Just buy an OLED tv, boom..your regular blus will look 4K-ish already.

I was rather slow to adapt to 4k after going all in on both DVD and Blu Ray. I finally took the plunge with a 65" 4K TV and UHD player during Black Friday 2018. I told myself I would only buy my favorite films, ones that I knew I would watch multiple times; but I think I recently crossed the 600 UHD mark. For me, it's a hobby, and knowing this is likely the last physical media format, I'm just enjoying it. While 4K is nice, there's plenty of times I watch the video and think "I don't think I could tell the difference between this and the Blu Ray" and other times, there's truly reference level material that's never looked better. I read a lot of reviews and take most of them with a grain of salt. Yeah, there's a lot of botched transfers, but they're still better than anything else out there, even if they're not as good as they could be. As long as it's not a major issue, like misframing or swapping the left and right audio channels, I just give it a pass.

What really drew me in though was the audio, and even though some Blu Rays do have the Atmos tracks, they're a lot more prevalent on UHD. But the first time you watch a movie with the overhead speakers, you'll never want to go back. My last house had a bit of a makeshift theater area in the bonus room with a 5.1.2 system and the 65" TV. We just got a new house in December and I spent about two weeks on the construction but just finished the dedicated theater with a 120" screen, a 4K JVC projector, and 9.2.4 surround. Watching movies at home has never looked or sounded so good.

Step 1, get a house.

At the moment, I do have a 5.1 set up and some neighbours who have yet to take umbrage but I am pretty reasonable with volume level and when I play, sayyy, a flick like Mad Max Fury Road.

When I lived in an apartment, I just didn’t have a sub. You miss a lot without low frequencies, but still having surround sound adds a lot and you shouldn’t have any complaints if you’re listening at normal levels.

We're in a condo building (originally built as apartments) but it's concrete hollowcore construction. We're at the end of the building, so we have the sub in the living room at the furthers end of the unit. I've had it cranked with certain movies and the neighbors never complained but my wife said she was feeling it in her chest in the bedroom at the other end of our condo.

That's precisely the reason I still haven't "upgraded" to 4k yet. 90% of the availavle titles are modern CGI crap. The older 35mm films look outstanding, but very few of them have been fully restored. 70mm resorations would truly show 4k to all its technical advantage, but they're very lacking in the format!

I do think 4k has been too little, too late in terms of physical media releases. So, 1080p is the current sweet spot. 4k, if it had been released in 2005 at the time of Blurays, would have achieved critical mass by now. As it is, with the death of physical media, 4k will not realize its full potential which is on pre-1990 35mm and 65mm / 70mm transfers to the format. I watched 2001 in 4k and was blown away. I think it was transfered in 4k from 70mm elements, but I'm not sure.

An 8K scan of the 65mm negative.

I just watched Backdraft. The UHD doesn't jump off the screen the way I think many people might expect from 4k HDR, but what it does do is provide pretty much the most perfect presentation of the film one could imagine. All that fire and smoke rendered perfectly without a hint of compression. HDR that adds depth and nuance to the color, but doesn't go nuts cranking up the highlights. A nice fine layer of grain. This is exactly what I love about 4k.

This is why there is trepidation for upgrading to anything physical media-wise at this point.

If 4K came out in 2005 it would have achieved what Blu-ray has achieved up until this point.

If 4K came out in 1998, it would have achieved critical mass just as DVD did.

When 8K arrives on the scene (whether physical or not) will all of those coveted 4K releases be relegated to the next yard sale?

I respect the advancements in technology but it seems to have become more about chasing the optimal perfection at the end of the rainbow rather than just enjoying the movie, which if I remember correctly, was the original purpose. 4K & 8K HDTVs for streaming will soon become just as ubiquitous as 1080p is today simply because that will be the only HDTVs being manufactured.

No, at this point it's about chasing the money phantoms, not about a true and outstanding increase in display quality. 8k is going to arrive whether we want, need, or will use it to its fullest advantage in spite of itself, since there a "new product" in it. If 4k has been a niche, underutilitzed format, 8k will be ultra-niche, and truly never reach its fullest potential. And, of course there will be a mass of "8k" TVs sold, and people will still be watching awful, compressed 480i streamed hot garbage on them, but, hey, that'll be upconverted to 8k!

I didn't buy into that game with 4k, and, as I said, the available number of *good* titles in the UHD format is seriously lacking. A great 1080p presentation is a thing of beauty to behold. There are so many remaining films which could be upgraded and / or (re)-released in outstanding 1080p that I'm never even going to have *time* to appreciate 4k, let alone the marketing gimmick of 8k. Which 0.001% of content will benefit from.

And this is all coming from a pedant who appreciates high-quality presentations. Yet, I know that 8k is a fool's errand.

Goddamnit, why doesn't Sony sell Lawrence of Arabia separately?

I wouldn't be surprised if live sports events becomes the 4K, 8K, or higher resolution standard.

Yes and no. Technology has to evolve regardless of whether it's deemed useless or not. We'll be flushing toilets with an app on our phones instead of pressing a little chrome handle, if we aren't already.

When 16K and 32K evolve we'll probably be shooting and editing content at those resolutions as well which will completely sweep the current 4K into the gutters. Do we need it? No, but we will think that we need it. 35mm film transfers will peter-out with any additional benefit but new content, newscasts and sports will benefit.

With each new format we always need to purchase a larger screen to recognize the uptick in quality. Will 32K involve an entire 12 foot X 8 foot screen-covered wall in your house?

But, you're forgetting that 16k and 32k will take massive amounts of power consumption, and / or very large, efficient batteries to encode. Existing h.265 codecs are already power-hungry and slow to encode. h.266 is out now, and it's much slower and generates much more heat in its crunching to encode "more efficiently". Disk space requirements will increase dramatically as well. For all of these reasons, I think "beyond 4k" just isn't going to be a silver bullet, won't be a natural "capitalistic" trend. Unless we have massively more efficient, less expensive batteries. And non-Silicon based computing power (quantum computers) cheaply and ubiquitously avaiable at our fingertips. As alluded to above, perhaps the only possible "efficient" use of 8k will be in live events, like sports. Even then, you'll need gigabit level internet, and streaming downlinks of 100 - 200 mbps minimum to justify and deliver the added increase in resolution which 8k can provide. Lower bitrates? There's no advantage to 4k vs 8k, they'll look the same, as crappy 8k will be bested by good-quality 4k.

You're probably right and I'm certainly not a tech expert but on the other hand, encoding Blu-ray seemed incredibly overwhelming in 2006 when you had a Windows XP or iMac Duo Core with 4GB of RAM. The technology moved ahead and the impossible just became standard or even out-dated.

The current DCP (Digital Cinema Package) delivers 250 mbps on a 30-foot theatre screen but unless you happen to have 30 feet of blank wall space at home you probably don't really need 250 mbps even if technological progress allows for it.

We have become so used to leaps-and-bounds of progress that you have to wonder if sometime in the near-future consumer electronics will flatline due to power-limits, bandwidth or just resource shortages.

UHD (4k) allows a max bitrate of 128 mbps in the h.265 standard. That's h.265 on physical media. These media are a max of 100 GB capacity (triple-layer), and you can fit a two-hour film in 100 GB at an average bitrate of ~111 mbps.

For sake of comparison, the "raw" versions of current films shipped to theatres on hard drive routinely take 1TB or more of space. So, about a 1000 mbps average encoding rate.

The promise lay in multithreaded, efficient SMP processing. Encoding in 32 cores makes things "easier", much faster than encoding in one CPU core, as in the old days.

We're already seeing dire chip shortages, GPU scarcity and vastly increased cost, and that's been going on since pre-COVID times due to crypto mining (avaricious greed due to "pure" capitalism and money laundering as it sole intention). So, 8k, 16k, 32k will have these kinds of artificial scarcity to contend with, which wasn't around in 2005 at the launch of 1080 or even in 2012 at the launch of UHD.

So, it'll be an uphill battle, for sure at resolutions > 4k.

From a broader perspective we're at a point where quickly evolving consumer technology is going to become more ethically questionable. I think we are coming to a crossroads where advancements in consumer tech becomes less about consumer need and more about lofty corporate financial goals.

I notice a massive difference in almost all 4K discs from their Blu-ray counterparts. The only ones I have had a little trouble discerning a major difference were with animated movies like the DC animated superhero releases.

I put in my Gremlins 4K disc the other day and compared it to the Blu-ray and it was a seriously night and day difference. I don't know if equipment has anything to do with it, but this is on an 82" 4K Samsung TV, Xbox Series X as the player and running everything through a Denon 4K receiver.

It actually surprised me how huge the difference was. I have compared other movies and it has been the same experience, at least with live-action ones. Now I typically want to watch everything in 4K unless something just isn't available that way.

^ Gremlin BD was an old old master though, to be fair.

Yeah, exactly. One of the biggest benefits for the push toward 4K is that it's forcing studios to remaster movies that weren't treated all that great on Blu-ray the first time around.

When you compare the new 4K to the old Blu-ray, which never looked great in the first place, of course there's going to be a big difference. But would that still be true if Warner issued a new Blu-ray from the same master as the 4K? In the case of Gremlins, I tend to doubt you'd see much difference.

Perhaps the most frustrating example for me is Batman '89. The old Blu-ray is rather soft and flat with poor contrast, and has a tremendous amount of room for improvement. The 4K has much more detail and better contrast and is a big improvement in most respects, but it's also been given a hideous teal-and-orange color makeover that simply ruins the new master.

It's hard to say how much different equipment and combinations play a role in the perception of image quality. 4K was designed to look great on an 82" screen just as Blu-ray was designed to look amazing on a 46" screen or DVD for a 32" CRT-TV.

If you took your 4K disc down to your local theatre and projected it onto a 30 foot screen you'd probably be quite disappointed with the shortcomings of the format when compared to the proper theatrical DCP version. For the optimal result, keep each format within its own intended viewing specs.

That's been one of the biggest 'unintended' benefits of 4k, at least for me. The 4k marketing hype has forced studios / distributors to go back and correct, nay, produce proper 1080p (re)-masters of films that they didn't do correctly the first time in 1080p. We've been very blessed with some great 1080p releases lately, too many to count. But films like 2001, Gremlins, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), Blade Runner, Predator, and others have finally received, 15 years into the format, some justice at last in 1080p *because* of 4k remastered.

Unfortunately, the work of James Cameron is one notable exception. The Blu-ray releases of his films were very poor because they 'tealified' the color-timing, modifying it from the original theatrical look. This is a terribly-unfortunate trend that many older films have been "graced" with, in a completely misguided feeling by studios that "moderning" color timing to a 'moderrn' look (ie, ruining their original saturated, vibrant theatrical colors and skewing them toward teal, orange, and blue) will make them sell better. So, in this respect many Blu-rays look far worse aestically than even their DVD couterparts. We saw this done in a mass-scale with the original MATRIX, where the first film was ruined by switching it to the green color-scheme of the two newer films. The remastered Blu-ray and UHD corrects this "somewhat" but is still not accurate to the original 1999 theatrical presentation or the original 2000 DVD of the film.

2001 and Blade Runner were done well on Blu-ray. I'm pretty sure the UHDs for both use the same masters as the Blu-rays.

As silly as it sounds, buying my first house in 2020 and finally having the space to house a TV larger than 32".

Bought my first TV over 32" a few months later and almost immediately jumped into 4K.

Well at $24 for The Good, the Bad and The Ugly and $26 pre-order price for each of the other Dollars flicks, I ordered my first real batch of 4Ks despite still not having the set up to watch the actual 4k discs.

I will give this format one thing...it is really getting some studios to go and restore their older films and the results have been pretty much amazing. At the moment, I have only snagged 4ks that have the same remaster in the set as a blu-ray like this Man With No Name Trilogy and The Shining. I imagine, eventually, when I get set up the first I snag is Vertigo and The Wizard of Oz. I am gathering Gone With the Wind is on the way, too. Those older technicolor flicks are of more interest in this format then modern movies.