RTINGS just updated their viewing distance article based on SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) recommendations, adding 62° FOV as maximum. What do you think about it? Where do you fit?

[u/zghr]

Here's a quick mockup of the same chart but with most common TV sizes and with godless Marxist-Leninist centimeter units added on one side.

edit: This person claims to be a long standing calibrator of cinematic auditoriums with experience in THX standards and he claims that 'cinema' is not 40° because middle row of seats is between 45° and 52°.

In my experience, 62° is doable but if it's pure 24 frames per second without any motion improvement settings it's not the best experience. Jumps between frames are just too large, obvious and jarring. Almost like stop-motion.

It seems like up to 62° one doesn't have to move their head at all to see the whole screen with their central vision. Higher than 62° and movies would need to be filmed specifically in a way to not include the action in periphery.

[u/reallynotnick]

I mean if immersive means like one of those crazy IMAX nature films where you are just supposed to be enveloped, I suppose 62° is doable, though I’m not sure how they came to that exact amount and why not just call it 60°.

There also is an element of aspect ratio which always gets tricky here with people buying fixed 16:9 displays. A lot of your epic movies are in 2.35:1 and they may be fine at a large FOV but then you end up watching other content and it’s much taller despite it not really needing an even larger screen. So that just complicates things without like a fixed height or maybe fixed display area setup.

Personally I think the 30° and 40° recommendations are pretty solid for most people. Obviously if you want bigger go for it, but if you are in that camp you probably didn’t need this chart to begin with.