Is it true you can't see any difference between 1366X768 pixel and 4K videos on a 1366X768 Pixels of Screen?

[Vivaldi]

Is it true you can't see any difference between 1366X768 pixel and 4K videos on a 1366X768 Pixels of Screen?

No difference at all?

[Anonymous]

I'm not entirely sure how it works, but through some combination of the codecs that are being used by your media player and whatever is happening on your graphics card the information from the file is being read and turned into instructions to light up each pixel on the screen with a colour.

There could be some variation depending on which media player or what file you are using etc in terms of exactly what specific colours are being sent to the screen so the 2 files may not be identical but I'm not sure if you would be able to see a difference or not.

In any case there wouldn't be any additional detail because the detail is limited by the amount of pixels which physically exist to make up the scree.

To simplify, imagine that the resolution of your screen is only 1 pixel, it doesn't matter what the quality of the file sending the information to the screen is, you are always only going to get a single blob but with different files, encoders and such like maybe you get a slightly different coloured blob. Presumably what happens is that the encoders average out or use some algorithum to determine what the colours of the pixels should be. Now suppose that the image is half black and half white, what does the encoder do? You only have 1 pixel so the choices are to make the pixel black, white or grey. Its worth noting that all of those choices are wrong and presumably it would depend on context as to whether black, white or grey were considered to be 'better'.

Not all screens are created equally though and there are many other factors other than simply the resolution which affect picture quality such as refresh rate, responce time, the colour palette, how deep the blacks are etc, whether there is any light bleeding into the edges of the screen etc.

You might have a really nice deep glossy black blob with your 1 pixel, you might also be able to change between a black, white or grey pixel very quickly (responce time in ms).

But the long and the short of it is that you only have as many pixels as you have on your screen and moar pixels is moar betterer but that is determined by the screen, not the file.

[Astarlessnightsky]

Yes, once the resolution of the screen is matched source material of a higher resolution won't make a difference.

Unless you zoom into the picture. Here its best to have a source material of really high resolution.

[slatyb]

Makes perfect sense to me.