just visited the local showrooms and viewed the Sony and Samsung 4k TVs and they BLEW ME AWAY!
Ok, not really that much, but here is what I saw...
To start off, I'm used to a calibrated 60" Pioneer kuro plasma, in a smaller room so I am used to ALMOST seeing the pixels. Can definitely see jaggies on lower res programs, games, stuff I shoot, but that tells you visually what I am used to.

The 4Ks look noticably better up close and also back many feet. What I notice is less FUZZING going on in the tiny details like in the grand IMAX-like city scapes they showed, and smoother video flow. The fuzzing of tiny details is something I am used to in all HD in films and from my camera, and it is much less noticable on those 4K screens - as one would expect with 4 times the resolution.

Now, I am pretty sure the footage they shot was higher than 24fps because there was no film judder to be seen FROM the footage. The onboard motion corrections can NOT correct blurry 24p footage, just SMOOOTH it's motion to a comfortable blur. If it is blured, it is blured. These demos were not blurred. So, there is that. It's not cheating, it is higher frame rates, cleaned even more by the motion correction systems running at 240hz or whatever. They used company provided 4k Content Distribution boxes and the sales guys had no idea what it was spitting for frame rate. I could SEE it was more than 24p.
* Quick correction, it could very well be 24p, but the content was slow enough that there was no blur from the original material. Panning was very slow or the shots did not move.

Additionally, the demos they had up were both color OVER graded, and parts were HDR processed. Again, not cheating but showing off and dazzling people with the insane coloring. I've never seen such bright blue shadows deep in canyons, and know of no city where ALL the main metal bridges are bright super bright electric yellow and all the building colors cover the spectrum like a rainbow. It was like AVATAR with the saturation cranked to 100! Anyway, it did make it look cool, and with the smooth motion correction and grading, like it 4K looked more surrealistic than realistic, BUT the pixels were tiny, the colors fantastic, and detail amazing.

Next place was playing Avatard on theirs but I was unsure if it was mastered in 4K blu ray, Full 4K, or regular BluRay upscaled. Only seen avatard once so I don't really know what that looks like at home detail wise. on the 4K it was smooth and clear, and looked slightly better than blu-ray I am used to, no real jaggies I could see but Cameron's camera shots were ALL moving all the time and I could not see anything stopped long enough to look for jaggies. It all looked great. Not sure it was better than blur-ray and it probably was just a blu- ray upscaled.

In the end, I still think one needs to see it in person - up close and very far away to appreciate what the extra detail and large color space can do to expand the future of the visual arts.

"as one would expect with 4 times the resolution. "

4K is something like 4000x2000 = 8 Mpixels

Full HD is 1920x1080 = 2 Mpixels, approximately.

So 4K is 4 times the number of pixels and twice the resolution.

uh oh this will get messy. :D

Isn't 8mp equal to 4x the 2mp?
isn't it multiplied surface area that makes the number of pixels 4 times more than normal HD?
the resolution numbers 1920x1080 and 3840x2160 might be "doubled" or 2x, but geometrically it adds a whole other half, rigth? me no good in math.
maybe I use the term resolution incorrectly?

Avatar was shot on F950's, pretty ancient technology now, 1920x1080 24p, times 2 since it was 3D.

I think "resolution" comes from analog days when images were assessed on the number of lines that could be resolved in the horizontal and vertical directions. How thin can you make the lines and the spaces between them before the lines become a blur? So resolution is a linear, not area, metric.

If that is the case, then with absolutely sharp technology, with 1920 horizontal pixels you could resolve 960 black lines alternating with 960 white lines.

If your lens is poor quality, you might only be able to resolve fewer lines than the pixel count would suggest. So resolution and pixel count are not necessarily related.

Perhaps we need a new term.

farss said, "Screen size is not a factor, angle of view is."

Bob, yep. I was bouncing my reply off your comment about everyone sitting in the first 6 rows, hence angle of view was implied.

As to the comment about IF there was 4k in my local theater and the need to sit in the first 4 rows:

My local theaters have all been projecting nothing but 4k for a while now, and I will guarantee you that the experience, from the middle of the stadium seating where I normally reside, is a vast improvement over film in every instance......Although the occasional lack of a projectionist will create some problems....however, it is like watching the best print imaginable at all times, and the newer automated server systems always adjust the masking curtains for the correct size and aspect ratio of the feature as it comes on (which is not always the same as the trailers).

This alone is a reason to consider affordable 4k for most of us.

It is truly doubtful that there will be a broadcast or cable version of 4k that is remotely streamable any time soon, but I would also disagree that there is no current HD stream that looks good. My Direct TV HD into a very affordable 42 inch LCD screen looks quite good most of the time if I have the screen set up properly, and local broadcasts look equally good, if not better. The average cable feed does not look so great, but friends with good bandwidth internet get quite good looking Netflix HD feeds as well, so it is possible.

I think the mid-priced 4k cameras that have good ways to capture HD and/or capture 4k in formats that allow decent "downsampling" make enormous sense.....and if HD becomes the "new MP3 of video" I will be thrilled, frankly.

As has been stated here multiple times, the bottleneck in editing software and viewing therein is the whole deal, so we should all pay attention to this and help each other out.

This new video on the Z100 also discusses benefits of 4k.

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anyone here know if 3840x2160 is the official standard for 4K video?