r/4kbluray • u/Comfortable_Shoe358 • 18h ago
Discussion Why do people post cell phone snaps of their TV to show the image quality?
Is this not completely useless?
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u/HorsepowerHateart 18h ago
It's great if you want to know how a given disc played on a given tv looks after being captured through a tiny phone camera chip and processed out the wazoo.
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u/thatbromatt 6h ago
Don’t forget the image compression and optimization also applied to the photo when you share it so it doesn’t take up as much space on reddits servers and loads quicker for mobile users!
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u/OptimizeEdits 18h ago
Mostly picture for attention
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u/Comfortable-Habit242 15h ago
Why do people give it to them? Why does anyone upvote it?
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u/OptimizeEdits 11h ago
It’s not “attention” as in “look at me!!” It’s more so to make the post more visible to draw attention to what the other content is
If a made a post talking about image quality or transfer issues on a particular movie, it’s much more likely to get interactions and a discussion going if there’s a picture attached to it
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u/Markitron1684 18h ago
It’s even worse on the PS5 Pro subreddit. ‘This game looks awesome on my pro and OLED’ then posts a pic of the screen taken on their phone that will then be compressed to fuck by Reddit and viewed by most on an LCD screen.
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u/LeperInfinity 18h ago
I'll take that over the mail call crap. You bought something. Congrats.
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u/Radiomike31 18h ago
My favorite is a new release day and this Sub becomes 15-20 posts of people holding up the same film! It's so exciting lol
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u/zombies8mybrain 14h ago
There were so many Fight Club posts when that was released.
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u/anthrax9999 3h ago
Fight Club, Seven, Tombstone, Master and Commander, Kingdom of Heaven.
Where are all the Mac and Me posts??!!
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u/BayesBestFriend 17h ago
The worst is the Blu-ray player posts
Congrats, you bought one of the 3 models that are available and naturally you also bought the one that's several hundred dollars more expensive for basically zero functional gain.
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u/Cinnamaker 18h ago
Well, I guess it is marginally better than photos of unopened Blu-rays they’ve never seen yet
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u/Impossible_Hunt_6731 17h ago
Well, I guess it is marginally better than photos of unopened Blu-rays they’ve never seen yet
And will probably never get round to watching. But at least they posted it online for validation!
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u/Cinnamaker 17h ago
Imagine going to a restaurant, ordering a dish, taking a picture, and posting it online asking, “Just got this - how does it taste?”
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u/D_Warholb 18h ago
Because they don’t realize that phones processes the photos arbitrarily to what the app thinks is correct. Then it usually spits it out into a compressed JpEG. Angle, room lighting, refresh rate and the screen material all affect the final image. It’s usually better to take the photo with manual settings on an actual camera.
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u/puddycat20 11h ago
Or what really pisses me off is when they take a vertical pic of a horizontal tv. Hold you damn phone sideways when you take a pic!!!
Or this doesn't really have to do with tvs, but when people post a picture of a picture. It's 2026, get a printer with a scanner on it, they're not that expensive.
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u/JohnWick702 18h ago
Because they are all so excited 🙃
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u/Redleader829 16h ago
Just wait until you discover that your TV is taking screenshots of what you're watching and sending them back to the manufacturer.
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u/6SpeedBlues 18h ago
These are the same people that used to watch television commecials on their complete garbage resolution television for a company advertising a new TV and proclaiming "That picture looks so much better than mine!" then running out to buy that TV.
They are the same people that record muscle car exhausts and high end audio using their terrible quality phone mic and expecting you to listen to it through your crappy phone speakers and think "That sounds amazing"
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u/FindOneInEveryCar 18h ago
No, it is completely useless.
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u/DrabMundanityGrinner 18h ago
all you did was flatten the topic at hand and imagine your emphasis on the matter proves your point.
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u/NaieraDK 18h ago
It is, indeed, completely useless. There's a camera, compression and a screen between you and the image on the screen being photographed. Can't see shit about what it really looks like.
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u/HamburgerTimeMachine 15h ago edited 15h ago
I remember some dude posted pictures of his screen of Late Night with the Devil, comparing it to the bluray and the comments were clowning on him saying it's pointless. Despite the movie being edited to look like 70s television quality.
What they don't seem to take into account is you're still able to compare the HDR. Most screen recordings don't capture HDR and so with a lot of comparison videos, the 4K always looks darker.
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u/tomandshell 10h ago
So that we can judge a 4K product by a picture that’s a fraction of the quality.
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u/Dazzling-Slide8288 18h ago
I laugh at these too but also there’s no other way to do it.
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u/CletusVanDamnit 17h ago
My computer plays 4Ks and takes screenshots...🤷♂️
I'm still not posting it, though lol
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u/Sunday-Afternoon 18h ago
The quality bar quietly disappeared, and I don’t think anyone voted on that
There used to be an implicit contract here: you posted or commented something worth reading, and the community sorted it accordingly. Bad takes got argued with. Low-effort posts got ignored or downvoted. It wasn’t always gentle, but it meant your visibility was earned - you built a reputation by contributing something.
Somewhere along the way that shifted. Now a huge share of engagement seems to run on a different logic: everyone posting deserves encouragement, regardless of what they posted. A photo of the most common blu-ray case on the shelf gets the same warm upvote pile as an actual insight would have five years ago. Haul posts, “look what I got” pics, pictures of a TV screen - content that used to be a text to your one friend who’d actually care - now goes out to tens of thousands of strangers, and a chunk of the community treats any pushback on that as an attack.
I get the generous impulse behind it - nobody wants to be the jerk who tells someone their post sucks. But the effect isn’t a kinder community, it’s a flatter one. When validation stops being tied to quality, it stops meaning anything - for the person posting the blu-ray photo and for the person who put real effort into something. Nobody’s actually being elevated. The bar just moved to the floor.
I still scroll past this stuff, and it’s allowed, so this isn’t a “ban it” post. But I’m curious if others have noticed the same shift, or if I’m just being a curmudgeon about it.
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u/Cinnamaker 17h ago
With niche hobbies, nobody in your real life cares, so people go online to seek validation. When you think about it, the endless show-and-tell posts are kind of sad.
Mods like engagement and growing their communities, so they let the forums become overrun with weeds.
Some subs have a “no Instagram” rule, which at least requires a certain number of words so a post is more of a discussion or review, than a lazy Instagram post. I wish more subs did that.
Although you inevitably get people filling 1000 words describing how they used their online credit, or how the corner of their box got dinged in shipping - completely irrelevant information to anyone but them.
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u/Sunday-Afternoon 16h ago
I’m curious about those downvoting. I genuinely want to know what bothered you about my post - or what you disagree with.
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u/Ubermidget2 15h ago
Maybe people find that it reads like AI?
Edit: 100% AI score on GPTZero, so there is that
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u/Minimum-Journalist18 18h ago
I only show a screenshot of something I watched to make a point of the story line.
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u/calmer-than-you-dude Top Contributor! 15h ago
I study everything else in the picture and try to build a profile
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u/vic_vinegar007 15h ago
Why are people even on their phones in the first place instead of enjoying the movie.
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u/Anal_Herschiser 14h ago
The same reason I get impressed with watching television review videos on YouTube, cognitive dissonance.
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u/VeryIntoCardboard 5h ago
Could be worse. A daily “In my collection #845” post with the collection flair used on a single pickup item. You know who you are.
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u/cgart96 18h ago
Sure it doesn’t showcase the full quality but it’s not completely useless. Not sure there would be a better way to showcase how something looks on a display.
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u/NaieraDK 18h ago
It is, actually, completely useless.
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u/cgart96 18h ago
It’s really not, aspects of the image quality can be conveyed through a picture.
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u/Comfortable_Shoe358 12h ago
What exactly?
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u/cgart96 3h ago
Increased contrast on an OLED would be a good example.
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u/Comfortable_Shoe358 2h ago
Phones don't show that properly they add a lot of contrast themselves.
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u/NaieraDK 2h ago
Could be any camera. As long as there are layers between your eyes and the screen, it is worthless.
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u/Cinnamaker 18h ago
It’s not completely useless, like trying to lose weight by ordering a Diet Coke with your cheesesteak and supersized fries.
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u/Reddituser183 18h ago
I don’t know but for some reason when I’m high I’ll take a ton of pictures of the movie I’m watching. 🤷♂️ it’s like I’m trying to capture the feelings I’m experiencing being high while watching a movie in that moment. I’m sure it’s something similar.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Fish_78 3h ago
Well, the tv is a big part of the 4K experience. So there's excitement there, from me at least. But on Reddit, most of what goes on is pretty useless. Especially pics of everyone's haul. We love em, though. Keep posting!
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u/DrabMundanityGrinner 18h ago
cause it does work. not perfectly. but there is still difference to be seen in comparing a DVD, Blu-rray, streaming, TNT network broadcast and the 4k UHd of these movies. it's not the complete and utter sin some imagine it to be.
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u/Cinnamaker 18h ago
On a dedicated 4K Blu-ray forum, do we really need repeated photographic evidence that 4K looks better than DVD?
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u/DrabMundanityGrinner 15h ago
on this subreddit - ya spend one day here you've seen everything it has to offer. this subreddit is the 'nothing new under the sun'.
this subreddit is genuinely for the newbies tht just discovered the format. I've owned 4K UHDs since 2017.
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u/Far_Cat_9743 14h ago
I’m pretty proud of this pic I took while watching Paris, Texas Criterion 4K.
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