Disk Usage

[epiic]

I'm running low on space on a system with ~3TB of storage across two drives. I set this up last year, with the expectation it would last at least a few years. (previous setup had about 1TB) I now feel I should be looking into 4TB drives. The biggest offender is photos/videos eating 2TB just themselves.

By Year:

2008
21G

2009
140G

Comments

[epiic]

People do have limits, but we're still a ways away from them.

I saw an 8k demo from Sony at SIGGRAPH a few years ago - around 16x as much detail as 1080p. And it's very obviously better. Though I also felt it was almost unrealistically sharp - like real life doesn't feel that detailed.

But 8k is a ways off - 4k projectors (~4x HD resolution) are $26k & up. 4k screens are a few thousand dollars, and there's barely any publicly available content. But I expect that to change in < 5 years.

8k is probably more than necessary for most people, and I haven't really been able to compare 8k to 4k myself, so I'm not sure how much of a difference it would make to me. But 4k is also clearly better than HD. And HD is vastly better than SD (Though really only about 6x better). I'm so spoiled by 1080p that I don't like seeing DVDs anymore - they just seem so blurry and artifact-filled. And most internet video sucks because "HD" is usually over compressed and 720p at best.

So, yes, my eyes aren't getting any better. Digital (& analog) content was just so vastly below my limits of perception and now is just barely catching up. So I'm happy. I want my 8k video that is ~400x more detailed than the VCDs of 15 years ago.

As for audio, we've had 96kHz 32-bit high quality audio for awhile. And I can tell a 320kbps encode from 128kbps, but only when comparing directly. (I'm sure others could without direct comparison, but my hearing isn't quite that good.) But I think it's understood that's about as good as it can get, and no one is pushing much there.

[yoshikochan]

Hm, but that image quality where things look surreal and you can see people's pores isn't really an improvement, if you ask me. (I noticed that on our HD TV, it took a while to get used to.) I do notice a difference if I'm watching on a big enough screen, but certainly not on my little laptop.

I can't hear the difference really in audio files, unless the recording is bad, or I'm turning the volume up quite a bit. Mostly the recording quality makes the biggest difference (so we'll never have good quality Beatles, unless audio enhancement becomes magical), so unless your recording is really incredible, it doesn't matter how powerfully you encode the file.

[epiic]

Isn't it _not_ seeing the details that is the surreal version? Since that's stuff that you _can_ see in reality but is lost in film grain or low resolution.
It's just that being used to detail being lost in low resolution or film grain you're not expecting to see it in video.

[envirion]

But isn't surreal vision ideal?
Like that jelly on lens for halo effect old-school hollywood thing?
Or instagram filters. :p

[epiic]

Sometimes. And so now you have the option - instagramify it if you want, or let it be super sharp if you don't.

Admittedly some stuff is nicer more lo-fi. And for a lot of stuff image quality doesn't matter at all. But, for say, "Pacific Rim", you want all that detail. Of the robots anyway. For "Clerks", I'm not really missing out without extra details.