Spooky ghost town vid perfectly sums up YouTube's 8K playback: It's virtually no use to anyone (yet) Ultra-high definition 8K videos are appearing on YouTube, despite the fact that few home broadband connections on the planet can stream them, and even fewer screens are capable of showing them in their full glory. The video arm of the Mountain View ad giant turned heads this week when a mini-flick called "Ghost Towns in 8K" …
But there are some rules of thumb: With great eyesight, you'd need a 46" or so TV sitting about 5' away (or 60" at 6' away), in order to be able to possibly see any difference between Full HD (1080p) and UHD (4K). Based on that, you'd need at least a 65" screen at 5' to get any benefit out of FUHD (8K), or an 85" screen at 6'. It'd only start becoming obvious and pleasing at nearly twice that size, and that's assuming excellent vision.
I think they're going to have a very hard time drumming up sales given these stats, outside of those home theater videophiles who crave huge screens and maximum detail. 4K at least has a small but noticeable benefit for anyone who wants a large TV in a small room, and computer monitors.
But there are some misleading rules of thumb. FTFY
FYI, most of the 'rules of thumb' rely on determining horizontal and/or vertical dpi and calculating what would be distinguishable by the human eye. There are two problems with that calculation, a) who on earth wants to see individual pixels anyway, and b) human eyes don't have linear grids of receptors that are perfectly aligned with the screen. A more realistic dpi to use would be a diagonal one and that would approximately halve the screen sizes you quote.
That's why I said "see ANY difference", not "see individual pixels." To see individual pixels, you'd have to roughly double the sizes I list... and then you can half them, as you say, and get back to the sizes I list.
If you have any research or personal experience that says otherwise, I'm all ears, but 8K is an extraordinary resolution that requires extraordinary circumstances. Few people will see a benefit beyond HD even well within the listed limits (as I am in my setup), because it's a game of diminishing marginal utility; double disk space, power, and cost for maybe 10-20% more enjoyment only makes sense to the most hardcore... and that's just for 4K.
I'm not convinced that seeing smutty postcards in ultra-high resolution would be an enhancement to the viewing experience - I suspect that being able to see every single detail would be a bit off-putting.
Not that much of an expert, I dare say there will be differing opinions on this and would hazard a guess at the existence of a 'happy medium', presumably with no shortage of volunteers to participate in establishing the specifics by extensive research (etc).
Personally speaking I don't give a fig about 8K.
My house isn't big enough to make use of a screen that would justify it (unless I watch it through the window from the garden perhaps ...). The Freeview broadcast options at the moment consist of HD (restricted offering), HD upscaled (restricted offering), full SD (some), SD at minimum possible bandwidth (most). And, before someone says stream it, I'm unlikely to be able to support a full 8k res on my broadband feed which is currently bouncing off the 2Mb/s mark ...
Until I can get a decent broadcast feed at *current* resolutions without being stripped of £70 a month - and there's no sign of that in the next 20 years - why bother?
Check out CineMassive’s solution for watching Neumannfilms' "Ghost Towns in 8K" at native resolution https://youtu.be/IdzVH9Nab9I. The video is playing on a 16 4k monitor array and is being rendered and displayed by a single video wall processor.
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