Ok, this has been mentioned on and off in various threads throughout Qt3 over the last decade or so, and it always seems so darn far away from actually happening.
Obviously 4K movies have been available for a while now. But TV clearly isn’t there yet. But they won’t start filming most things on TV in 4K until more and more people can actually receive and display that 4K content. The first 4K TVs went on sale in 2012, so maybe we’re reaching enough of a critical mass that it will start happening soon?
I think the big milestone is over-the-air broadcast adoption. ATSC 3.0 is rolling out slower than planned. @Editer mentioned that Seattle went live with 4K broadcasts. How is it Denny? Are the local news broadcasts filmed in 4K now that they’re broadcasting in 4k?
Apparently we’re supposed to get ATSC 3.0 broadcasts here in Kansas City sometime in 2021, but they said the same thing in 2019 and 2020, and it keeps getting delayed. I remember HDTVs were around for a few years, but the moment they made it so that all TV stations had to broadcast in HD, that’s when everyone switched over. Tennis matches were now suddenly filmed in HD and it made a huge difference. Shows like the Daily show were suddenly in HD that year too. For years, it was only Mark Cuban’s HD channels broadcasting HD content, but then suddenly when broadcast was made to switch over it was like a switch was thrown and everything was suddenly HD in a year. So I keep thinking that will suddenly happen with 4K too, but I think this year’s super bowl wasn’t even broadcast or filmed in 4K (but last year’s was).
So we’re maybe on the cusp?
I know Netflix and Amazon have been doing shows for a while now that are filmed in 4K right? I don’t have a 4K TV myself yet, so I can’t check how widespread that is.
Everything Netflix and Amazon do in-house is done in 4K, pretty sure. I think that’s true of most Hulu in-house production (though I didn’t realize they did 4K at all until recently because they won’t do better than 480p on PC, which is the only place I would voluntarily use Hulu due to ads) and definitely Disney+. HBO has only done 4K on a few of their simultaneous theatrical movies so far, but I bet it’s coming.
My problem is most of these services won’t do 4K on PC, or even 1080p in a lot of cases, because they’re worried about piracy. This does nothing to stop pirates, who have 4K downloads up usually by the next day. So I have to pirate their content to get the display resolution I deserve as a paying customer, on my chosen platform. Great business model, guys. Really wonderful. (I do have a 4K TV and I watch some stuff on it but I can’t watch it with my GF who’s in another state, and I can’t stream anything at 4K on my end because see above re: DRM even for Netflix, which is the only one of the above that will do 4K on PC.)
All of that said, 4K tends to matter more for the sort of content you get in big budget movies than for the sort of thing you see in a lot of TV. HDR is really the bigger impact and I think that’s still less common than 4K both in terms of displays and in terms of content filmed that way.
Speaking as a consumer, I have absolutely no idea what the point of 4K is supposed to be for anyone without an enormous display. Local bandwidth can barely handle HD half the time, so 4K TV would be a non-starter anyway.
If you want to push people onto 4K you’re going to have to do what was done to promote HD: stop selling TV’s that allow the previous standard to look good. It’s impossible to get a proper standard definition television anymore so one basically has to pay for HD media. I presume sooner or later the same will be done for 4K.
It looks noticeably better on my 27" monitor or my 43" TV (though I would argue the latter is absolutely enormous…it’s just about the smallest TV you can get that has things like 4K or (pseudo)HDR). But if you’re, e.g., watching people talk, you don’t really need that level of sharpness. I’ve generally been more impressed with both 4K and HDR in videogames than video content tbh.
I would argue we’ve been there for a couple years now. 4K sets are basically the only thing sold above 43" and below that it’s hard to say how much improvement you’d really get. Content-wise you’re seeing the major players in streaming putting all their content out in 4K.
Broadcast TV won’t switch over until they’re dragged kicking and screaming into 4K because HD is cheaper and most cable providers don’t have the bandwidth for it anyway, so why provide content that’s only going to be compressed down?
Full HD is great. It was a revelation for sports. Football (soccer) looked so much better. Tennis looked amazingly better. American Football looked so much better. But I figure maybe 4K will be the same way for sports. That it will look a lot better and it will be hard to go back once I’ve seen it in 4K.
Again, the problem is most Americans get their live TV through cable, and cable compresses the shit out of 1080p to the point it can look like crap at times. 4K is even going to be worse.
I’m no expert but in my opinion for any resolution you really only see it at it’s best on physical formats. Whether a BD or UHD I feel like I can always see a huge improvement over streaming. That said i feel like Netflix shows like Daredevil look great with HDR and 4k. The compression on dark scenes over cable or satellite almost always drives me bonkers. On Netflix, Hulu and Movies Anywhere it usually looks pretty good. For some reason I think Prime black levels look worse but it’s probably all in my head, heck all my opinions are probably just my imagination ;-)
I am getting kind of pissed that some movies aren’t coming out on physical media anymore. I was trying to buy The Empty Man on UHD or BD but it is not available. I did find I could get DVD used at Redbox but I’ll take streaming over that. So I just bought it on Amazon for Movies Anywhere. I think I read somewhere recently Warner Bros was trying to stop releasing disks which will really suck if it begins a trend.
Ugh. Yeah, no kidding. I’ve pretty much fully switched over to digital for games, books, and music but I just don’t feel like there’s any advantage and plenty of negatives to the way digital purchasing is being handled for movies and shows. I mean, I do the subscription streaming, of course, I’m not a Luddite, but…the value proposition is very different and the quality is less important for rental content.
The way things seem to be going I’m not convinced there will be mass market TVs under 43" much longer. If that “small”. Certainly not with the really cool features.
From what I’ve read, ATSC 3.0 is going to be switching over from MPEG-2/H.264 compression (it’s been both over time) to the more efficient H.265. That should help as H.265 is about 40% more efficient. Is it a panacea? No, as UHD is 4x the pixels as FHD. More bandwidth is definitely going to be required.
I don’t think there will ever be an evolution like SD to HD in the 2000s. 4K is nice on big TVs, but just isn’t that different. But the jump from fuzzy, cathode ray tube sets to HD was mind boggling. For quite a long time bars would have mix of old TVs and HDs showing the same event, which always brought home the massive difference.
It’s kinda fascinating to me how different forum populations adopt new tech.
On a couple of other (mostly sports) forums, folks were buying 4k TVs throughout 2017 and 2018. I finally took the plunge on a 56" 4k TV in March of 2019. And started building a big ol’ content library on a PC to stream to that TV that includes a lot of 4k shortly thereafter. And I’m kind of a tech dummy.
I have seen, since about mid-2020, a lot of big studios/media companies starting to revisit lots of legacy non-4k titles and use whatever AI stuff they use to do post-production upscaling to 4k. Sometimes it’s pretty iffy. Sometimes it looks noticeably better (Lawrence of Arabia jumps to mind.)
But yeah. Finally here? I’d say so. I think it’s already been here for 12-18 months or more from what I’ve seen of how studios are releasing stuff for home viewer adoption.
Honestly, other than getting a more consistent signal, I haven’t seen much difference. I did watch a Seahawks game and it looked amazing.
Problem is that I don’t watch much non-streaming TV anymore. SNL, the CW superhero stuff, and Brooklyn 99 are about all that I watch on broadcast nowadays.
This is almost 2 years old from Engadget, but Youtube’s algorithm pushed it at me today, and it was a very informative video. I didn’t know that most movies today are still filmed in 2K and then upscaled for 4K Blurays.
I think some (American) Football games are broadcast in 4K now. But I’m still not sure if there’s enough 4K content out there to be worth getting a 4K TV. After hearing how QD-OLED are better than regular OLED, I’m kind of glad I waited for technology to shake out. Maybe they will be super-affordable in the next couple of years.
