Guitarguy on 19 September 2016
| SvennoJ said: 4K blu-ray looks to be the next Laserdisc. Older movies, 35mm and early digital movies before a few years ago won't see much benefit from 4K. A well preserved 35mm print resolves to about 3K, yet most of the gains will be in cleaner film grain. Only since a few years have movies been shot with 4k cameras and most are still mastered in 2K. It will be a hard sell to double dip for minor color enhancements. I hope they make good transfers of the few dozen 70mm movies, those will be worth watching in 4K. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_70_mm_films 4K blu-ray is a much smaller jump than blu-ray was compared to dvd. Smaller resolution increase, much smaller bandwidth and disk size increase (both have about a twice efficient compression algorithm), plus blu-ray already has lossless sound and dolby atmos / dts:x, no sound benefits on 4K blu-ray. 4K blu-ray does add HDR, which was never part of cinema and is only really suited to modern movies shot digitally. Even there it won't be the same representation as watched in the cinema. The 10 bit wide color gamut and higher color resolution are still pretty noticeable, although not the same eye opener as blu-ray was next to DVD. I wonder what a good upscaling blu-ray player looks like on the same 4K tv compared to the 4K version of the movie. Reading 4K blu-ray reviews, differences are discussed like DF discusses them between XBox One and PS4 versions. Some more detail here, some better colors there. When I was switching back and forth between the dvd version and early hd-dvd version of Fear and loathing in Las Vegas on a HD ready CRT, the difference already was night and day. I also wonder what an upscaled blu-ray looks like next to 4K streaming. Blu-ray still has the higher bandwidth after taking the higher compression factor of 4K streaming into account. Logic dictates that it should hold up better in action scenes. I can't stream 4K anyway with the old cable internet infrastructure here. I had plenty laserdiscs, and I'll get 4K blu-ray in the end. However I doubt I'll be double dipping this time. I'm in no hurry to upgrade this time. I'll let HDR settle first and wait to see if laser projectors come down in price. It's different this time. DVD blown up to 92" had glaring flaws, Soft picture and compression artifacts everywhere. Blu-ray still looks great at that size. |
This part puzzles me. Why do studios film in 4K, only to finish on a 2k/1080P digital intermediate, then to upscale to 4k for the UHD release? Would it not be better to finish on a 4k intermediate and then downscale to 1080P for regular blu ray?
