I just purchased my first 4k TV set. It’s an LG 49UJ6300, a 49" set. I take delivery on it on Tuesday as they were out of stock on them Friday. Yes, I went to Best Buy on Black Friday, needless to say, it was PACKED.
Anyhoo, I asked the salesman about 4k content and where to find it. He recommended a set of HDMI cables that “upscale” 1080 to 4k so I can get 4k on anything from my Comcast box that’s an HD signal.
I didn’t ask further about it, but when I got home, I did some googling and some places, like CNET, claim that these cables are a scam and that they are no better than regular HDMI cables. So…did I waste my money? The cables are made by a company called Rocketfish, they were $20 for an 8 foot long set.
He’s talking complete crap. HDMI cables carry signals, they do not upscale anything.
My set top box outputs 1080p only. My cable company does offer a 4K set top box for an additional monthly fee, but it is almost entirely sports content only in 4K.
If you have Netflix with a premium account, you can get a bunch of 4K content directly on your smart tv without any cables!
The claim about the cable, as already said, was a scam, but no big deal since it was $20 and you probably need an HDMI cable anyway.
But the additional point is that “upscaling” itself has a lot of woo associated with it. There was a lot of this going on when HD was new and HD content relatively scarce, with “upscaling” DVD players and such. Remember that your TV upscales everything anyway; it has to, otherwise anything less than its native resolution would be postage-stamped as a small image in the middle of the screen. Upscaling is like blowing up an image in Photoshop – it involves extrapolating information that isn’t actually there. It can be simple nearest-neighbor extrapolation or more sophisticated algorithms like bicubic resampling.
The questions with upscaling are (a) whether the external device is going to have a better algorithm than the one in the TV itself, and (b) whether you’ll be able to see the difference. The answer to (a) is often “no” (hence the woo, though a few expensive DVD players did have exceptionally good upscaling) – and the answer to (b) may be “no” either way. This is especially true when upscaling from HD to 4K, where on a typical home-size TV screen you wouldn’t see differences in upscaling quality anyway. 4K is really getting into the higher echelons of digital cinema quality. In fact, for a long time – and even now, to some degree – the minimum DCI standard for digital movie theaters was 2K, which is the same vertical resolution as 1080p and only slightly higher horizontal resolution.
You can get 4K on Netflix, but you need to be in the highest “UltraHD” tier which costs $14/month. I’d recommend making up the $3 difference to your parents if you don’t already have it. I mean, if you’re gonna get the 4K TV, you want to watch 4K stuff, right?
Now I don’t know which shows are available in 4k other than the Netflix originals. I don’t have 4k, so I can’t check easily. However, here’s a link that purports to list them.
As for upscaling, there’s some fancy stuff you can do for an excactly 2x upscale that might be better than usual. That said, it’s the TV that upscales, not the cables.
That said, you do need cables that can handle 4K, and having some that are guaranteed to work is nice. Though, in truth, most pre-4K cables will work just fine.
I guess the question still remains: if I have a 4k TV, and my provider is broadcasting in 1080, will my new TV then “upscale” it into 4k, or am I a slave to content (in addition to losing money over “fake” cables)?
I think we have 4K televisions because consumer electronics companies have become addicted to upgrades.
NTSC color came out in the mid 1950’s and CRT technology improved incrementally from round screen to rectangular, vacuum tube to transistor and shadow mask to trinitron. This took forty years or more. You bought a TV and kept it for 10 or 20 years.
In the last 20 years we have had flatscreen NTSC, followed quickly by HD flatscreen 720p, plasma, 1080i, 1080p, 3D TV, LED backlights and now 4K and the newest, 4k OLED. I know people who bought them all…
4K signal sources are few and far between and I don’t know if people on this board will live to see it on broadcast or cable as the default choice. Streaming yes, if you have really high speed internet - Netflix recommends 25mbps or better.
Mostly, this is the consumer electronics companies saying “We are going to get you to buy the latest and greatest even though you don’t understand it and can’t even utilize it to the fullest”. At least it is fairly affordable.
I guess I just don’t understand this. I mean, I do, from a sales perspective, but if shit doesn’t fly, it won’t keep selling, and I have not seen a reason to believe that 4k, like HD, isn’t coming. That said, you may be right about a false market for something that isn’t there yet…hence my question. I already bought the damn TV…can I enjoy it or not? I have ultra fast internet here (about 150Mb down) so that’s not going to be an issue. What can I watch on this gosh darn set when I bring it home in two days?
Absolutely enjoy it. If you have Netflix, look for 4K streams - you have the bandwidth. You can watch everything on it (but your old VHS tapes might look pretty crappy )
If the 4K shit doesn’t fly, 8K is just around the corner…:dubious:
If you want some really off the wall stuff: most “smart TVs” operate on kind of an “app” system, with an internal list of apps you can use to access content. Flip around on that list; there’s some oddball free 4K stuff in there, or at least there was last time I looked (though I don’t remember the app).
I bought a 4K OLED last year, upgrading from a 720p plasma. The answer for whether the upscaling is worth it is, it depends. As noted, you are introducing artifacts to match the screen resolution so it’s not the truest picture, but it’s still better than what I had. There is a definite clarity playing a streaming 4k source like Youtube or Netflix that isn’t in a 1080p native pic even if it’s at the limits of thehuman eye’s resolution. Here’s the kicker, though. Sitting on my couch, they both look freaking fantastic, especially in HDR or Dolby Vision. Even my Oppo 103 Darbee edition looks amazing. Even if you don’t have a lot of 4k content right now, having features like HDR and Dolby Vision make getting a 4k TV worthwhile, at least to me,as the content catches up. I went through the same thing 12 years ago when we switched to HD/Blu-ray from DVD, and the switch to 4k was worth it in my mind, especially with a decent surround system.
RE: Prime- American Gods in 4K was great!
One problem is that, until recently, there has been relatively little content shot or mastered in 4K. More is being produced every day, of course, and some movies shot on film are now being scanned at 4K or higher, but we have a window of a decade or more, as Hollywood transitioned from shooting 35mm film (which has resolution equivalent to 4K or more) to digital cameras, in which the source material started out at 2K resolution or worse. Infamously, portions of Star Wars Episode 1 were shot on HD CAM, which has a resolution of 1K (1440×1080)!
Many of the older movies shot on film that have been remastered to digital for DVD or Blu-ray were only scanned at 2K, which is still the resolution of most digital projectors in multiplexes. Only recently have the studios been scanning 35mm films at 4K or higher for home video.
So finding real 4K material is tricky, and takes some detective work. Read the labels on the package or dig into the description to find out the shooting or scanning resolution used. Shows shot or scanned at 4K or higher should tout that fact. Any that are silent on resolution may not be true 4K.
One class of films that is relatively reliably true 4K is IMAX documentaries. Not Hollywood films repurposed for IMAX theaters, but the 40-minute nature films from companies like Macgillivray Freeman Films and The Stephen Low Company. Those two have shot nearly all of their films on 15-perf 70mm film, which has a frame size 10 times larger than standard 35mm and resolution estimated to be equivalent to 12K. These titles have been the gold standard for video image quality since the days of laser disc, and remain so today. They are scanned at up to 11K, and true 4K versions were among the first content used to demo 4K TVs when they were first introduced.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a 4K set myself yet, so I can’t personally recommend any specific shows or sources, but look for films made for IMAX and giant-screen theaters, and you’ll probably find some material that will really show off your 4K TV.
Those aren’t the numbers I’m getting. Both the chart and the calculator you linked give me 6.3 feet as the distance where having something higher than 1080p is relevant, and 4.9 feet is where something better than QuadHD (1440p) is relevant.
The optimal range for that size of TV is apparently between 2.5 and 6.8 feet, so most of the optimal viewing range is within the range where you can tell the difference.