4 weeks not smoking as of yesterday. Woo-hoo, extra hoo.
I wanted to take a few moments and talk to you about 4k Resolution for televisions and computer monitors. If it hasn't started already, a big push is going to be made to get you to buy these for massive amounts of money, and I thought it would be for the best if you understood exactly what they're going to try to sell you.
Chances are, if you've purchased a television within the last 7 years or so you have a 1080p HD television. This sounds intimidating, but it's not. First off, the HD or High-Definition title is applied to any screen resolution greater than 480. Second, 480, 720, 1080, and now 4k are all screen resolutions. A screen resolution is simply the pixel dimensions of your television screen, which in the case of 1080p, is 1920x1080. If you're familiar with pixels and screens, jump down to the next paragraph, if not, hang with me here a moment. It's useful to think of your television screen as a brick wall with each brick a pixel. In this instance, we would note that our brick wall is 1,920 bricks wide (x axis) by 1,080 bricks tall (y axis).
There are a few important things to note at this juncture: 1) All modern televisions, i.e., anything that doesn't use a cathode ray tube, that share a resolution have the same quantity of pixels regardless of how big the screen is. This is to say that if you have a 60-inch 1080p television, your TV has just as many pixels as our 32-inch 1080p television. 2) The defining number of a resolution has always been the vertical pixel count - this is now changing with 4k, which will use the horizontal pixel count, and it will also round up - 4k resolution is 3840x2160.
So, 1080p, or 1920x1080, is our current standard of High Definition. This is going to be replaced, eventually, with 4k, or 3840x2160. To get a better handle on this, it's good to multiply the dimensions to get a total pixel count. 1920 * 1080 = 2,073,600 total pixels. 3840 * 2160 = 8,294,400 total pixels. When you hear them claim on the commercials that you're going to get '4 times as much data' this is what they're talking about, going from 2 million to 8 million pixels. This is a big deal, especially for larger televisions. Why? Picture clarity, that's why.
To talk about picture clarity, we need to talk about pixel density, measured in Pixels Per Inch or PPI. The problem with screen resolutions for some time has been that they use the same quantity of pixels for that particular resolution regardless of size. My 32-inch TV has the same 2-million pixels that someone else's 60-inch TV has. When we talk about pixel density though, my 32-inch television has a 70 PPI, while the 60-inch model has a 37 PPI. If you've ever looked at a wall of televisions at a Best Buy or Wal-Mart and noted that the smaller models had a sharper picture, this is why. What the adoption of 4k is going to do is massively ramp up the PPI for all television sizes, though it will be most notable, based on what the human eye can detect, on larger televisions. To give an example, that 60-inch set with it's 37 PPI in 1080p resolution is going to jump up to 74 PPI with 4k resolution, which is to say that Steph and I will be able to go from a 32-inch set with 426.25 square inches of viewing area to a 60-inch set with 1,538.3 square inches of viewing area and actually have more PPI. That's amazing.
One last thing: don't buy one just yet. They're amazingly expensive and, as of this moment, nothing exists that will actually use it. It's coming, of course. The new Playstation 4 and Xbox 1, both due to be released later this year, are supposed to support it.
I promise to post something funny, or at least less technical, next time.
