Has anyone here upgraded from 1080P to 4K? What are your impressions?

[Leathaface]

I'm gonna be getting a 4K TV this Sunday and i'm hyped for it. I have only seen a 4K screen though once, that was 4 years ago.

For people who regularly view 4K, what's the difference like?

 

[Birdjaguar]

I have a 27" 4k monitor I run at 3840 x 2160 through display port. It is fabulous and makes my other 24" look stupid and dull. You will be very spoiled very quickly. It will change your gaming life forever.

 

[Synobun]

I have a 27" 4k monitor I run at 3840 x 2160 through display port. It is fabulous and makes my other 24" look stupid and dull. You will be very spoiled very quickly. It will change your gaming life forever.

How do old games look on it?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Well since I got it 19 months ago I've only played theses games: Path of Exile, Total War Rome 2, Civ V, and Skyrim. They all look excellent++. I cannot speak to any others. TV, movies, everything else also looks superb.

 

[Ryika]

For TVs, I find that it really depends on where you sit and how big the TV is. If you're positioned directly in front of a large TV, the difference is huge and very noticeable, but only a few meters away from an average-sized (~43") TV, and you'll hardly be able to differentiate between 1080p and 4k, if at all. And of course most things you can do with your TV are not even available in 4k, so stuff will be upscaled.

Imho, contrast and color accuracy are much more important in that case. Overall I would say for TVs 4k is more of a tool that keeps things sharp if you use a big TV at a small distance than a must-have feature in every situation, but of course it also doesn't hurt to have it if the tv is good in general.

 

[Cheetah]

My laptop is very powerful, but it's an ultrabook, not a gaming laptop, so it struggles a bit with the most fancy games (also not having Windows and DirectX could hurt a bit for those games, I suppose). So for gaming I usually turn down the resolution to 1920x1080 anyway.

For all other stuff I use the 4K display normally, but since it's a 13" screen, I definitely had to scale everything up to twice the regular size.

It looks really crisp and nice though.

 

[civvver]

Well most broadcasts don't come in 4k yet so you probably won't even watch that much 4k stuff.

The reason most 4k tvs look awesome compared to their predecessors is simply better lighting/contrast and better refresh rates (very underrated). Pretty much all tvs are 4k now so you can't do a side by side comparison of 4k with same features as 1080 now. But I'd want a 120hz native tv with some sort of hdr to get a good viewing experience.

 

[Leathaface]

For TVs, I find that it really depends on where you sit and how big the TV is. If you're positioned directly in front of a large TV, the difference is huge and very noticeable, but only a few meters away from an average-sized (~43") TV, and you'll hardly be able to differentiate between 1080p and 4k, if at all. And of course most things you can do with your TV are not even available in 4k, so stuff will be upscaled.

Imho, contrast and color accuracy are much more important in that case. Overall I would say for TVs 4k is more of a tool that keeps things sharp if you use a big TV at a small distance than a must-have feature in every situation, but of course it also doesn't hurt to have it if the tv is good in general.

I'll be getting a 55 inch 4K tv and i'll be sitting around 3 feet from it.

 

[warpus]

A couple months ago I bought a 4K 42 inch TV for $330 or something like that. It was replacing the $760 (in 2007 CAD) HD TV that was starting to break down. I pretty much only bought it because I figured it was a great deal in terms of getting a replacement. And so far it's been great except for the weird fact that all the simpsons characters look a bit green. Everything else looks amazing though, even other instances of yellow. It's just the simpsons that are affected. I probably need to sit down and calibrate the colours I guess, but then again I don't really watch the simpsons very often. On the other hand one guest has already commented on it

I don't have a 4K plan though, I haven't checked with my provider how much that would cost. I figure it's probably not worth it, I don't really need to see things any clearer than that, not with a 42 inch livingroom TV

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Did it once. Bought this cheapo huge Phillips monitor:

The increased resolution was nice and all, but the icons were tiny. The IPS screen was also of substandard quality with a lot of image retention, and the manual said "dont keep a fixed image more than 15 minutes or some burn-in may happen", so i returned it and continued with my old Samsung 1K TV. I dont really see so much difference, so not regrets.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I'm pretty sure you can adjust the size of icons in windows now without changing the resolution. Could be wrong though. But yeah that's my gripe with higher definition monitors is the way it scales all the text and icons to be ant-readable automatically.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

You can change icons, fonts and everything, but it leads to a number of problems with other software. Text clipping, unreadable menus, etc. At least a couple of years ago when i tried it. Maybe now it is better.

 

[Ryika]

To be honest, for most work-related things I would always go for multiple smaller 1080p monitors instead of one big 4k monitor anyway. Especially if you're working with programs where you have to go through lots of menus rather often, 4k can become really annoying really fast. Lots of stuff still isn't "standardized" (not sure if that's the right word) for 4k, and if you're not using "industry standard"-grade kind of software then that often includes simple things as having unmovable UI elements on different ends of the monitor. Having 2 or 3 medium-sized 1080p monitors right next to each other gives lots of working space without the weirdness that happens in 4k.

Playing modern games on a properly sized 4k monitor is a completely different beast though...

 

[Cheetah]

You can change icons, fonts and everything, but it leads to a number of problems with other software. Text clipping, unreadable menus, etc. At least a couple of years ago when i tried it. Maybe now it is better.

Lots of programs haven't been prepared for high resolutions and scaling. As time moves on, more and more programs are upgraded to handle it. So it should definitely be better now than it was a few years ago.

 

[civvver]

I'll be getting a 55 inch 4K tv and i'll be sitting around 3 feet from it.

wait, what? You're using it as a monitor? Cus who the hell watches tv that close.

 

[Silurian]

I bought a 40" Samsung 4K UHD just back in November.
My computers hard drive died just after so I connected to my mail, cfc etc via the TV for a while.
Picture seems quite good compared to the 32" Philips it replaced which I bought in 2007.


http://www.samsung.com/uk/tvs/uhd-mu6120/UE40MU6120KXXU/

 

[civvver]

that tv has hdr- high dynamic range, so it's going to look really good. To make things more confusing there are levels of hdr, like how they color it, how many bits it is, but any hdr is better than none. Samsung is also a quality brand. Phillips is kind of low tier.

 

[bhavv]

Consider 2560x1440 too:

Lower GPU intensity than 4k
Higher refresh rates
Little to no issue with older or indie games having unreadable UI.

I'll be saving 4k+ for a HDR 65" Inch TV with streaming for my first house I'm getting soon, but this is a low optional priority and it won't be until 2-3 years time.

To me, 4k screens are still too lacking in other features and I want something that's going to be vastly better than my 1440p 144hz Asus ROG Swift screen.

Also prices on screens is a major fix / scam. My current monitor was purchased with preorder on release day (first 144hz monitor above lame 1080p). It still costs the same several years later, meanwhile better screens are priced even higher. I don't actually need any better for how much more it costs, and the 2-3 year time frame will give opportunity for lowered prices or better technology like upcoming 4K HDR (I'm liking Nvidias 4K 65" HDR TV with built in streaming ready features very much, but this is probably going to be a ridiculous price £6000+ crap price).

 

[Quintillus]

I have a 4K TV, though I never had a TV prior to that, just a 24" 1920x1200 monitor (which I still use on my computer). I use the TV to watch Blu-Rays, DVDs, a bit of streaming video, and a handful of times per year actual over-the-air TV. It's a 48" Samsung, and I typically sit 7-8 feet away on a sofa. I've also played Rocket League on it a couple times, but I've never been handy with a controller so 99% of the time I play it on my 24" Dell monitor with a mouse+keyboard.

IMO the 4K aspect isn't a big deal; I got it in 4K because by autumn 2016, most of the better TVs were 4K anyway. The two big reasons being the viewing distance that Ryika touched on, and that there isn't much 4K content, and most of it's more expensive than 1080p content. I think the only video content I've watched in 4K is the film Interstellar, via Amazon Prime. From my couch, I couldn't tell an increase in detail versus watching Spectre on Blu-Ray or Game of Thrones in 1080p via HBO Now. It may have been better, but the difference was marginal. Whereas, if I watch a DVD, I do notice the difference in quality - for 5 or 10 minutes at least, and by then I'm into the film and adjusted to it enough that I don't think about it anymore.

For live sports, the signal is often still in 720p. When watching American football, there are times I wish there was a bit more detail or clarity. But that happens whether I'm watching on my 4K TV, a friend's 4K TV, or my parents' 1080i Sony Bravia from 2007. The signal is the limiting factor in all three cases.

The other difference I notice when comparing my 4K Samsung to my parents' 1080i Sony is that their Sony has much better sound quality. This is due to its increased thickness and integrated, visible-to-humans front-facing speakers. I wound up buying a soundbar for my Samsung, which made the difference between having to put closed captions on most of the time due to muddled audio, and having sufficiently clear audio to understand almost everything, not to mention improved sound quality in general.