Cost of UHD Blu Ray - Is MS subsidizing Xbone S, or is Sony just milking it?

[Pemalite]

Guitarguy said:

Pemalite said:

I haven't looked into a complete breakdown of the PS4 Slim/Pro drives themselves yet, so I can't really answer that question.

However... When the Xbox One and Playstation 4 first launched, the Blu-Ray 4k standard hadn't been fully ratified.
The Original Xbox One and Playstation 4 could actually output 4k already, thanks to the inclusion of HDMI 1.4. (Although limited to 30hz.)

The issue with those consoles actually came down to the drives themselves, from there everything gets pretty messy.

When you say 30hz, does that equate to 30 frames per second? If so then outputting 4K video content(via streaming) on PS4/Xbox One shouldn't be a problem considering movies/film/shows run at 24 frames per second? I know Sony are patching the PS4 to run HDR but I wonder why they dont patch the original PS4 to run 4K video.

Basically, yes.

With that said, nVidia actually managed to do full 4k, 60hz on HDMI 1.4 (Kepler) by using compression (merging of the 4 colour channels in the YCbCr space.)
The downside to that approach is that whilst quality overall is still pretty good for moving images, text quality actually took a fairly chunky hit.

There is no technical reason why the "vanilla" Playstation 4 and Xbox One cannot do 4k video other than the video engines in both consoles chips don't have full decoding support, but the work around for that is done in the GPU's shaders. - But that could becomes messy with the Xbox One's snap feature.