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SvennoJ on 21 March 2016
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Here is a very interesting post from the blu-ray forum, proposing that 4K UHD playback could be possible in the existing ps4 via firmware updates.

http://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=11821882&postcount=8

1) There is no such thing as a UHD drive, it's a modern version 2 drive that complies with the 2010 BD-R whitepaper. So any modern BD-ROM drive can be a version 2 drive if it can read a BD-R disk and UHD requires 4X read speed. There is a quote on this forum stating that PCs will not need a special drive to support UHD Blu-ray. The PS4 documentation says it can read BD-ROM and BD-R while the XB1 says it has a BD-ROM drive. (The Sony 2010 Patent for a version 2 drive states that a version 1 drive could read a version 2 disk with firmware update but maybe not reliably; PS3 has a version 1 disk.)

2) We know that the PS4 has a custom HDMI port that can support up to 120 FPS and HDCP takes place in the Southbridge TEE. There is a 2013 quote from a Sony employee that the PS4 supports a HDMI 2 port. (Firmware update-able to HDMI 2)

3) HEVC requires 1.5 times the GPGPU that h.264 requires and both the XB1 and PS4 have dedicated blocks of GPGPU compute using Xtensa DPUs and Microsoft has announced the XB1 supports HEVC profile 10. They do not mention it will be used for UHD blu-ray but for Netflix UHD IPTV.

Yet he's going against what Sony said

Masayasu Ito, who leads hardware engineering/operation for Sony Interactive Entertainment/PlayStation, said last year that it's not possible without updated hardware.

Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi said in 2013 that the Xbox One would support 4K Blu-ray discs, but seeing as how that statement was made years ago and hasn't really been reiterated by anyone at MS since, I wouldn't put much stock into it.

Would be a strange change of pace when the XBox One gets 4k UHD blu-ray play back in an update while the ps4 is stuck to regular blu-ray.