ABC, Disney Have No Plans For 4K TV Anytime Soon → Re: I don't see the need...

HD was badly needed, and an obvious quality leap for common screen sizes when it made its debut. Big, blurry rear projection TVs were pretty common in the late 90's. The clarity couldn't really be improved, because the source wasn't good enough.

In contrast, I've yet to see a picture in someone's home where I thought 1920x1080 resolution was the limiting factor. Just recently I went to a friend's house in Malibu to watch the oscars, where he had his FiOS HD picture projected full size onto his large living room wall. Even at that size, the picture was still beautifully crisp. 4K probably would have made a small incremental improvement, but not the same magnitude that SD to HD was to more practical common viewing scenarios.

Besides the increase in resolution going from SD to HD, another improvement was that HDTVs also provided a wider "view" (screen), going from SDTV's 4:3 aspect ratio to HDTV's 16:9 one. That was also a major selling point for me.

4K UHDTVs still have the same aspect ratio as HDTVs though, so there's no improvement there.

>FiOS TV
>Watching the Oscars (a program broadcast on ABC, a 720p television network - not even 1920x1080!)
>In addition to being low resolution, it is also bitrate starved MPEG-2
>Thinks that fewer than one million pixels being projected on a full size screen is "beautifully crisp."

Son, I have bad news for you. You need to get your eyes checked.

You are like a starving African who just got handed a McDonald's cheeseburger by an aid worker and now thinks he has just experienced the finest cuisine in the world.