The TV Dilemma
At a young age, if you are between thirty and forty you are probably, having a blast now with TV sizes. Though we never complained, about our old 14” CRT or 20” (if you were lucky) TVs, and they were actually pretty standard.
We all had a rich friend with one of those giant TVs with the speakers underneath and we couldn’t wait to visit him or her to rock those huge pixels with our consoles.
But, for the rest of the mortals, 20” was sufficient.
When LCD screens became more popular is when the size war begun. But bigger was not always better. TV stations were not ready for HD and most of the signals looked stretched when watched on a wide screen TV.
Same thing with games, at that time PS2 and Wii were mostly running the show and while some developers took the initiative of making their games in 16:9 most out there would stick to their regular ratio and the games would look stretched.
Besides, light gun games stopped working due to the lag introduced by the new screen technology.
Everything got way better with HDMI and Full HD (1080p). TV stations were embracing the new aspect ratio of TVs and with this bump in resolution bigger screen sized came along. Sizes of 42” became standard and was it a blast! More than double the size of what we were used to as kids. It almost felt like leaving the house to watch a movie at the theatre was a waste of time and money.
The new console generation, at the time, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 totally jump on board with Full HD. Most of us still remember the time we saw games like Gears of War for the first time on a big screen TV.
Moving forward, we all agree that Full HD is sufficient for quality and resolution, and beyond this point we are not sure if it is the content that pushes the resolution or resolution capabilities that push content makers to increase their numbers. While 4K is great, it’s definitely not needed, let alone 8K.
As for TV sizes, 55” has become the new standard and TV’s are very accessible, and they even put smart capabilities to them turning the device into small computers. Consoles are literally packed computers now and a huge community has grown around them, making it as mainstream as ever.
That said, as cheap as they can make TV’s they will become inconveniently big at a point, and we believe the size limits are starting to arise. As much as we want a huge TV, there will be some size limitations for placing them at home and even transportation, with bigger sizes impossible to fit on elevators, etc.
In Europe, where countries are not that big as in the US, houses are small and the vast majority of people live in small to medium apartments where an 80” tv will be a hustle, even if you can afford it.
The Cellphone Dilemma
So, how do we bring this same issue with cell phones. In the early eighties when cellphones appeared they were big. And that was not cool. Then became smaller and smaller, to the point where they were making the phones clamshell shaped and they were small.
Somewhere around 2009, they put LCD screens to phones, and the trend went the other way. They got bigger with time and so powerful that they ended up replacing tablets at some point.
People would play games on them and shacked the handheld console market for the first time, taking the PSVita to fail street.
Furthermore, from these big screen phones users can play classic games that were played a long time ago. For example, there are real money casinos for UK players, and other nationalities, that you can access any time of the day. Being able to play your favourite casino games among the good variety that the providers offer, win jackpots and pay with your preferred payment method is simply just convenient. All from your phone.
They got so big that companies packed small phone-like devices into watches and called them smart watches so you can interact with your phone without pulling it out of your bulky pants.
Conclusion
Experts think we’ve been at the edge of reaching the limit of processing speed. Data jumping is a thing that affects all technological devices and limit them in a way.
We really don’t know what the next resolution bump will arrive for TV’s. We know 8K is around the corner, but we don’t know if we need it.
Phones can’t get any bigger or we will have to walk around with a backpack all day just to keep up with our social networking.
The best way to deal with this is to use our current devices as much as possible and just replace them when they fail. While we wait and decide if we want to jump on board of the next trend.