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SvennoJ on 16 June 2016
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I see a massive difference in store, but that's the real scam. All the 1080p tvs display crappy live tv feed, which is about 7-8 mbps mpeg2 720p/1080i, while the 4K tvs display specially made high bit rate content to make them look as good as possible.

I know my 1080p projector can still look a lot better while displaying 4K content. A downscaling 4K UHD player will tie me over better (until 4k projectors get affordable) than settling for a smaller tv. Higher bandwidth, less compression artifacts and downscaling to 4:4:4 full RGB will give most of the benefit of 4K blu-ray.

Blu-ray is 1920x1080 grayscale, 960x540 color info, 220 shades per color (15-235 range). 4K blu-ray is 3840x2160 grayscale, 1920x1080 color info, upto 1024 shades per color, although it's on a logarithmic scale to define brighter whites and for now encoded in DCI P3: The main difference between DCI P3 and Rec.709 (the current standard color space) is that DCI P3 can display many more tones of green, though there is also a slight expansion to the number of red tones. The number of blue tones was unchanged.
Hence if you properly downscale to full RGB 1920x1080 256 shades per color, no chroma subsampling, you already have a big upgrade over standard blu-ray and if your 1080p tv supports full RGB without chroma subsampling you should see a difference already.

So yeah, if you watch the same 4K content downscaled onto a high quality 1080p tv, you're less likely to notice a difference until you get really close. Ofcourse in the store you might even get high bitrate 4:4:4 demo 4K content which you'll never get at home. Chroma subsampling is still applied to all video streamed or on disc. Not that you'll notice the difference sitting on the couch :)

4K tvs aren't the scam, bit starved HD streams are the real scam. At least there is HDR to make a difference, however there's not a lot of content yet in HDR and the specs are still subject to change. 12 bit Rec.2020 is the ultimate goal, covering aout 70% of human color vision. For now HDR tvs are aiming to cover 90% of DCI P3 which covers about 50% of human color vision. (The current rec.709 standard only covers 35%)

It's a weird situation with color coverage, like selling tvs with a few more pixels each year until 4K standard is reached.