Vinther1991 said:
Mummelmann said:
100% what I'm thinking as well. There is no good reason for it not to support 4K discs, the total added cost would be more than neglectable, Sony are both co-owners of the format itself as well heavy on contacts and suppliers for parts and assembly on anything and everything blu-ray related. It sounds like the feeble excuses that were used last gen when Nintendo chose to region lock their consoles, they did because they did it, more or less, the reasoning behind was nonsense. Sony, a tech and hi-fi company with a long history of formats, film and movie distribution, always at the forefront of tech when it comes to visual and audiovisual technology, have left out the best version of their own format where they distribute their own films on their own platform. It makes no sense what so ever, even if the pool of potential consumers who would buy for 4K discs is small, which I'm not so sure that it is. Getting a kick-ass console with upscaled 4K gaming and proper 4K movies on disc could be just what the doctor ordered and it certainly wouldn't detract from the appeal of the Pro at any rate.
|
You are so right. There's no good reason for them not to include it, it would cost so little more, but add quite some value. There might not be a lot of 4K blu-rays at the moment, but it's nice to know that when you have bought a new machine, you have future-proofed yourself.
Even if the pool of potential consumers who would buy the pro for 4K blu-rays is only 10%, that's 10% costumers Sony potentially lose to Microsoft. That would be quite a loss. And what for? To gain 5 dollars more per console?
And sorry folks, I really don't get the mentality among people who defend this decision. When talking about games, it's all about 4K, 60FPS, high quality graphics, teraflops, anti-aliasing, HDR etc. All that seems to be so important. But when it comes to movies, then the image quality suddenly doesn't matter at all, and Netflix-streaming is suddenly good enough. What???
|
Games and movies are not the same business model at all, and the way they're treated by consumers is kind of obvious. In the 80s, VHS movies started out in the hundreds of dollars (!!) in the early days, then slowly trickled down to the $30-$40 range, with some specials going down to $14.99 or $19.99 once in a while. By the mid 90s, this had fallen to $9.99 to $19.99 for most films other than some new releases, which stayed very high (Rental price) for a while before finally dropping to normal prices. This is to say nothing of some films that simply wouldn't show up on VHS for a while. VHS was potato quality as well, and the vastly superior Laserdisc format (basically DVD quality from the early 1980s!) never truly took off, though it found a niche with the people that actually cared about quality.
By the time DVD came along, people were ready for a new higher quality replacement for VHS that also didn't break the bank. Adoption was fairly slow at first, because standalone players remained in the hundreds of dollars range until the PS2 came to be. The timing of that really seemed to help matters, and it was a cool novelty at the time. You could immediately tell a huge difference and the other choice was pretty terrible (DVD 720x480, VHS being basically equal to a blurry 240p). And so DVD took off and became huge/ubiquitous over time. By the time Bluray came out, I think it had several things working against it :
1- Bluray was really only affordable with the PS3, and even that was really damned expensive
2- Bluray films themselves were expensive and not widely available at first
3- A lot of people had only recently bought into DVD over the previous few years (early adopters late 90s-early 2000s, mass adoption early to mid 2000s), so they obviously weren't in a hurry to do it all again.
4- 1080P TVs weren't truly mass market devices at the time anyway. A good ~50" 1080P TV was in the $5000+ range in 2006. And looking at a Bluray on a 720P TV for the most part really wasn't nearly as amazing as the jump from VHS to DVD, so it remained a very high-end option for a long time.
Bluray adoption slowly increased, prices came down a bit on the movies, and a ton of the players themselves, but movie sales never really exploded, and in fact they peaked before the release of UHD anyway. So there was never a 'baton passing' moment. People have simply gotten used to streaming instead, for the most part. And for a lot of content, it doesn't matter, which makes things tough. I'm a big movie fan and quality buff, and 4K Blurays aren't something I'm likely to buy outside of a tiny handful of elite films. The regular stuff I'm just content with Netflixing or watching via Amazon Prime.
And at the end of the day, it's just too apples/oranges to compare movies to games. With a good game, you may spend 5-20 hours playing it for a single-player experience, and potentially hundreds or even thousands of hours on a multiplayer experience. Having better quality during that experience is great. With almost everybody, you spend 90-180 minutes watching a movie once, and then you may or may not rewatch it a couple of times during the next couple of decades if ever again.
I wish 4K or even 8K discs were the standard, widely available and cheap, and highly successful. It just isn't so, and isn't likely to be. We will eventually have streaming standards better than 4K discs (it will take a LONG time though), but I doubt that we ever see another physical movie format, and 4K Bluray will never even see the limited success that Bluray did (which in turn never saw the success that DVD hit!).
