I know I am a display tech nerd, but can people really not tell the difference? Even going from a 1440p to a 4k monitor to me was a very noticeable improvement to clarity. And there's a huge difference in the way that games look on my living room TV in 1080p compared to 4k.
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
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It's all about the baseline.
Cinematic, Blu Ray bitrate 1080p vs 4K is not too dramatic.
Compressed streams though? Or worse production quality? 4K raises the baseline dramatically. It's much harder to stream bad-looking 4K than it is 1080p, especially since '4K' usually implies certain codecs/standards.
This discussion drives me crazy because it’s the EXACT SAME FUCKING discussion that happened when 1080p screens became available in the 00s. So many people argued “oh it depends how far away you sit but you don’t really notice it” and “oh if the screen size is small your eyes can’t tell”
NO monthafucka if you have halfway decent eyesight there’s NO WAY you won’t notice a huge change in quality from 720p to 1080p even on a 6” screen. 1080 to 4k is noticeable on almost ANY size screen (we all just skip 1440p, don’t we?) and as the size of the screen goes up and up, it just gets more and more noticeable.
Edit: Forgot to mention, a big reason I heard people making this argument so much in the ‘00s is because I was in TV and computer sales.
I don't remember that discussion at all... I remember people being super excited for 1080p, but annoyed that there was no content for it because DVDs were still 480p and TV content was similar. Blurays were 1080p, but weren't really a thing until the late 00s.
We've had 4k for a decade, and there's still not much content for it. When there is, the difference w/ 1080p isn't so significant as to be worth the cost, as it's usually just upscaled 1080 content. 4k makes a lot of sense for a monitor that's 30" or larger, but for a TV where you're 10-15 feet away it doesn't make nearly as much sense.
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The difference between 1080p and 2160p is night and day to me.
Black and white antennae TV's from the 1950's was clearer than a lot of TV's today, but they weighed 600 kilograms. Nowadays I buy cheap, small TV's and let my brain fill in the empty spaces like it's supposed to. /s
I've been saying this for years.
Shhh – the ISPs need a reason to sell bigger data plans. Please think of the ISPs…
Except everyone uses crap bit rates and compression on their streaming content and it really doesn’t look that much better than 1080p. UHD Blu Rays tho are a totally different story, absolutely outclassing lower res content.
The question for me isn't whether or not there's a difference that I might be able to see if I were paying attention to the picture quality, it's whether the video quality is sufficiently bad to distract me from the content. And only hypercompressed macroblocked-to-hell-and-back ancient MPEG1 files or multiply-recopied VHS tapes from the Dark Ages are ever that bad for me. In general, I'm perfectly happy with 480p. Of course, I might just have a higher-than-average immunity to bad video. (Similarly, I can spot tearing if I'm looking for it, but I do have to be looking for it.)