Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The State of 4K: Early 2014!”.
Hey what is up guys, mkbhd here and back at ces 2014 this january. Not only did i catch a tesla model s at the panasonic booth, but i also found this so this is a 4k tough pad tablet from panasonic, and you know it’s absolutely ridiculous. For a normal person, i mean this is a 20 plus inch tablet. It’S heavy.
It’S got a ton of graphics power behind it. It’S very expensive, but of course the display was absolutely ridiculously good. Looking it had an amazing pixel density and a ton of sharpness and detail, as you would expect from something that’s 4k, and so that got me thinking.
Where is all the 4k, so this is the state of 4k as of february 2014., uh so below this video. If youtube processed it right, you will see the 240p option. The 480p option, the 720p option, the 1080p option, the 1440p option and if all went well a 2160p option, and that is for the 3840×2160 version of this video. What we’ll call 4k so right off the bat 4k video is four times the resolution of 1080p video or, if you look at it on the same size screen it’s four times as pixel denser four times as detailed. That is amazing. That’S going to look great on pretty much any size, so the question is: why isn’t everything already 4k and uh? The short answer? Is it’s difficult? It’S difficult to shoot! 4K, it’s difficult to process, 4k output, 4k and display and playback 4k.
So when we say it’s difficult to shoot 4k video, that literally means that the cameras that we’re using that will all shoot 1080p – just fine, don’t quite have the processing power or the sensors capable of shooting 4k video. Such a high resolution video a perfect example of that is the gopro hero 3 plus black edition that’ll shoot 4k video, but only at 15 frames per second. It can’t quite muster the processing power to go beyond that and then something like the samsung galaxy note.
3. It is a pretty powerful phone, but it’ll only shoot at a relatively low bit rate long story short uh. If you’re going to get high quality, high frame rate, high bitrate high resolution, video you’re going to need a very expensive, very powerful camera and those are coming down in price now, but i did a video on all the 4k camera options i saw at ces last Month so i’ll leave that linked right below the like button. But if you get anything out of watching that video is that it can be quite expensive to shoot a high quality 4k video alright. So this is a 4k tv legitimately, it’s a 3840 by 2160 panel i’ll have the link and the model number right below that like button uh, and so this is, is fully able to display 4k content at any time, but it has never actually displayed 4k.
Anything ever so what’s hooked up to this, as you can probably tell by the nba right now, is the playstation 4 and xbox one and an apple tv, and none of which will actually output 4k through hdmi and there’s also a chromecast plugged into this tv that Won’T do 4k either. So, as far as we’re concerned, this is all still 1080p stuff and as much as i love to you know, play nba or forza in 4k, with the insane detail of that high resolution or watch netflix in 4k or chromecast tv shows in 4k. Nothing will do that right now and that’s actually the case for a lot of people so really no reason to go. Buy a 4k tv because, as far as we’re concerned, this is still acting exactly like a 1080p tv alright.
So this is a 4k desktop display. It’S one of the few monitors you can put on your desk that will have that 3840 by 2160 resolution. This is the asus pq321q and right now it’s hooked up to a mac pro via thunderbolt, which is one of the few ports that will actually output. 4K. Uh at an acceptable frame rate 60. Hertz is really what i mean by that uh.
But here’s the thing about that uh go ahead and full screen this video hit it full screen. You got this, you got it, you got it full screen for a sec. All right check this out boom.
This is what the desktop looks like in 4k and it looks all super tiny because in mac os 10 there’s very limited high dpi scaling support. So, unfortunately, everything looks super duper small coming from a higher resolution monitor. But this is what your display would look like if it was 4k without any sort of scaling really small.
I know so. I’M hoping when apple finally releases their own 4k display they’ll update mac os 10 with more high dpi options, so that things don’t have to look quite this tiny. But then again, my eyes have already kind of gotten used to it anyway. But at the end of the day, when it comes down to it, when you get a setup that can show 4k video on a 4k display without taking up all your bandwidth and without dropping frames, it’s an amazing experience. It looks beautiful it’s incredibly detailed, but the problem is the number of people with setups that check all those boxes is very, very small. In fact, most laptops, if you guys, are watching this on a laptop most laptops, won’t really play back 4k video 100 without dropping any frames, and most of them don’t even have 4k displays anyway, and neither do our phones and neither do most of our tablets, except For i guess that brings us back to that ridiculous. Panasonic 4k tablet from the beginning. Uh most people are totally fine with 1080p and they’ll say that, like that’s, great 1080p looks fine, but once you see 4k video or super high resolution, video played back natively without any of those problems that is typically associated with. It is amazing, and then you can’t really go back. I call it the retina display effect. Once you see such high resolution stuff, everything else starts to look fuzzy so as much as we love 4k and all its sharpness and all its pixels here in the tech community, it is still a long way from being widely adopted, but it’s definitely starting. In fact, this is the year that i think we’re going to see the biggest shift from people seeing 1080p as a standard to people seeing 4k as a standard and you’re going to see a lot more 4k tvs in stores and a lot more of that 4k Talk in those ads in the future, so right now, if i had to put the state of 4k in a single word, it would be momentum. It started off a little while ago. That word was potential, but now it has a lot of momentum moving forward. If you went to ces basically everyone there was showing some sort of 4k tv, and that made me really happy because i love pixels and eventually we’re gon na see a whole lot more 4k stuff all around.
So that’s been it. Hopefully you enjoyed this video and if you did feel free to share it, that’s about it. I guess i’ve said. That’S it several times already now. Thank you for watching and i’ll talk to you guys in the next article peace you .