Help Me Understand...

[guachi]

To quote GeoffD from another thread who summarized 4k about as succinctly as possible - "It's not just about more pixels. It's about better pixels."

Those pixels can be better because of a rescan or because you are relying on the studio to do the upscaling instead of your player, or because higher disk size and better compression means fewer artifacts, or because the studio added Atmos and the old blu-ray doesn't have it, or because grain is handled better (looking at you, Sony), or because of more/better colors or because of HDR.

I can understand reticence for upgrading if you already own a nice 1080 TV (I didn't I used my 30" PC monitor as I had sold my awesome Sony CRT) or a jillion blu-rays (I didn't as I bought my first UHD disc before my first 4k disc).

However, if you are a cinephile, and I assume anyone on this board is, I think getting the 4k release is worth the extra $5. You get a UHD AND blu-ray disc and potentially a UHD digital code. If need be you can buy discs now, wait until Black Friday and upgrade your player to a UHD player and get a UHD TV at your leisure. You now have a free blu-ray disc you can give away and a UHD disc and digital code you don't have to upgrade in the future.

But, really, it's the HDR that hooked me on 4k. I had the TV and player because if I were going to upgrade from TV broadcasts and DVDs I might as well go all the way to 4k, right? It's not like I could get the OLED TV I wanted in anything but 4k. Then I saw one of those NetFlix Marvel shows in Dolby Vision and ... WOW... did the HDR pop in some scenes. Later that week I went out and bought some 4k discs. If streaming looked that good, imagine how good a movie on disc would look?

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by guachi

To quote GeoffD from another thread who summarized 4k about as succinctly as possible - "It's not just about more pixels. It's about better pixels."

To be fair that's some Dolby marketing spiel right there, but it really does sum up what UHD's main benefits are. If we get more pixels, great, but I'll settle for better ones as they still provide what I perceive to be clear improvements over the 1080p Blu-ray counterparts...mostly.