CMV: 4K TV is largely a useless technological advancement that's not even close to being ready for widespread adoption by AV geeks and certainly not the average consumer

I hold this opinion for several reasons.

First of all you have to sit too close to a large screen to take full advantage of the increase in resolution over 1080P. This vastly increases your horizontal viewing angle which will negatively impact your ability to see the entire movie or play a console game effectively.

So ok, lets say you really like your nose up to the screen, that presents another problem, most living rooms are not setup to accommodate a TV that big or to sit that closely. There's a reason why 4K TVs are moving into the 85" range, because the average viewing distance of most people barely takes full advantage of most of the 1080p tvs in people's houses right now.

Furthermore, to go to 4K you have to dump your plasma in favor of arguably inferior LCD/LED technology that fails to produce effective black levels for the most part in comparison. The only technology on the horizon that can beat plasma in black levels is OLED.

So we need a 85" OLED 4K TV, and that's going to be pricey and isn't even available yet. And that's saying nothing of the problem of upscaling older content that's likely to stay in 1080p for a considerable period of time. Upscaling that 1080p blu-ray, PS4 (which is already being upscaled to 1080P), or satellite image is going to make the picture blurry and inferior to a true 1:1 1080P image under the exact same conditions.

In conclusion, 4K isn't ready for prime time, and likely won't be for at least another 5-10 years. The proper seating distance for a modern 1080P TV is about 1.6 times the diagonal length of the screen based on my research. I don't know what the comparable distance is exactly for 4K (guessing 1.0-1.1x since it's double the horizontal resolution), but the technical limitations are not going to accommodate most people.

If you're looking to improve your AV experience most people would be vastly better served by getting a decent audio system.

Submitted November 30, 2014 at 07:20AM by Vornnash http://www.reddit.com/r/gadgets/comments/2nt3c6/cmv_4k_tv_is_largely_a_useless_technological/