Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “4K Video: Explained!”.
Hey what’s up guys mkbhd here and today we’re going to be talking about 4k explained so you’ve probably heard 4k tossed around quite a bit in the past couple of weeks or months, especially during ces. At the beginning of january. This year, 4k has been sort of a buzzword, but what does 4k mean exactly well, there’s not a whole lot to technically explain, but there is a lot to it. So 4k is a resolution really and it’s measured in pixels, just like every other resolution, starting at the smallest, you can see smartphones nowadays, the average smartphone is about 1280×720. So that’s a 1280×720. We call it a 720p display.
Your average laptop say, which has a slightly bigger display, is typically somewhere around 1440 by 900 somewhere around there. Then you get up to the larger desktop displays, and these are usually around 1920 by 1080. These are called 1080p displays. 4K. Displays are somewhere around 4 000 pixels across by 2000 pixels down now i say somewhere around that because 4k actually varies, there isn’t an exact standard yet, but the closest thing we have to a standard for 4k is called uhd and uhd stands for ultra high definition And that is 3840 by 2160.. That is a lot of pixels. There are more pixels on a 4k display than there are seconds in three months. So if you’re gon na try to count all these pixels you’re gon na take a while now in terms of pixel density, i already did a video about pixel density, but we already know that basically, the higher the pixel density of a display, the better it looks, The more clear the more sharp it looks because there are more pixels for you to look at to make the image look good. So this also depends on the distance.
You are viewing that item from so we’ll start off with smartphones. If you’re, looking at a 1280×720 display a couple inches from your face, you don’t really use your smartphone that far away from your face, so you really need it to be a high pixel density, because i’m pretty close, i can see a lot of pixels if it’s Bad, so, given that we hold these guys, a foot or less away from our face i’ll give the average smartphone an average pixel density of 300 ppi or 300 pixels per inch, a laptop since you hold it further from your face, doesn’t have to be quite as High a pixel density, so if you’re looking at maybe a 15 inch laptop with that 1440 by 900 resolution, you are looking at a pixel density of about 120 ppi, which is good because it’s already, you know two feet away from your face now. So you can’t really see all the pixels at 120 ppi, so 120 is pretty good for a laptop when you get to a huge display that you’re sitting kind of far away from, like a 1080p 55 inch tv, you get to a pixel density of 40 40 Ppi now that seems low, because you know we were just talking about 300 ppi phones, but sitting 10 10 15 20 feet away from it. You’Re never going to be able to see those pixels at 40 ppi.
So it’s a really high crisp resolution display. But that’s just 1080p now, i’m sure you’ve, all as a kid or at least sometime in your life, walked up to a tv and looked at all the red, green and blue pixels. That is called the subpixel matrix. Basically, when you’re looking at these pixels, those are the colors that make up the images that you see on your tv.
In order to see those, you had to get up like all the way up to the tv and look at it from a couple of inches away, and then you could see all the pixels with a 4k tv. You will actually never be able to see those red, green and blue pixels. A 4k 55 inch tv comes in over a hundred ppi, which means you can be inches from it like a laptop and still not be able to see the pixels standing. Five eight 12 feet away from a 4k tv will look flat out incredible, really really sharp. Now i don’t have a 4k tv personally, but i saw a ton of them at ces 2013..
You might have seen my video recap of that event. If you haven’t it’s down below the like button on this video, but there were a ton of 4k tvs playing 4k content like videos and video games on these tvs and everyone who walked by pretty much paused for a second and stared at it. Because it was that off striking, it was really good.
Looking it’s almost like a little bit below that level of looking through a window, it’s just sort of a surreal sort of realism. You get especially if you have a high frame rate, a really good 4k video looks incredible on any 4k tv now. The first problem with 4k tvs is that they’re a little bit expensive. Okay, not a little bit expensive. They are really expensive, not six. Seven thousand dollars, i’m talking new car 25.
000. 30. 000.
Us dollars expensive. So these are crazy out of this world expensive right now, but again we saw them on the show floor at ces for the past two years. That’S kind of where this sort of innovation starts, and maybe in another two or three years, it’ll be in our living room, but the other problem with 4k at least right now, if you want to call it a problem is that there is barely any 4k content.
Remember when we saw 3d tvs at ces and they all had those awesome, 3d videos and the 3d glasses, but nobody makes 3d content well. Sony is sort of pushing the way for more 4k content to be produced, and there are some awesome cameras out there. I have a link description below that will shoot 4k, so sony’s pushing the way a lot of big companies are sort of following behind and making. You know it easier for you to get 4k content into your home, even if you don’t have a 4k display. It still looks really good on a 1080p display and a 2560×1600 display. So basically what that means is, you know tv shows aren’t 4k today, but if this keeps up, you know the past two years have been good. If they keep going. It’S gon na be really good and hopefully we’ll see some awesome 4k stuff in the future.
So the largest hub out there right now for 4k content is of course the internet specifically web video like youtube. But the thing is people who are going out and shooting videos on the red scarlet and the red epic and 4k cameras putting it on youtube. It gets compressed way down to you, know: 50 megabits per second tops, the bit rate gets lowered, it gets compressed and you don’t get the full quality of it watching it on youtube. That being said, i have a video linked in the description below where you can watch a 4k video on vimeo and vimeo seems to have the sort of clearest compression or littlest compression at all. So you can watch that video on your display.
I guarantee you it’s going to look great and you can leave a comment below if you enjoyed it, it’s a pretty great video and it’s just really really crisp and clear. You can see every little detail and everything. So if you want to watch 4k content, the web is the place to be youtube, not so much, but vimeo is a great place to find it also fun fact: when you view a 4k video on youtube, there is a button just for 4k, so you know How you see 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p and 1080p there’s a button that says original for anything over 1080p.
So if you upload a 4k 5k 8k video, you get a special button. So yeah there you go. That’S 4k explained it’s pretty basic, but again it’s pretty awesome. I’M hoping someday in the future we’ll have you know 4k displays in the palm of our hands playing 4k games. We saw nvidia’s project shield, which was outputting 4k video from a handheld console to a 4k tv.
So you know that’s a step in the right direction. Hopefully, we’ll see more stuff like that very soon. Let me know if you guys are excited for 4k or, if that’s so yesterday, and that 8k tv at ces is the future either way.
Thanks for watching guys – and i will talk to you guys in the next article, which will get started with the long-awaited hackintosh pro project – that’s finally getting started so thumbs up if you’re ready for that. Thanks for watching peace, you .