Digital Media: Pixel Games

This is the first of a multi-part series covering various aspects of digital media. With the ever closing gap between premium and budget devices in the mobile industry, manufacturers are desperate to add features exclusive to their premium models. One aspect where this is being done is in screen resolution. Laptops, phones, tablets and TVs now have HD screens. HD content is either 720p (1280 x 720) and 1080p (1920 x 1080) or anything in between. 1080p is generally referred to as Full HD and this is the highest quality available for home video in the form of Blu-ray discs or digital downloads. With this in mind, I think manufacturers are pushing the envelope with their ever increasing pixel counts. There are already phones and tablets that have a native resolution of full HD. So why do manufacturers perceive a need for higher resolutions in their products? Devices like the iPad 3 and the Nexus 10 have a native resolution well in excess of 1080p. 

While HD undoubtedly makes things look better, I wonder why Apple and Samsung decided to go overboard. As Blu-ray is 1920 x 1080, these devices have a lot of spare pixels that are being wasted. Their manufacturers could argue that images and videos will look better on their devices. But this is not exactly straightforward. The question is not so simple.

This is because the image quality of full HD is just 2.1mega pixels. We all have photos of a much higher quality ranging from 5MP to 38MP. There is however a fine line between screen resolution and screen size. A balance between the two has to be achieved. You’ll be better off viewing an 8MP image on a 7 inch tablet with 720p screen than you would on a 5 inch phone with 1080p. Why? A small screen is a small screen. There’s no getting around it. To truly appreciate photos/videos, you’ll need a big screen; bigger than any mobile device (phones, tabs, and laptops). I know from experience that you cannot ‘properly’ view high resolution images and videos on small screens no matter how sharp those small screens are. I tried to read a PDF magazine on two different devices, a Galaxy Tab P1000 (7 inches @ 1024 x 600) and a Galaxy S3 (4.8 inches @ 1280 x 720). It was much easier to read on the P1000 than on the S3 even though it looked sharper on the latter. This is because the whole page couldn’t be legibly displayed at once on the S3.  And it is for this very reason that I find the resolutions of the iPad 3 and Nexus 10 to be superfluous. The extra detail they are capable of displaying will be mostly lost on you because their screens are not large enough. Even though they will display an 8MP photo in much sharper detail, you still will be unable to view the whole image at once. You’ll be better off viewing those images on a larger screen. I usually use my TV for this. You will find that you’ll see the image in much better detail; in all its resplendent glory. This applies to movies as well. Even DVD video looks so much better on a TV than on a laptop. Watching the Avengers DVD on a TV is a completely different experience from watching it a 1080p laptop. You see more on a big screen because your field of view is enlarged.

In TV land, there is a new technology called Ultra HD, colloquially known as 4K and 8K.  4K (2160p) has four times the resolution of Full HD while 8K (4320p) has 16 times the resolution of Full HD. In other words, 4K and 8K have the video quality of an 8.3 MP image and a 33.2 MP image respectively. Technologies like 4k and 8k are for the time being, proof of concepts. There is no content for them. So I’ll advise you to avoid all the 4k and 8k TVs currently being sold and most especially any mobile device labelled as 4K or 8K capable. This is because a very large screen/display is needed for of 4K/8K have admitted that a very large screen is needed to truly appreciate the bump in resolution/detail. As large as 80 inches.  As said earlier, there is a fine balance between resolution and screen size. You just can’t keep bumping up the resolution on small screen because the law of diminishing returns sets in much sooner than later. 1080p will be the gold standard for home video for the considerable future. My advice to anyone considering buying into the nascent 4K/8K technology is to wait until the dust settles. Judging from history, there will most likely be a format war. Remember Betamax vs. VHS and the very recent HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray. And as we have reached the peak of screen sizes as far as mobile devices are concerned, I envisage the future will be projected screens and projected surfaces. So to Apple and Samsung, 1920 x 1080 is enough!

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