Display Rant part 1 (draft?)
My armchair (non-expert) rant: theoretically optimal flat panel display is 8k1200hz or something. I’m no blur busters so hear me out as someone who just noticed things along the way. Also as someone who went “hey, oled didn’t magically give me near crt motion handling. what gives?” after getting one.
8K because I believe monitors should be rated in Pixels Per Inch or Centimeter. I know they don’t cleanly line up with print style DPI, but I think we should be aiming for that. It’s not about seeing more detail it’s about being able to render out edges and things the same way you don’t see jaggies or other patterns in print. Unless someone fucks up. I know print and screen are different but looking at old black and white line work or some photo optical blow ups for large prints and artbooks really solidifies to my eyes that people could see more detail. I would love for that to be 300 PPI or higher monitors in arbitrary sizes, but I think to reduce video scaling headaches it should stick to a multiple of what we’ve got. So yeah, this means I think 16k is fine. If 4k got us to perfect scaling for '240p' resolutions, 8k will also fix 480p. 480p upscaled still has a border or non-integer scale in 4k. I also think this just allows us to hide any scaling artifacts. Once the shimmering from non-integer scaling certain details gets small enough, you can’t see it. Can’t anti-alias the game image cleanly? don’t need to. Dither effects? can’t see it. Games also can be like the old PC gaming days where you could drop down to a lower resolution. “1080p looks the same” well good now you can render 1080p and scale it however you want. I understand the urge to resist new standards as corpo obsolecense bullshit but I do think at monitor distances theres much to think about. I think there can be advantages at TV distances, but it’s probably less of a difference.
Incredibly high refresh rate is entirely because we need fine control of display timings. The thing that makes the CRT computer monitor I use look so clean in motion is how it displays each frame. It’s 60/72/75/85/120 as I need it, and no matter what it can quickly display and roll an image. Fighting games look great. Easier to see some attacks. How can I put this. A CRT displays an image very quickly then goes blank. A LCD or OLED has to display each frame. All at once. (The ‘inherent lag’ comes from having to have a whole frame to show IIRC) Even in black frame insertion modes it has to display a frame for the whole whatever ms that each frame takes. so the full 16-ish ms a 60fps frame takes up instead of a super bright 2 or 3 ms whatever it was before going blank. A CRT, LCD/OLED do not display frames the same way so display refresh rates are sort of not comparable. CRT is also rolling line per line not the whole image at once. A LCD with BFI would still have to hold the picture for a whole frame each time. When watching film in the theaters most of us had seen 24/23.976 x 3 for around 72hz comparable on a CRT. The shutter was on a wheel and came in an angled wiping motion. We were chasing high refresh for both 3D stereo (which I liked but also found weird to be making some sort of consumer product standard) but also to make motion look smoother on LCDs and OLEDs you need to not just emulate flicker but also make the whole display run faster. if you’re imagining a LCD just ‘smearing’ image to next image, making the display faster makes it do that quicker. This is not necessarily for making games run at those high framerates, but I’m sure a 2D sidescroller would love to try. (That said, do I trust modern companies to responsibly implement some sort of well tuned motion betweener for that new standard to let disc makers set flags for motion smoothing on a per-scene basis? fuuuuck nooooo)
I think about how perfect the CD was. It covered most of music and audio very well. Are there formats and higher spec things that sound better? YES. Is the CD good enough for almost everything that it isn’t a forced upgrade path? yes. Did we, eventually, get hardware to work with the higher end stuff for recording at home or small business? yes, you want to work at higher quality than the finished product sometimes. We don’t have a true version of that perfect format in home video. And for how ‘democratized’ home editing is, actual higher end video meant for production is still in more professional budgets. Though, still cheaper in the digital age I think? 1080p bluray felt like it but that only covered movies and tv when it first dominated. UHD doesn’t for other silly reasons. (IIRC, some 1080p BD features are hard to replicate in UHD mastering software, may be fixed now. Even at max bitrate certain sources will not look like an upgrade. Have not seen anyone use UHD discs for 60fps content outside of a few high framerate films and demos?)