Gadgetory

the 359 is sponsored by USB technology the USB implementers forum reminds consumers that USB if' logos are displayed on certified USB products so the next time you're shopping for a reliable USB charger cable or device look for the logos get the whole story at enabling USB org 8 Bullock's welcome - good morning to the 359 CNET's daily news program brought to you in the same format as what used to be radio now known as a live podcast it's episode 451 on Wednesday August 30th we're coming at you from the scene at New York studios and I'm BVG let's commemorate today because today was the day Skynet became self-aware back in 1997 and humanity as we know it was destroyed by the t800 Terminator series now here are your hosts Alfred aying Roger Chang and dammit Wow hey dude it's great that you're really loud so we can hear you but like it's hard so like thanks for starting the show off in such a bright note you know you know what's you know it's a brighter note to start today off of it is 100 days until the new super smash brothers comes out oh it is we're just gonna get smashed questions all throughout the entire show as it should be Brian can we come here are you the other can you not hear me out there nope we can't hear you well we could hear you kind of are you physically but not with like the speakers and now with the technology that is powering the show all right well vamp for a second and I'll I'll try to fix that louder BAM all right so anyway so kinky exactly all right well Brian is on Brian MA how come you never just sit here with us yeah you can see the top of his head no you can't all right there it is well so we'll just get him the topic so we uh we've got David on for reason Etha is here did before got some TV news and we'll talk specifically about 8k TV technology is a feature um he'll explain what it is cuz I'm gonna tell what it is beyond fact like supposed to be sharper it's just eight thousand more it's more you body board you get eight thousand for free yeah that would be a great deal actually and won't really break down all TV news and take your questions about all things TVs because that's what David's here for yeah he knows more about TVs than anyone else in the world really Yeah right actually eight times as much as anybody else okay next person down it sure all right can you hear me now well yeah I'm a genius you are all right let's get the show on all right let's do it so as always if you have any questions mostly for David Nutt for us unless they're smash questions leave them in the comments section but I will pick out the best and we'll get them in three bits in 59 seconds from thorry a two welcome to the 359 I'm Roger chant I'm out for dang and with us is special guest and TV wizard David Katz Meyer he's yours what I was not actually a wizard but he's well I'm like a level zero okay I just learned can trips there we go he's here because Etha is upon us and we've already got some TV news Dave can you break down some of the early announcements from LG and sharp yeah we saw those guys basically rolled out 8k TVs so these things we've seen before actually at CES and since like 2014 honestly I've been talking about these things so LG showed their 88 inch 8k OLED concept TV he thought you know 77 inch roads were expensive at 10 grand imagine this thing and then sharp has its own 8k TV they're known for really large presentation monitors that's what this is it's not a real consumer product so let's break down what 8k is is it just twice as sharper resolutions 4k you'd think but it's actually four times as sharp even better right the math isn't I have it in front of me so don't get it wrong okay hey is 7680 by 43 20 which is 33 million one hundred seventy seven thousand six hundred pixels and 4k is a mere eight million so right it's it's it's a lot it's a lot smaller pixels and a lot more it's the bottom line I mean what does that mean for the end-user the person watching this TV is it really a noticeable benefit no okay I mean how many and the podcast there how many TV shows are even like recording in like a cage well not every shows a this is a podcast zero okay the the there are actually a couple movies that were shot in HK like guards the galaxy 2 was shot in HK 4 sorry 8k forgettable a couple of upcoming movies as well that's just the film part because the CGI has to be a lot lower resolution cuz CGI takes a heck of a lot more processing power to deal with and a normal video but yeah there really aren't that many 8k cameras out there the content is just getting started Netflix and those guys you know haven't really done anything with it there are some 8k quote-unquote videos on YouTube but you know they're really hard to watch and really Kay and blah blah blah so it's super what is the point of putting these things that is it basically like plenty flying on the ground saying hey we're investing in 8k everyone else start started jumping on this bandwagon yeah and and these guys have been showing these things for a while rumor has it that Samsung is gonna come out with an 8k TV later at Aoife so yeah these guys want to get in and and you know kind of get it started essentially so you know get the TVs out there and then they think the content is gonna fall I feel like these standards upgrades so quickly that by the time everybody has an 8k TV and everything is being filled with a ke cameras it's like Oh check it out we got 16 K now yeah in terms of 4k content like it's still not ubiquitous right there are a lot of channels yeah they're channels that weren't even broadcasting in HD for a while right there's no TV broadcast in 4k regularly and there's a few streaming shows mainly originals on Amazon and Netflix yeah in those places but long story short 4k content isn't really even here yet and now we're talk about 8k so is this I mean you mentioned concept are these all concepts are always gonna see these in the market anytime soon none of these ones that we've seen done now so far are viable you know the rumor has it that Samsung's is gonna be viable we'll find out at CES earlier this year they showed an ATV that they said you were gonna be able to buy later this year so we're thinking that's gonna be it and so why would you want to buy line if there's no content writing rights not on your friends yeah yeah yeah it's turnkey Dunc all over those eight but again if you've got a TV and there's no EK content what do you like is it if the 4k content does it look better so Samsung says that it has AI processing course it does that you guys gonna be a very big buzzword yeah I will make that a K TV sing with 4k and 1080p in your VHS content oh I really wanna pull really want to play VHS cassette we're on on an 8k party yeah just the best blow it up as big as you can get it all right from one of these stories chicks on CNET I'm Roger Chang I'm out for a David Katz Mayer thanks for listening very jazzy oh yeah you guys can tease all you want but the audience likes my music oh yeah thanks everybody for joining us for the recording of the audio podcast that'll publish later we'll tell you where to find it and for now I'm gonna jump into the chat and dig out some questions and comments let's go ahead and give a shout out to any Oni coming all the way from Kenya I love hearing that we got these awesome international numbers in the meantime let's jump in and take one from Brian Matthews he says instead of an 8k TV how about an 8k projector TI properly si would would we see a difference in a K TV it would have to be like a hundred inches big so yeah you're on the right track the larger an image the more you're liable to appreciate the the extra resolution a same thing if you sit closer to the picture you're gonna appreciate it more so yeah sitting really close to really gigantic TVs your best chance of appreciating a K and that's that's how I watch my 4k TV okay my challenge is from it we're all raised our mom's told us don't sit close to the TV it'll ruin your eyes our mom's never had a K TV babe right it's totally worth [Laughter] we have some skeptics in the audience today people are asking no they're not all a K believers already what's the matter with you people I'm not out there with chrome TV 3d TVs um you know you can do that's that's plenty Curt you just say curved TV and you can walk away from TV you have done they still exist by the way that's shocking right Daniel Peter says how clear can you get really Mathew dieter says can humans really see the difference between 4k and 8k at the current size of home TVs and Sanjay says I believe the human eye can't see beyond 2k right so all of that stuff is generally true it all depends on this eating distance the screen size what you're actually watching if you're just looking at still lines they're really easy to differentiate picture an eye chart or your optometrist it's really easy to see those ease they're not moving but you know most people watch TV that moves yeah color yeah color resolutions a whole other issue so all these things combined mean that in general it's really hard to tell the difference and of course if you don't have 20/20 vision if you're not a fighter pilot you know it's really hard to you know again appreciate this extra definition so is this just a marketing thing to a large extent I'm not gonna say that until actually get it into the lab and sit side by side that I might blow anybody's mind but from what we've seen with to comparing 1080p and 4k back in the day with 265 inch TVs right next to each other basically the exact same except for the resolution it was really hard to tell it's 65 inches sitting about 8 feet away which was pretty damn close so a kale be even harder so I want to ask about Apple and the iMac because they they tout a 5k iMac I've never actually looked at one but is that is this somewhere in this in the spectrum or is 5km marketing so we have looked at that and again with 4k content upskilled slightly you know to match the 5k it's really hard to tell and again it's all about a really tiny screen I mean compared to a TV or an IMAX screen and you know you got to sit really close and you got to have the content be the kind of content like stills or highly detailed stuff that really shows it off so if you see demos of this stuff you're gonna see slow pans over nature and you know things with a lot of lines and really that that kind of content is what these show off this high tax resolution I just imagined cat smart going to like a friend's house who like claims they have a 4k TV and he's just like inches away from the screen like no it's not well you need a liar you know be like a jeweler is magnifying the screen to actually see the pixels even with 4k TVs especially the small ones so imagine an 8k TV the pixels are gonna be literally indiscernible so so you can just tell people you have an 8k TV and tell people that now well these ones you know if they get launched we might have to actually go up with a microscope to actually see that they're a Kay you know can't take these guys words for it anyway if you're looking at our set on background this is our 52 K TV super ultra high def yeah yeah just it was made specifically for our show ironically as we're locked in to 1080 he on the outgoing so you can't appreciate no just tell everybody it's a Cayman yeah don't ever know it's like bragging about that Canadian girlfriend that no one can ever prove what got our super claws I could totally tell the difference yeah doesn't go to our school you don't know all right let's take one from n Sanjay a K offers better aliasing over four K that's a question does eight K offer better aliasing over 4 K because in the studio's they only use 5 to 6 K cameras yeah so again it really helps to capture at a higher resolution um Studios love a K and all that stuff in the camera because it gives you room to play on the Edit side and polish up your boo-boos editor guy can tell us in fact they can frame stuff really wide and then just use the parts that they want oh god the image okay and we were talked about 4k that was one of the things that really excited about Sony Pictures said we love 4k you know we can make the 1080p image whatever we want same thing with 8k even right larger with aliasing again it'd be really hard to see the difference in practice I think that's basically just jagged edges smoothing out you know again that'll show it more readily than anything else but already with 4k it's really hard to see if the contents produce well okay all right here's one from Ryan Williams when okay let's take actually a few from the same train of thought when does it get to a point when her eyes can't notice the difference Jacob Lombardo expands this is a serious question at one point do these increase in resolution go past the human eyes I'm sensing a trend here the short answer is yes they're already past the human eye so if you think about a 50 inch 4k TV there's I mean there's a bunch of math I don't know if thought my head so I'm not gonna say it right now but if you get close enough you can kind of see a difference but if you get a little bit further back and I have test patterns where there's literally lines you know 30 or 20 lines and and if you get back clothed far enough they blend together and for everybody else that's slightly different depending on your vision but if you're in that range all of a sudden the resolution doesn't matter at all and there are a lot of people to claim oh yeah I can see it or you know side by side blah blah blah but you know if you talk to an optometrist there is a real limit to human and with 4k at 50 inches you're kind of already there if you go you know again a lot larger screen set a lot closer you might be able to see some difference with a k and it's not a hard stop because there's a lot of pixels in between 8k and 4k so you know there's a range but at the end of the day we're kind of already there and that's kind of what Apple is talking about with Retina displays for example you're okay you're at the level of being able to not discern the difference in phone screens are kind of already there as well with very large phone screens you know high resolution you there's really no benefit to putting extra pixels on those things so TVs are larger screens so they're gonna try and get a little higher on the number so ultimately this is a matter of you know 4k is kind of run its course in terms of like buzz or hype so they've just needed to invent a new term well a lot of things about 4k for example you can buy a 4k TV for like 300 bucks an hour yes you know so that's an issue for manufacturers they wanna be able to charge Warren you know make profits which their companies that's what they do right they need to have a premium Branum feature it out the other issue is that OLED out there which is a real improvement in pure quality OLED TVs from LG and others those are you know the best in picture quality right now and if you have a not OLED TV LCD like Samsung and Vizio other guys make they don't make an OLED TV they want to be able to have something you can put up against OLED and say hey look these guys may have amazing contrast in color and off angle and all this stuff but our we have more pixels you know you know we have more of these things that you can't you'll see well you know right that's exactly what it boils down to eight is higher than four and you're comparing a short hole led to an 8k LCD especially a LCD cost the same or a little bit lower and you're in the store and you're going it's higher than four gimme v8o so that's an interesting point do you think the AKG V's will be cheaper than the ohlet's it depends so like I said at the beginning a 77 inch OLED TV right now is about 10 grand Nate 210 that's massively expensive obviously but the 65s are in the three $2,500 range so I don't think these you know let's say Samsung comes out with a 65 inch a K TV I don't think that thing is going to be less than the 65 inch OLED at 3 grand okay I especially at the beginning because these things just started coming right right another thing with with a que is that there's HDMI 2.1 which is a new standard for hdmi transmission that can handle the higher bandwidth and higher resolution and it's kind of exciting for us TV nerds that maybe this will be the first TV that has HDMI 2.1 which would be kind of neat oh this is an extra nerdy question but when do we get rid of those HDMI cables and go completely wireless talk to Apple seems like there's an opportunity there their place for cooling yeah but know that I think they're gonna be around for a while because it's just really efficient and there's not you know once you hide the cables behind your TV and everything that we really understands they're there when you're walking around the phone Wireless has a lot more of a benefit but within the TV there are wireless hdmi solutions out there right now and they work pretty well so you know if you really want to get rid of the wire it's great with projectors and long cable runs and things like that you can buy one but they're you know just not that practical ok I got to wonder what the impact is going to be on bandwidth for content delivery if we keep blowing up the pixels or 5g comes in about 5g yeah that's a really good point so if you're a Comcast or you're a purveyor of bandwidth you're loved and all these increases in resolution because they just sucked down the megabits and make people upgrade their packages your internet home delivery so we're you know right now they call for 15 to 20 megabits per second for 4k streaming for Netflix and those guys they're you know just do a little bit of math nobody's amassed anything but I'm figuring at least 40 to 50 megabits per second to stream a single a.k show now for a lot of households that's the entire bandwidth who has that right I mean seriously and and and if you don't then hey let's go out and Patra for it so everybody makes a lot of money that actually kind of plays into the comment coming in from Jade 49 asking can 8 K TVs really only function in big sizes to which I kind of like chuckle to myself a little bit because I'm picturing like those little like CRT TVs used to get that were like portable I was like why would you want content with like no no no no for like phones well that makes sense yes oh and another thing where you talk about phones it kind of makes sense verse 4 reality is an area where higher resolution does make sense as well so right now with VR you're kind of limited to the screen and the way phones work is and we put something in your Samsung gear VR you got to use half of the resolution on the phone so if you can double that resolution then you can get rid of the screen door effect get some nice what actually makes sense on a mobile device or on a VR headset yes I think there there's some room for the extra pixels to pay a dividend okay although there's only I think as a as far as I know there's only one 4k phone out there yeah and and the way manufacturing works these guys have to get on board and start putting them out at that higher resolution that's the only real use case that I can see that makes sense for 4k on the phone they're like those screens are too small for there to be any real other tangible benefit right yeah I mean there is you know again the shooting side of it makes sense you have to edit and but when you're consuming it on you know video or VR or anything like that I think it's it's hard to think up another use case besides yeah we actually wrote an article I'm trying to Google it right now about when 4k isn't enough the case for higher resolutions and it talks about VR it talks about 360 cameras which is another market where you know shoots in every direction and and that's less about the screen more about the camera right right exactly the capturing yeah and PCs and gaming so this is something where you know resolution can go up a little bit in PCs and you get textures and things like that going on so we're now just getting video game the console games in 4k right they're just catching up to and and that gets back to what I said it beginning so actually smash is not gonna be in 4k no switch no switch games it's and yeah it's an HD the whole problem with all this extra resolution is that it requires so much more processing power on the cgi side which can include video games or movies or whatever when you're generating graphics at these high resolutions you often get to the point you talk to gaming guys and we look at games is it better to have 1080p at 60 frames a second or you know less resolution at 120 frames per second you know right the smoother frame rate looks better and you only have so much bandwidth so you're sucking up all this bandwidth with with static pixels to make higher resolution whereas you can use the bandwidth to again create an increase frame rate yeah you can increase color definition you can do a lot of other things with the bandwidth besides using it for pixels so you know a lot of people say HD are 1080p HD are it sometimes gonna look better than 4k non HD are you know so you're spending your pixels not on increasing detail but increasing other areas of picture performance that are much more important I'm glad you brought that up Josh boy I was just asking about what's better for K or 1080p with HDR right right so 1080p HD R is really non-existent right now you only get it if you're watching Netflix and your Netflix hasn't scaled up to 4k yet you know when you first turn it on it's like boop boop you can actually watch some 1080p HD R for a couple seconds or if you have a you know that slow connection but right now there it doesn't really exist 10 4k and HDR go hand-in-hand right now in the market so all the 4k blu-ray discs have HDR on their 4k there's no real 1080p HD are out there but you can see that happening for example with broadcast where or cable where bandwidth is a lot more limited and these guys have to send out you know as efficient a signal as they can and maybe you'll opt for you know again sacrificing some of that pixel some of that resolution to get better HDR increases your contrast it makes color better there's a lot of benefits to HDR I definitely prefer it if you're gonna choose between HDR and 4k I'll take HDR every time mmm Jacob Lombardo this is going to be the next 3d useless feature flop no provider is going to make a que footage since the extreme price and no difference with human eyes seeing the video picture James Taylor I love you music we have zero cable signal at 4k so why are we even talking about this I mean I'm gonna be uncharacteristically forgiving and optimistic cause it's fun technology but cats is there really any benefit to this besides the cosmetic appeal well okay let me let me take a step back we said very similar things when 4k came out and it's really hard to tell Jensen with 4k right but turn around today for Kay's everywhere all it takes is scaling of the technology it's it's kind of everywhere okay a lot more places to be right yeah if you pay Netflix 15 bucks a month you get but loads of 4k and everybody watch it all behind it's in every home eight KS already good to be obsolete well is is is the debut for Kate Kate Kate Evie's right now making 4k obsolete absolutely not in fact it's not even making 1080p obsolete all these things can coexist hmm they're still out there and and the point is that you know in a couple years every TV is gonna be 8k just like right now almost every high-end mid-range TV above two and three hundred bucks above fifty inches is 4k so with LCD which is the predominant display technology it's super easy to scale up resolution so there's no reason for these guys not to make everything a Kay as soon as possible regardless of what happens on the content side I set them up you knock them down Katz from Fernando at what size screen do you think the advantage of 8k comes into play I want projector size TVs 52 78 is not big enough I want the cinema experience alright so 100 inches I'll just throw it out there I mean and how close can you sit to 100 inch TV without ralphing Tom yeah right do you like to be the dude in the front of the movie theater I'll put it that way because that guy might be able to see the difference on an 8k screen bringing up movie theaters 4k projection is out there in movie theaters and if you say close enough you can see the pixels so right there is a real benefit to getting agent 8k projection Samsung itself makes these cinema screens which wall-sized crazy awesome displays for movies and you know you can see those things really benefitting for 4k but sure hundred inch is fine again you gotta look close you got the right content you guys sit close blah blah blah blah so speaking of content Larry Mitchell's asking how soon are we actually going to see contents showing up in a ke do we know of anybody who's working on developing new programming or film 2020 that because NHK which is the broadcaster in Japan is coming out with they've already announced a ke footage for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo yeah so accents and it makes perfect sense because you can stage the Olympics everything is what's happening it's super easy to film that stuff yeah they've been doing 4k Olympic stuff for a while so yeah I think that's gonna be the first time it really comes out so it makes sense for there to be a few TVs out there that you can watch out okay there you go Ricky B would you rather have resolution or refresh which is more important in the long run well there's a point at which resolution is important and then after that becomes unimportant and refresh becomes more important but the downside of refresh is has anybody seen The Hobbit and high refresh rate or watched Billy Lynn's long halftime walk which was a movie that Angley filmed in 100 frames per second and it was shown in six frames per second it's really really smooth and looks really weird so the refresh rate issue with video games kind of as much as you can get is great but with film a lot of people are used to and want the 24p look of film where refresh rate really doesn't help you at all so and and for example a lot of sports are shown shot and shown at 60 frames and that's really nice but it'd be awesome if you could show them at 120 frames because your eye I don't really know what your ivory fresh is at but it's higher than 60 120 you can tell the difference so you know for anything but film I'll take refresh rate once it's safe for a resolution or higher it's interesting how organically this conversation is flowing because an Sanjay is asking why do films still use 24 frames legacy that's what people are used to so I think there's also an element that it's not about the highest quality of delivery it's about the manipulation of your emotions so the element of lower frame rates sometimes implies harder faster action that heavily used in a lot of action films I used to use it when I would shoot music videos just for the sake of the drama and it added an increased sense of I don't know in enhanced action really yeah and and in right now for example you talk to guys that really like it like Angley who's the Titanic guy I keep forgetting so he's a big advocate of high frame rate in film and so he's talking about doing avatar too in high frame rate Peter Jackson obviously with The Hobbit so these guys really believe in the high frame rate and they think that you know what this is how our film should look and they're the directors and you know far be it from us the viewer to say you know what this would be better if it was 24p so it all really is totally subjective much more than something like detail the frame rate of film most people want to shoot in 24p cameras and 24p for a reason and you know that's what people are used to but i think if we had evolved in a different track and you know we'd all evolved with 60 frames per sec film that wouldn't be an issue and everybody would you know not really care about that all right we kind of rep we got reppin guys just realize that time right away sorry have fun with cats everybody thanks for joining us throw in your comments about what 4k 8 k displays you're excited about or hdmi wireless hdmi cables keep the conversation going about us Roger take us on out alright our podcast is available on iTunes tune in stitcher feedburner google play music google play podcast an amazon alexa of course you know to come see y'all tomorrow you you