Comment Re:Too little too late? (Score 1) 293
or just 2160p as it should be called
Movies come in different aspect ratios. At 1.78:1 you get 1080p or 2160p. At the also popular 2.35:1 you get ~817p. 720p likewise becomes ~544p. Those aren't really helpful for comparison since 817p isn't lower resolution than 1080p. Only the horizontal resolution is constant, so it actually makes sense to use it. The use of vertical resolution comes from the days of analog TV when only horizontal resolution was continuous, not discrete.
(I'm sure the marketing folks were salivating over it anyway.)
Also, while I haven't watched your hour-long video (summary?), I'm not sure why anyone would target 4096 pixels wide, which would make upscaling existing HD very painful. Doubling the resolution is much simpler, and I very much doubt that 4K was ever a spec as opposed to a marketing term.
Indeed, upscaling existing 1920x1080 to 4096x(aspect ratio) would be painful. Just as downscaling the 2K and 4K that movies are shot in to 1920x1080 and 3840x2160 are, but could be much better if they weren't. That is one of the points brought up in the video.
Other points in the video talk about how resolution isn't the only factor that makes the newer formats better, it is not even the most important one. The new formats also come with a wider color gamut, better compression algorithms, and so on. But one of the main points is the problem of getting movie formats cleanly scaled down to home formats. They had an opportunity here to stop doing that and they blew it.
