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+--- Thread: Research Is your ultra-HD TV’s resolution too high for the eye to see? (/thread-19067.html)
Is your ultra-HD TV’s resolution too high for the eye to see? - C C - Oct 28, 2025
Where there could still be a benefit, though, is when you have those movies or TV shows that exceed the 16:9 aspect ratio of a television set. To fit those things on the screen, as much as half the screen surface can sometimes go unused, which means there are fewer pixels constituting the images on regular HD. Otherwise, I'd tend to agree that going much beyond full 1920x1080 HD is probably overkill. But you often don't get that amount maximally utilized these days, since the number of films and TV series with wider aspect ratios is increasing.
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Is your ultra-HD TV’s resolution too high for the eye to see?
https://connectsci.au/news/news-parent/6937/Is-your-ultra-HD-TV-s-resolution-too-high-for-the?searchresult=1
EXCERPTS: The study found that for an average-sized living room with 2.5m between the TV and seating, a 44-inch 4K or 8K TV does not provide any detectable benefit over a lower resolution HD TV of the same size.
“If you have more pixels in your display, it's less efficient, it costs more and it requires more processing power to drive it,” says co-author Rafał Mantiuk, a professor of computer science and technology at the University of Cambridge, UK. “So, we wanted to know the point at which it makes no sense to further improve the resolution of the display.”
[...] All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision with correct colour vision.
The researchers then measured how many individual pixels could fit into a one-degree slice of the participants' field of vision, a measurement known as pixels per degree (PPD). It is believed that the human eye can reach up to 60 PPD based on the 20/20 vision standard.
“This measurement has been widely accepted, but no one had actually sat down and measured it for modern displays, rather than a wall chart of letters that was first developed in the 19th century,” says Ashraf.
The results show that the eye’s resolution limit is higher than previously assumed, although this limit differed between black-and-white images and visuals presented in colour. The average PPD was 94 for greyscale images viewed front on, 89 PPD for red and green patterns and 53 PPD for yellow and violet patterns.
“Our brain doesn’t actually have the capacity to sense details in colour very well, which is why we saw a big drop-off for colour images, especially when viewed in peripheral vision,” says Mantiuk. “Our eyes are essentially sensors that aren’t all that great, but our brain processes that data into what it thinks we should be seeing.”
According to the authors, these limits mean there is little benefit of choosing an 8K or 4K display over a lower resolution 1440p screen when there is at least 2.5 metres between the viewer and the TV.
The results, published in Nature Communications, will help people make informed choices about which TV is most suitable for them... (MORE - details)