[e-t172]

Originally Posted by Fullmetal Encoder

It should be possible then to come up with an objective way to gauge the relative benefit of moving from a smaller screen to a larger screen given that we know the screen sizes and resolutions. I'm thinking that a larger panel would negate the benefit of the higher resolution somewhat. Maybe taking the ratio of each panel's resolution to it's size in comparison would provide a better answer to XMonarchY's question.

The absolute limit of human visual acuity is 0.5 minute of arc, though 1 minute of arc seems more realistic especially with the lower background luminance in a home theater scenario. If you sit far enough from the screen that the pixel size if less than 1 minute of arc (which is a typical home theater best practice), you won't be able to see the difference between a box PSF and a gaussian PSF, because the distance between the centers of the pixels will be less than your visual acuity can resolve.

For this reason, this stuff only makes a difference if you're sitting very close to the screen (especially in 4K!). Basically, if you sit too close to a box PSF screen (e.g. LCD at native resolution), it will appear pixelated; if you sit too close to a gaussian (or near-gaussian) PSF screen (e.g. 1080p upscaled to 4K), it will appear blurry. The latter is preferable to the former.

Originally Posted by Shiandow

I'm not sure why you think a gaussian PSF is the ideal goal for an image upscaler. If that was the case then using a Gaussian kernel for upscaling would be ideal, but that tends to result in images which are quite blurry.

As far as I could find the article you linked didn't claim that Gaussian was best, just that it was better than a box filter.

True. Trying to determine the best PSF is akin to trying to determine the best upscaling filter, which often results in heated discussions There's no debate about box being the worst though. If I'm not mistaken it's mathematically equivalent to nearest neighbor upscaling.

Originally Posted by Fullmetal Encoder

And when I do, the 1:1 image looks superior to my eyes. That's what I'm trying to reconcile.

I'm not sure what you're doing, but if you want to compare 1:1 to upscaled in a meaningful way, you need to keep the image size the same. Which is impossible to do unless you have two similarly sized screens with different native resolutions. Or maybe you could try using one screen and moving back and forth to keep apparent size the same, but that doesn't sound very scientific!