YouTube has gone nuts this week with announcing new features. First there was the revamped mobile page, then the new Leanback feature and now comes a video resolution that I highly doubt anyone can actually take advantage of in their home. The height of High Definition (HD) has been considered 1080P for some time now, but are you ready for 4K?
Pushing an astonishing 4,000 lines of resolution (4096 x 3072), 4K is optimized for screens that are a minimum of 25 feet wide. To give you an idea of where you have ever seen that much resolution, IMAX uses two 2K projectors to get the image you see on the screen.
So far there are only a few 4K videos on the site, and to change them over to that resolution you need to click on the resolution selector and click on "Original". However, even if you bump up the resolution that high, about the only difference you'll probably notice is that it slows down the loading a lot, but to your eye you probably won't see the difference as your monitor won't handle it. As YouTube said, "projectors that show videos in 4K are typically the size of a small refrigerator."
While it is commendable that YouTube wants the highest quality videos possible on the site, we really can't figure out who these videos are going to serve. Are they just planning ahead for the future, or was this actually a demand for this? Who knows, but they're here.
What say you? Do you see any point to this?
