Why 4K instead of 2160p?

b/Tech, Science & IT publicado por u/Dream of Omnimaga November 18, 2015, 04:31:25 AM

Why 4K instead of 2160p?

So I decided to upgrade from my 1920x1080 monitor and went for a 4K monitor. However, when I tried it, I discovered that it was well under 4000p (almost half of that, in fact). Can I report the store or company for falsely advertising a 2160p monitor as 4000p?

Oh wait! I just discovered that they now advertise the monitor horizontal resolution instead of vertical. THey wanted to make the number greater to make technology-illiterate people (most customers) think that the TV is four times the vertical resolution of a 1080P TV rather than twice.

Oh wait... in fact my new monitor isn't even 4K. It's 3.84K! False advertising!

Joking aside, seriously, why the switch? I mean, 2160p looks weird, but didn't 720p, 1080i and 1080p look weird already? Why we are suddenly switching to horizontal? Is it just because companies expects most customers to be so stupid that they'll think a 4K TV is 7110x4000, 6820x3840 or 7680x4320?

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u/novenary November 18, 2015, 04:35:08 AM

Presumably 4k means that there's four times the amount of pixels that 1080p has (it has double resolution horizontally and vertically).

u/Yuki November 18, 2015, 04:38:18 AM

They probably wanted to emphasize on the fact it's 4 times bigger in area (equivalent to 4 Full HD screens), so they went with the width instead of the height. They never officially went with the height anyway when HD came out, 1080p came later and I'm pretty sure we'll say 2160p as well.

u/Dream of Omnimaga November 18, 2015, 05:24:35 AM

Quote from: Juju on November 18, 2015, 04:38:18 AM
They never officially went with the height anyway when HD came out, 1080p came later

Wait, what did they use before?

Also yeah my issue is that it makes some people think that 4K means 4000p (or close), as in 4 times the vertical amount of pixels in full HD TV, rather than 4 times the total amount of pixels in the screen. It's kinda like if they suddenly decided that to calculate the size of an LCD monitor, they would not only include the frame around the screen, but also the monitor thickness and support base in the dimensions.

u/p4nix November 18, 2015, 09:43:31 AM

I think the more important question is why to buy high resolution screens. The majority doesn't need that pixel density in my opinion. Of course, fonts might look better, but one can live with less pixels :o

u/novenary November 18, 2015, 10:07:56 AM

You don't know till you tried. I was sure high density was useless until I got my phone, it has a 320 dpi screen and everything looks really smooth. Also high resolution reduces the need for anti aliasing, which is a good thing.

u/p4nix November 18, 2015, 10:18:00 AM

I will not buy a new display for my computer until my current one is dead.

u/novenary November 18, 2015, 10:23:28 AM

That's fair, I myself have two monitors and want a third one though. Working with more than one monitor is great and I'd like to take further advantage of that, besides neither of my current ones is 1080p which is pretty annoying because I watch a lot of anime and sometimes movies on my computer and I'd rather play them unscaled.

u/p4nix November 18, 2015, 10:25:59 AM

The problem with multi-monitors is, that I don't have enough space at the moment, and that I wouldn't like having two different monitors

So that would cost a lot (especially a computer which can handle that). But it definitely has some advantages.

u/novenary November 18, 2015, 10:27:00 AM

Well any computer can handle multiple monitors, it depends what you do on them.

Also the total resolution is what actually matters, as multiple monitors are internally treated as a larger single monitor.

u/Dream of Omnimaga November 26, 2015, 04:29:45 AM

It actually depends of the computer video card too. If your video card is too old and low-end and you use 4K worth of resolution, then expect some display lag, especially with fullscreen videos.

u/Snektron November 27, 2015, 03:43:36 PM

My calculator has a 6K monitor: 96 * 64 = 6144 pixels

u/Dream of Omnimaga November 27, 2015, 10:14:56 PM

Ha, I bet the next marketing step will be to call smaller screens of handheld consoles like that, or use something like 2M as in 2 millions. Older French Canadians will think it stands for 2 Megs (remember in the 90's when ppl said meg instead of megabyte and MB?)