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DM235 said:
Those are Bluray players that play standard 1080p Bluray discs and upscale them to 4K. True 4K UHD Bluray players are just starting to be released. The Samsung UBD-K8500 is $400, while Panasonic is expected to release an $800 model soon. |
Indeed. Yet the costs this time is not in the actual drive. According to avs forum a standard 6x CAV BD-ROM player should be able to play 4K UHD discs with minor modifications. The price is in the hardware needed to decode the 128 mbps H.265 stream with high bandwidth Dolby Atmos support. A 4k streaming / upscaling player doesn't need as much power as 4K streaming has much lower requirements.
4K blu-ray comes in 3 flavors: 50GB at 82Mbps, 66GB at 108Mbps, and 100GB at 128Mbps.
The 50GB discs are simply 2 layer blu-ray discs, 66GB a 2 layer slightly higher density disc (33GB layers instead of 25GB) and 100GB discs are the 3 layer variants. It's not completely new tech this time, more like HD-DVD compared to DVD and even a lot less of an upgrade than that.
A 6x CAV lu-ray disc player (the one in ps4) has a max throughput of about 90 to 216mps on blu-ray (depending on where the data is on the disc). The higher dot pich increases that to just under 128mbps for the inner track. A slightly faster drive than 6x speed should do. (119mbps on the innermost track if it all scales the way I think it does)
It's not new tech requiring new drive technology and new lasers diodes. Hence Samsung can start with a $400 player, while blu-ray started at $1200 at the time it ended up in the ps3! $400 is pretty cheap for a first player. Plus 4 layer drives have been out for years (BDXL)
The ps4 should be capable enough to handle the decoding and video processing, just some minor drive modifications needed and HDMI 2.0 port with HDCP 2.2 copy protection.
