Buyer beware: most TV models have multiple “submodels” that are sold at different tiers. The Sony 999WOW that graced magazine covers for its state of the art everything has country cousins with lesser and lesser specs, sold further and further down the chain under the same main model number. It’s the 999WOW-R that you want (and will pay $3k for); Sam’s Club and Costco have the -C for $1500 less and one-third the features.
Check the manufacturer site carefully for all such submodels and note the numbering/model number differences. Then shop accordingly, by the small print on the shelf tag and not the foot-high numbers on the come-on sign.
One thing that helps future proof your tv is separate box that has all the hdmi and other connectors. My TV has this and it plugs using a proprietary connector to the tv. This means if future blue ray players require a hdmi 3 connector or some such you can just buy the box rather than a whole new tv.
So explain what this does, in small words. Looks like an entirely secondary HDMI/4K switching box, which no one with adequately-chosen TV and AV receiver would need. (I use a Denon receiver to do all HDMI switching; will upgrade it whenever we move to 4K. I like having only one cable to the TV for simplicity.)
4k TV refers to the fact that it has 4k lines of resolution. The resolution is 4096 x 2160 or a about 8 1/2 million pixels. So the screen alone holds 135 times more pixels than your Commodore 64 had in total memory bytes.
The color depth of TVs varies, but they all have a lot more than 8 bits per pixel these days.
If you mapped the entire memory of your commodore 64 to your 4k TV screen, it would only take up a tiny fraction of the image.
By the way, my personal luck with 4k TVs has been horrible. I tried one and it died a week after I bought it. I returned it and bought a different brand but that one displayed poorly and kept crashing so I ended up bringing it back as well.
Like 3D, it’s very much a wait-for-it tech. I think it will be universal in four or five years, but there’s not much compelling reason to upgrade now unless you’re right at the replacement point for an older setup. Put another way, if you’re looking for a new system now, it’s worth buying into good 4K stuff, but if you’ve got a decent HD setup, just live with it a few more years.
I read somewhere that 4K isn’t yet standardized, so that if you buy a Samsung 4K TV and an LG 4K player, you can’t view content from the player on the TV. Is that true?
Basically it separates all the HDMI and other ports from the TV. The industry is constantly come out with new security standards as well as increasing HDMI thru-put. So right now if you buy a TV that has HDCP 2.2 standards you can connect devices that are compatible with that standard, HDCP is a security standard developed to ensure that your blue ray, or other device, is plugged into a TV instead of a Hard drive where you are illegally copying the movie.
But lets say that next year they release HDCP 2.3 and they require all new Blue ray players and TVs to be HDCP 2.3 compatible. You have to buy a new TV unless you have this separate device in which case you just buy the new device and keep the old TV.
Or for a more consumer friendly scenario you have a 4k TV and it has HDMI 1.4 ports which allows for 4096×2160p/30 Hz. However your TV is capable of 60 Hz which requires an HDMI 2.0 port. You can’t physically rip the old 1.4 ports out of your TV and replace them with 2.0 ports so you have to buy a new TV or if you have this system you just have to replace your ports box.
Or going back to the OP we see that a TV might only have one 4k port on board with all the ports on a separate box you could upgrade your TV later so you can have as many 4k ports as you want.
That’s what I did. I had an old (like from 2001 or something like that) big-ass Sony rear projection TV and an old Onkyo A/V receiver that were starting to give me fits so I just chucked them and got a Vizio 4K Ultra HD 55" TV and a new Onkyo A/V receiver with 6 HDMI inputs.
The switch is only as good as its slowest link in the chain. Yes an HDMI switch box may solve the OPs problem of only having a single 4k capable port it can’t upgrade that port from 1.4 to 2.0. Also I agree that it is deceptive for a tv to advertise 4 HDMI ports when only 1 is of the right quality. An HDMI switch also requires getting up and pushing a button on the switch instead of using your remote to change native inputs.
That still won’t make the TV actually support whatever newfangled video thing comes out, though.
However, a single 4K-ready input port is probably not that big a deal. HDMI switches aren’t hard to make or expensive. Of course, then you have either one more damn remote or a universal remote, but I figure if you’re going multiple 4K devices, you’re probably already shelling out a lot for your entertainment system and would want a nice programmable remote anyway.
