What is HDR, anyway?

> A big problem is that it costs the TV, Film, and Photography industries billions of dollars (and a bajillion hours of work) to upgrade their infrastructure. For context, it took well over a decade for HDTV to reach critical mass.

This is also true for consumers. I don't own a single 4k or HDR display. I probably won't own an HDR display until my TV dies, and I probably won't own a 4k display until I replace my work screen, at which point I'll also replace one of my home screens so I can remote into it without scaling.

> I don't own a single 4k or HDR display

Don't feel like you have to. I bought a giant fancy TV with it, and even though it's impressive, it's kinda like ultra-hifi-audio. I don't miss it when I watch the same show on one of my older TVs.

If you ever do get it, I suggest doing for a TV that you watch with your full attention, and watching TV / movies in the dark. It's not very useful on a TV that you might turn on while doing housework; but very useful when you are actively watching TV with your full attention.

I don't either see a point of having 4K TV vs 1080p TV. To me is just marketing, I have at my house both a 4K and a 1080p and from a normal viewing distance (that is 3/4 meters) you don't see differences.

Also in my country (Italy) TV transmissions are 1080i at best, a lot are still 570i (PAL resolution). Streaming media can be 4K (if you have enough bandwidth to stream it at that resolution, which I don't have at my house). Sure, if you download pirated movies you find it at 4K, and if you have the bandwidth to afford it... sure.

But even there, sometimes is better a well done 1080p movie than an hyper compressed 4K one, since you see compression artifacts.

To me 1080p, and maybe even 720p, is enough for TV vision. Well, sometimes I miss the CRT TVs, they where low resolution but for example had a much better picture quality than most modern 4K LCD TV where black scenes are gray (I know there is OLED, but is too expensive and has other issues).