Even with my corrected 20/20 vision, I can't tell the difference between a DVD and a Blu-ray when I'm sitting on the couch.

We've all seen these tired old graphs, haven't we? (I can't vouch for the accuracy of this one, but it looks like it matches my experience in personal testing.)

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High resolution on a monitor makes sense. But when I'm watching TV I personally don't want the screen to be right in my face. The benefit I see in higher resolution images is the ability to zoom and retain quality. Which isn't really something that makes sense to me for motion pictures.

I won't dispute this, because it is true that film has much higher resolution than consumer digital cameras. But my experience from looking at some of his stuff is that Ken Rockwell likes to pretend he knows more than he really does, so you might want to get a better source.

Digital audio is nice because once you've reached 32-bit resolution at 192 kHz, all but the craziest of audiophiles will agree the quality is better than wax. Two ears; two channels; and simple, uncompressed wave sampling... gotta love audio.

I like my TV just fine the way it is. I don't feel incomplete because I don't have a gigantic screen to veg out in front of, or the "latest and greatest" gadgets.

Edit: For reference, I have a 40" 1080p TV that's viewed at a distance of about 15 feet.

With my 42 inch 1080p, I can tell a difference... however I don't see the point in upgrading. I'm watching a movie, not an art expo. I don't need to pause and gawk at every digital imperfection.

I find that after 720p, I no longer notice artifacts in general viewing. I think greater than 1080 would be a waste unless our TV grows another 10 inches. TBH, there's another toy I'd rather be 10 inches bigger, and it isn't electronic.

You can probably see the actual pixel cells that close. sheesh

I sit a couple feet back from my 24" LCDs. I can't imagine sitting that close to a 40". Of course they have the same actual resolution, so maybe the 40" would just let me not have to jack the font size up so far. .

Wow, that is insanely cheap. (I think I paid more than that for my TV a couple years back.) I can't justify buying it as a monitor though.

Yeah, it's called "Google 1960's and 1970's movies". Space Odyssey, Alien, Sparticus, Patton. The list could go on almost forever.

I'd say only somewhat recently have movies become psychologically tied to dollar figures. That is "Do X/Y/Z and forgo any plot or story". Surely producers have always influenced things, but not like they do today. The money is too big, and the statistics too available. Nobody gets creative control in a movie that costs $150,000,000. Forget movie, any PROJECT involving that kind of money. But nowadays, movies are intentionally devoid of plot because movies are international affairs. Sony isn't making a movie for you and me. It's making a movie for a billion foreigners. And foreigners like big explosions and hate complex plots.

I mean honestly, when was the LAST political thriller movie you saw? Those are movies driven by dialog, and a complex unraveling plot. You can't sell that to people who don't speak English well or know (or care) about current affairs in the USA.

The last political thriller I saw was not only rare, but also hidden. Captain America 2. It's a political thriller hidden inside a dumb (as in easy to digest) comic book movie. You would think it's as dumb as Transformers, but under-the-hood is a hugely applicable social critique of us heading toward a total government control of information. Coincidentally, the movie was being made BEFORE the Snowden leaks.

You can't sell a Tom Clancy movie without more explosions, nor can you sell a Kevin Smith dialog-driven movie. The budgets are too high to not also target the international market. So Kevin Smith movies end up with tiny budgets.

Remember the ads for Inglourious Basterds? They made it look like Kill Bill, or an action movie so people would go see it. But the 30-second commercials had ALL the action scenes in the movie. The rest was dialog on top of dialog. They gave that movie a "mere" $75,000,000 budget even though it's a movie made by the legendary Quentin Tarantino.

Off topic, but you're falling into the trap of thinking PCM samples are continuous function values. They aren't. Samples, much like pixels, are discrete values, and everything in between them is 100% undefined. The trick is, given a series of samples captured at n hz, there is only one valid output for a signal that's limited to a frequency of n/2 (nyquist frequency). Sure, using a higher sample rate means you can define a better looking triangle or sawtooth waveform or whatever, but that extra detail is part of higher frequency content you can't hear. It can actually even interfere with the content you can hear when it's processed for output, since a band-limited signal is necessary for reconstructing an analog waveform (and if you don't have speakers that can actually play (unheard) high frequencies, or if you don't filter the signal to cut out those high frequencies, they'll get folded back into the audible range as noise).

This is a good primer on sampling.

I'm only a few minutes in but wanted to thank you, as the presenter is doing a great job.

Right, but the 6hz is a parameter of the function defining the waveform. It starts with a 6hz sine wave, then adds up a particular series of rising frequencies with decaying attenuation (until you reach +inf frequency at -inf dB). The resulting sound isn't a pure 6hz signal, it's instead a signal focused at 6hz with specially-crafted distortion around it.

Ultimately, this means that at higher frequencies you do lose detail from the waveform, but that lost detail was inaudible to you anyway. If two different waveforms start creating similar sample patterns at higher frequencies, then that means the defining characteristics of the waveform would be in the higher frequencies you wouldn't be able to hear. Ergo, the two waveforms would sound as similar to humans as their resulting sample patterns look.

Yeah, I know. Well, DVI isn't up to task (Dual Link max 2560×1600 @ 60 Hz). Newest HDMI is able, and DisplayPort can.

Some TVs support "twin HDMI cables" for half-and-half signal using existing technology but they're very specific.

30 Hz @ 4K, 120 Hz @ 1080p. So people do 4K for text data and movies, 1080p for video games (good luck running 4K on most video cards.) But that is the main reason I waited on buying it.

Basically the cable standards have been caught with their pants down with the huge leap in display resolutions. And content + display + videocard + cables all need to work. Cable standards being the ones that dragged their feet the most.

I really like what HDMI is pushing for (new DRM excluded) such as Deep Color (36/48-bit) color and RGBY support. The color gamut is much better with RGBY so colors like gold and violet actually look gold and violet. Basically everything you were taught in grade school was a lie, and you can't make all colors with red, green, and blue.

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I used to have the color gamut links for the general topic (not Sharp's implementation specifically), but I don't recall them at the moment. This picture sucks because it scales the image to make 3-primary look bigger than 4-primary.

[edit] Here's one at least showing the difference between RGB and the actual eye's abilities:

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Bettering image quality is probably the reason animals are starting to think TV is real-life. For example, an experiment with squids using TV showed them unresponsive. Switching to HD made them attack/inspect the screen. So the mere fact we think TV's are "good enough" is more indoctrination, the way people thought standard definition was "real enough." Now that we're really pushing the boundaries of color and resolution, we'll likely see a likewise increase in "experience."