No, not one iota.
4K is completely over hyped, who the hell wants to see a newscaster's pimple from 30ft'?
I can well understand it, and higher resolutions, for big budget productions where the visuals are a vital component of 'the experience' but 4K footage of your dog on the beach, you can keep it.
Two core reasoning's for 4K are pretty weak too. The first is, I need to shoot 4K so I can edit down to HD in post for cropping and stabilization purposes, is akin to saying I shoot with a 100mm lens so I can crop down to a 400mm fov for my wildlife shooting, or, I shoot medium format stills so I can edit down to 135 format! Can you imagine somebody suggesting that? If you use either of those reasoning's then you no longer have 4K quality anyway so what was the point of shooting it?
Linked to that is the comment "it is inevitable". Well the HD standard works pretty well for the screen size viewing distance coc calculations that are based on human vision, so most of the time we see very little difference. Sure in the store when you stand next to a 4K and an HD screen the difference is dramatic, and we have progressed towards larger screens and shorter viewing distances, but for most people when they get the 4K screen home and in their normal position the differences are not so big and often not actually viewable with the naked eye. Which puts 4K into perspective and gives higher resolution systems a very real limit to practical applications.
The second reasoning is the "I can take still images from my 4K footage", really? The 1DX was hyped with that capability and every still I saw from it looked pretty weak in comparison to an 18MP still from the same camera.
But it is a great way of selling media cards, HDD's, and computing power.........
Shoot a scene with lots of foliage (or some other non regular detail) in it with a wide angle (not of large objects) in HD and 4K. Then view the scenes on an HD panel and a 4K panel of the same size. The difference will be immediate and stark, because the HD footage cannot resolve the detail you are looking at.
The mistake people make is looking at something like a person or some other large object close to the camera with a narrow field of view. And in a situation like that visually your brain will register the large object over detail, and may not "notice" the stark differences between the two clips. That completely changes when you look at a scene shot with a wide angle of view with lots of small detail that is the focus of attention.
Frankly, the people who say "oh, you can't tell the difference" just boggles the mind. They either have bad eyesight or have never actually seen 4K footage and base their opinion on stuff they have heard as opposed to actual experience.
Nailed it.
You are right, I have never been to a TV sales room, a Sony store, or passed one, or even seen any of the in your face displays at practically every single store in the USA.
I 100% agree, up close there is a dramatic difference. My opinion about there being less visible difference at 'regular viewing distances' is actually backed up by physics so forgive me for being quite firm in my opinion. I suspect you spend a lot of time editing 4K footage on high res monitors on your desk, again, doing that there is a dramatic difference, however that is not how I, or the majority of TV viewers actually view most of their video content.
The 'best' 4K footage for detail of foliage and dof landscapes, by far, that I have seen has all been timelapse that was, no doubt, actually shot at much higher resolutions, further weakening the case for 4K. Sure it is going to happen, but not because it is needed, it will happen because that is first world marketing and manufacturing. Besides, am I the only one that finds the highly detailed full dof timelape 4K big screens very unnatural? That isn't how I see the landscape in nature, ever, so why would I want the video to look like that?
Watch 'The Darjeeling Express' on 1080 and you are in India, watch a timelapse of pretty much any world famous scenery on a 4K big screen and you are looking at some Hollywoodesque over sharpened caricature. But, whatever.........
Poll