Take the pulse of CES 2013 and you’ll find the usual gizmo lineup: smartphones, tablets, cameras, cars and high-end audio products. But this year, the show’s opening salvo involved something the industry refers to as “4K ultra-high-definition television.” These are towering TV screens — over 80 inches in a few cases — with several times the resolution of today’s top-end 1080p (1920 x 1080) sets: 3840 × 2160 pixels, even more than something like Apple’s groundbreaking Retina MacBook Pro (2880 x 1880). (Note 3840 x 2160 is technically short of 4K by 160 lines — marketing always rounds up.) Manufacturers are positioning this sort of pixel brawn to compensate for two things: diminishing visual returns as screens scale up, size-wise, and the lack of interest in 3D technology. According to NPD DisplaySearch, global TV shipments declined 6% in 2012, and the market’s expected to remain flat through 2013 (to be fair, NPD chalks this up more to “economic uncertainty” and slow declines in TV prices). Companies like Sony, Samsung, Toshiba and LG thus seem to be treating 4K TV as “plan B” in their bid to reinvigorate a stagnant market. I have zero interest in 3D technology, but I’ve long been mindful of display resolutions and screen sizes. Play games or movies on 60, 70 or 80-inch screens at today’s idea of “high-definition” and you really notice the pixels, especially sitting close to the screen. You can really see it in games, where even the top engines still render well short of reality-caliber visuals and three-dimensional objects start to look aliased and blocky on bigger screens. 4K TVs in theory ameliorate this by increasing the horizontal and vertical line counts to give you the experience at 80 inches, say, that you might have at 1080p on a smaller set. No one actually sits up close to an 80-inch screen for the same reasons we call comparable viewing positions in a movie theater “nosebleeds,” but if you had to, the idea with 4K TV is that you’d be far less likely to notice the individual![]()
