4 January 2018 - ambiguous 4K

Do you remember how slow people were to pick up on the idea that higher video resolution was better? At first, many could not see the difference between old-fashioned TV and high definition. There were standards with names like 720p and 1080p, with precise technical meanings that were gibberish to the public. This was a sign that engineers had not yet been pushed out of the process. Today marketers are in charge, and they have convinced the public to see meaning in names like 4K, which is technically ambiguous. When the names get too vague to quite pin down, we know we’re getting somewhere.