The football is a comet. A smudged, pixelated ghost of a thing arcing across a field that isn’t grass so much as a vibrating green texture that refuses to resolve. You lean forward, squinting. The players, celebrated athletes rendered in what the box promised was ‘lifelike clarity,’ are just indistinct jerseys melting into one another whenever the camera pans. This isn’t what you paid for. That massive, wafer-thin screen mounted on your wall, which displayed impossibly crisp images of slow-motion hummingbirds in the store, is currently delivering a picture that feels like a memory from 15 years ago, streamed over a dial-up connection.
You run through the checklist of modern anxieties. Is it the Wi-Fi? Did someone start microwaving something? You check your internet speed for the fifth time: a healthy 245 Mbps. You even, and I’m admitting this with some shame, once spent $75 on a gold-plated, braided-nylon HDMI 2.1 cable because a forum post promised it would “unlock the signal.” It did not. It did absolutely nothing, because the problem isn’t the pipe. The problem is the water.
The Real Deception
We’ve been sold a story about pixels. A simple, seductive math: more is better. HD was good, so 4K, with four times the
