What TV Resolution do you Need?

I want to begin by saying that I love my 85-inch 4K Sony television. The picture is amazing and the screen is huge. Being a Sony employee I get discounts on our electronic products and so I didn't have to pay full price. Before that I had a 60-inch 1080p Sony television that had the added benefit of being passive 3D. That is the same technology used in movie theaters so when I wanted more glasses, I could just bring the ones from the movie theater home with me. So the question is if I notice a difference and if I think an 8K television would be better.

First I have to say that I like the larger screen but that is not what I want to focus on today. I have a large theater room in my house and the 85-inches fits perfectly. The size of the television is constrained by where you will put it. If you are in a small apartment, 50-inches may be perfect. If you are sitting within a few feet of the screen, 85-inches is definitely too large.

Resolution is a different metric than size and refers to the number of pixels on the screen. Your standard television from 30 years ago had a resolution of 640x480. That is not very many pixels and it is tough to go back to those old displays now. The picture quality is not that great. Now try to go back and watch an old VHS video cassette. That resolution came in at 320x240 and is painful to watch now.

A 1080p screen means there are 1920x1080 pixels and became the gold standard for televisions about 10 years ago. We also moved from a 4x3 aspect ratio to 16x9 which created a wider screen but that is yet another metric we don't need to focus on. Let's stick with just the number of pixels on most screens.

I remember attending an internal Sony technology fair about 10 years ago and seeing the first 4K televisions. The pictures looked very lifelike and made great demos. I wondered how long it would take for content to become available as a 4K screen has as many pixels as 4 1080p ones. That means videos are that much larger and streaming services require that much more bandwidth to send them to you.

It didn't take long for content to arrive but did it really? Your common Blu-ray player is limited to 1080p. If you want to see anything in true 4K, you have to upgrade to the newer 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player found in the PlayStation 5. Now you can try to stream that high resolution but the reality is that you won't get true 4K content. A streaming service like Netflix requires you to have the the premium service and all of your devices have to support 4K. Then you have to have the right Internet connection. The truth is that you will rarely see 4K content from any streaming service provider. That doesn't mean it is impossible, just rare.

People use televisions for more than just watching things. I used to spend a lot of time gaming and higher resolution monitors provide an advantage. While some games don't support the higher resolution, some do and they look amazing. I also have a 4K television that I have connected to my Mac computer and I like having that much screen real estate. It allows a lot of open windows at the same time.

So what resolution do you really need? If all you are doing is watching television and movies, your 1080p is just fine. I would not go out and buy a new TV. Now if something happened to your old television and it is time to get a new one, I would definitely recommend one that is 4K. I had a TV go bad in my vacation condo that I rent out and I replaced it with a 4K one. Yes I had to spend a little more but it should last awhile.

If you are big into gaming or use your television as a computer monitor, I highly recommend 4K and wouldn't even look at a lower resolution. Furthermore I would make sure the minimum size of my computer monitor is 43 inches. Smaller than that and you have to sit too close to the screen for it to be comfortable. My wife has a 4K monitor connected to her laptop that is 32 inches and she has reduced the resolution as it is too small at true 4K.

Now some of you are probably wondering if you need an 8K TV. Currently Sony does not make one and so you have to look at other manufacturers. Because of that, I won't be buying one soon. Furthermore there is little to no content available for them. Remember that 8K is like having 4 4K TV's. That minimum 43-inch monitor explodes to 86 inches if you want to use it as a computer monitor. That won't even fit on my desk. My neck hurts just thinking about it.

Eventually I may change my mind. As bandwidth from Internet providers increases and content becomes available, the change may make sense. I just don't see it right now. Should I need a new TV any time soon, I'll stick with 4K for now.  

Daytime Television Blows

Last night I got a nasty case of the stomach flu. I woke up every 90 minutes to empty my stomach contents. Fortunately towards the end of the night, my stomach would cramp up, waking me, but I didn't need to go pray to the porcelain god. I think my body recognized I didn't have anything else to expel. I ended up staying in bed until 8am, which is late considering I usually get up at 6am. When I finally did wake up, I didn't feel like doing anything and so I turned on the television to see what I could find on broadcast TV. From the title of this post you can tell I came away disappointed.

When all of the streaming services became ubiquitous, I cancelled my cable subscription and increased my Internet speed. Now I really only use broadcast television to watch the nightly news every evening. Being too lazy to look for something to watch online, I cycled through the normal TV channels. Some of them had local news shows and others had national morning news shows. None of them interested me. I looked at a few of the public broadcasting networks and again came away disappointed. Ultimately after 30 minutes I turned off the TV and headed to my office to read e-mail.

I did the bare minimum e-mail for work and attended an hour-long meeting that got shortened to 15 minutes when I explained I spent the night with the stomach flu. Then I headed to my TV room to watch what I wanted in the comfort of my soft-padded-leather couches. While I could watch shows coming over the airwaves, I also had all of my streaming services including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and even YouTube. I entertained myself while eating a very soft and bland breakfast without the hassle of channel surfing. After about an hour and seeing that all the food I ate stayed down, I ate some grapes and yogurt as my energy is low and my stomach empty.

I have not really watched daytime-broadcast TV in about a decade and I have to say I haven't missed much. It is filled with the same programming I used to hate when I stayed home from school because of illness. Fortunately we have many more entertainment options and are not stuck watching VHS video tapes with their lousy 320x240-pixel resolution. Technology really does make being sick easier to deal with.

Getting the Most out of my PlayStation 5

When I first got my PlayStation 5, I kept it on my desk in my home office as I used it for work. Now that I am no longer working for Sony Interactive Entertainment, I have moved it into my theater room. I now have it connected to my brand-new 85-inch television. Unfortunately it was not as simple as plugging it into my TV as I had to also connect it to my surround-sound system.

Yesterday I posted about the importance of refresh rates and why 120 frames per second or Hz is significant for the latest televisions. I want to preserve the high refresh rate from my PlayStation 5 and that just isn't possible if I plug it into my current television receiver which is then connected to the TV. My receiver only supports 60 Hz at 4K and I do not want to spend money replacing it right now. I probably will in the future but for now I want to keep using it. So how do I keep the high video quality and also keep the high sound quality?

I can't take full credit for this as my oldest son helped me figure it out. The solution is to use the audio return channel or eARC HDMI output from the television. The high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) has been around for over 15 years and has evolved to allow for various scenarios like this. When I set up my PlayStation 5, I plugged it directly into my new television using one of it's two HDMI 2.1 interfaces. The second is used to connect the TV to the receiver. Now what happens is the picture and sound are sent to the television from the PS5. The sound is then sent back to the receiver for that shake-the-neighbors experience. HDMI works both ways so that any devices connected to the receiver use that same HDMI interface into the television.

One would think that with a PS5 I wouldn't need to connect any other device. It streams video, has a DVD drive, a Blu-ray drive, and can play 4K Blu-ray disks. I also have a PS4 Pro connected to a PlayStation VR as well as an old VHS video cassette player, from Sony, of course. The moment you connect your PS VR to your PS4, you lose the ability to play games in 4K without having to swap cables. Rather than deal with that, I just kept my PS4 Pro and use it with my PS VR. I also use it to play video games with my grandson and keep a healthy mix of age-appropriate games loaded on it. As for the VHS tapes, their quality is really horrible even with 4K upscaling. You never know when you may need to watch an old video though.

My son and I connected everything and then started watching Return of the Jedi on Disney+. While we enjoy the movie, we wanted to make sure the sound and picture were in sync. After all, nothing ruins the experience of a movie when you hear an explosion before you see it. The lip movement not matching the dialog can also be really annoying, which is why I prefer subtitles to dubbing for non-English movies. Fortunately both the TV and the receiver have mechanisms for delaying one or the other. In my case, the sound led the picture. I went into the receiver settings and added a 10ms delay. That improved things somewhat but wasn't perfect. I upped the delay to 20ms and everything synced perfectly. If it had been the other way around and the picture led the sound, I would have added the delay to the television.

Once we got the timing worked out on the PS5, I had to go in and check it on the PS4 and VHS cassette player. The PS4 is in sync but there is a 20ms delay on the VHS. I can turn off the delay setting in the receiver when I play video tapes to solve that problem. As I doubt I will watch a lot of VHS tapes, I'm fine not worrying about it. I can probably set custom parameters for each device and save them to the receiver but am fine with how things are set up now.

Should you find yourself with a new PS5 and an older receiver, just connect it directly to the television. Then use eARC to pull in your surround-sound receiver. You may have to adjust some settings but once you get it set up, you will be amazed at the quality.

Disc vs. Streaming

Recently I mentioned the Disney+ video streaming service. After playing with it for a while, I now have to ask myself what to do with all of the Disney DVD and Blu-ray discs I have. This is not a new problem as I originally owned them all on VHS video cassette. Over the years I have systematically replaced all of my favorites with the DVD and Blu-ray equivalents. Now I don't need any of them as I can get them all on Disney+ wherever I am in the world.

The move from physical copies of media is something the music industry faced over the past decade. Go try to find a CD of your latest favorite song. It can be tough because people have stopped buying CD discs. For a while, people were buying individual songs on services like iTunes. Now everything has gone to streaming. If you want to listen to a specific song, you just go to YouTube and pull up the music video which may or may not actually be a video.

I don't plan to get rid of my Blu-ray collection of movies any time soon. There are a number of my favorite movies that are tough to find on any streaming service. I am still looking for one of my favorite movies on disc that I used to have on VHS. Most people would think it is not that great of a movie but I really enjoyed it as a teenager.

I am also waiting how long it takes for people to tire of paying the monthly fee for access to movies. If you watch a movie several times a week, then paying for the streaming service makes sense. However if you only watch once or twice a month, there are some people that will justify pay-per-view, owning a disc, or owning the digital rights to favorite movies.

Ultimately I think the movie industry will follow the music industry and we will stop purchasing physical discs. While my current preference is to own physical media, I may be in the minority soon. The writing is on the wall.