Home Video Asylum

TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Home Theater systems and more.

It depends on the size....

I never worried about Blu-Ray when we had a 55" HDTV. Standard DVDs upsampled looked great. Then, I got a 75" 4K TV and Oppo 203 for Christmas and we upgraded the NetFlix subscription to Blu-Ray and it's fantastic. Depending on how close you sit to the TV, I say that you should go at least 60" before you'll see a big difference in 4K.

Here's a quote from an article on 4K discs which sounds like it's all marketing at this point in time:

2K DIs: The dirty secret

One thing people don't realize about 4K as well is that most Hollywood content today is only 2K. When they edit a movie in Hollywood, they do so using a digital intermediate. On this DI, they do all the special effects, color correction, and final editing. In almost all cases they do it at 2K resolution because either they haven't upgraded their systems to support 4K, or it would be too expensive or time-consuming. Special effects, in particular, take much longer to do at 4K resolution so they almost never are done this way.

This means that even films that use 4K, 6K, or even 8K cameras often produce a finished product at 2K resolution. The image will be sharp and free of artifacts thanks to the higher resolution in the capture, but when you get it at the end everything is done at 2K resolution. 4K discs of these movies, including huge titles like Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and Wonder Woman, are only upscaling 2K images to 4K resolution on the disc.

The good news is that these movies also have HDR and WCG, which make more of an impact than the extra resolution does. The problem is that if you have a TV that is only 4K but can't show HDR and WCG correctly if at all, you aren't getting any benefit from your 4K TV. The image would be almost identical when looking at a 4K UHD disc, where a 2K DI is scaled, or a Blu-ray disc, where the TV does the scaling. There might be some small differences, but nothing to make the price difference or upgrade worth it.


-Rod


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