4K vs HD

OXO camera

Recording at 1080HD/30fps will be a high enough quality for any presentation. Below is a chart that shows a viewer can only begin to see the benefits of 4K when they are less than 10 feet away from a 85” screen.

Optical devices like the human eye are measured in terms of their resolving power which is the distance at which the eye can resolve or distinguish fine details that are close together. Imagine having a conversation with a bearded man who is standing right in front of you. Your eyes can distinguish the individual hairs in his beard. If you saw him across the street, you could see he has a beard, but the resolving power of your eyes isn’t great enough to distinguish individual hairs.

The fine details on a 4K TV are produced by the 8,294,400 pixels that are packed together on the screen. At certain distances, details will blend together and the picture will appear softer because your eyes cannot resolve all the detail in the closely spaced pixels. If you sit further away, the picture on a 4K TV will look just like the picture on a 1080p TV because all the added detail in the 4K picture can’t be seen. The optimal distances for viewing a 4K picture are closer than many people sit when they watch TV.

The main reason for filming in 4K is that the added resolution will be of benefit if cropping of the video (or stills extracted from the video) is used as there will be more pixels remaining. However interpolation software is often a better way of dealing with this both for still images and videos.