So how big will a 4k film be file wise?
Will they fit on a blu-ray?
Excuse my ignorance, but we're still watching on a 32" CRT with a normal DVD player; not even Blu-Ray!
My GF watches Jeremy Kyle on my 55" top of the range Sony in SD and couldn't care less about picture quality. Drives me absolutely crazy!
So how big will a 4k film be file wise?Will they fit on a blu-ray?
Excuse my ignorance, but we're still watching on a 32" CRT with a normal DVD player; not even Blu-Ray!
Well this is the problem isn't it. The industry on the one hand wants us to move away from physical media to the point that your film collection is cloud based. Then on the other hand they want you to buy kit that would require 40GB files to be streamed...
I think compression technology has some way to go before most of us can have our cake and eat it as it were. Mind you, I remember quite a few mates rushing out and buying the latest 50" plasma's with surround sound only to sit there watching poor quality pirate films 🙄
Will they fit on a blu-ray?
Depends on how compressed the movie is and what sort of disc you're using. A typical feature length film with reasonable compression would be around 60GB. Standard 2 layer BluRay (the one used for most current films) holds 50GB so it wouldn't fit on that unless you compressed the movie to a greater extent than would be ideal. Triple and quad layer BluRay discs are available which hold 100GB and 128GB respectively although I think these are currently only used for data storage devices rather than consumer playback devices. But the technology exists to fit a 4k film on a disc so I'm sure with the right motivation it could be made into a consumer unit.
As for streaming, I'd quite happily wait for a film to download if it meant having it at 4K with minimal compression. I know eventually we'd be pushing for streaming but downloading could be a temporary stop gap. Given the choice I'll always pick a high quality download over a lower quality stream.
There is little point in a UHD screens under 60", the physical limitations of the nodes in our eyes cannot take in the detail. Under 60" yes the picture will looks pin sharp but you will not be able to see the detail. Go view the same material on an 80"+ screen and get the viewing distance correct and the picture comes alive, your find yourself looking all over the screen.
Is this like the whole super expensive hi-fi issue, where it was kinda pointless due to the quality at which most CDs were recorded at?
...although that may be a poor analogy now with the advent of streaming music etc.
So tempting! My AMP and my XB1 are both 4k supported. Still, lack the access to content as others have pointed out.
Is this like the whole super expensive hi-fi issue, where it was kinda pointless due to the quality at which most CDs were recorded at?
Not really.
I'm surprised anyone can tell a difference between an sd and HD signal on any HD capable TV as the TV will be up scaling the sd picture. If you've got a half decent HD capable TV it will have very good up scaling.
I have a 42" plasma as my main TV and the HD picture is superb, but only marginally better than an up scaled sd picture and no different if you compare a kids animated film upscaled DVD vs BR. The 4k telly I saw demo'd was easily noticeably better, especially close up, and I mean an order of magnitude better. I know nothing about eye nodes but it seems to me our eyes can easily tell the difference between 1080 and 4k on a 58" screen at least. I think our eyes can take whatever is to come after 4k. But 4k comes into its own when sitting close to large screens. The same principle as IMAX. Sit close to a chuffing big screen so it fills your field of vision. No point to it, so stop trying to justify it with logic. It's purely for the sheer hell and fun of it. Most people people are overbiked so why not be over-tv'd?
4k is great, and internet TV, and 3D and curved screens since I could buy a very cheap 40" LED TV the other day for peanuts because it had none of the above, it just supported good old HD (1080p for BluRay/AppleTV and 1080i for local TV) with enough HDMI ports for what I needed.
Unless there is a major shift to internet based TV content to support the broadcast of 4k content (and lets face it, most content is still via digital Ariel or satellite) then it will go the way of 3D.
Also, that resolution is pretty pointless on a big screen as your eyes would not be able to differentiate from a distance, however for close in tasks such as gaming it is great.
Anyway, the Japanese are working on 8k now......
@arnie
Was in Harrods last year and came across a £35k tv. But this comes from the store that also sells £5k furry toys. Stunning to see how the rich waste their money
Slight aside here. I am a big fan of Harrods, just bought a bed there quite a bit cheaper than identical one in Furniture Village. No doubt they have some high end stuff (they had beds over £50k !) but they have great knowledgeable staff, outstanding customer service and are they are very good on price. That TV could have been £40k somewhere else.
@wobbliscott
Most people people are overbiked so why not be over-tv'd?
F*** Yeah ! That made me smile. Also interesting your point about up close, with today's big TV's I find it's the ability to watch them from further away which I really like. We spend our money and make our choice. No doubt in my mind I'll get a 4K TV screen at some stage, just a question of when / at what price. Typical TV ownership cycle is 10 years and my last one is only 5 years old so it could be a while.
I'm surprised anyone can tell a difference between an sd and HD signal on any HD capable TV as the TV will be up scaling the sd picture. If you've got a half decent HD capable TV it will have very good up scaling.
I'm surprised that you're surprised. Not saying it's night and day, but SD and HD look quite different to me.
I saw a demo of the 150" panasonic 4K plasma a few years ago, they were sending it a cd's worth of data a second from hard drive players!
And once again, meh.
A good film in SD is still good, a shit film in 4k is still shit. All this obsessing over the medium of delivery is getting silly.
It's like wanting more and more megapixels on a digital camera, but forgetting about taking well composed photos of interesting things.
That's because he has a flash telly and doesn't know how to set it up. Turn the motion processing off and it will look 10x better
Interesting...
@grum HD has made today's big screen TV's "must have", I was a late adopter but I'd never go back now. 720/1080 is pretty similar for me but I can see 4k is the next step. I don't have to have it now but I will get it eventually, when a 4k TV costs what a 1080 one does today or possibly less. We are not obsessing over it just saying we can see a difference.
muppetWrangler - MemberAs for streaming, I'd quite happily wait for a film to download if it meant having it at 4K with minimal compression. I know eventually we'd be pushing for streaming but downloading could be a temporary stop gap. Given the choice I'll always pick a high quality download over a lower quality stream.
I just put 60Gb into a 'dowload time calcluator' online and unless i got my numbers completely wrong, it will take at least 45hrs to download over my (maximum) 3Mb connection that TalkTalk have furnished me with.
Even if we got the 6Mb that they reckon is potentially possible, it would still take 23hrs!
Hardly feasible for a quick decision of what film to watch on a Friday night!!
A good film in SD is still good, a shit film in 4k is still shit. All this obsessing over the medium of delivery is getting silly.
Who is obsessing? Nice telly was nice, and I probably will get one in 3-4 years when prices are reasonable.
It's like wanting more and more megapixels on a digital camera, but forgetting about taking well composed photos of interesting things.
There will still be interesting things, they will just look amaze-balls.
All this obsessing over the medium of delivery is getting silly.It's like wanting more and more megapixels on a digital camera, but forgetting about taking well composed photos of interesting things.
So true. And what's thos obsession with huge tvs? Anything much above 42: in an average sized living room is daft. Our 32" tv sits in the corner being relatively unobtrusive. Anthing much larger wold seriously impose on the whole room.
If you've got a half decent HD capable TV it will have very good up scaling.
I'm not sure you quite understand the concepts here. Upscaling makes fewer pixels into more pixels by spreading out the existing detail over more pixels. If something's been filmed in HD there will be more details to begin with, so you get more detail. The TV can't create detail when it upscales.
Anything much above 42: in an average sized living room is daft.
If we bought a new TV it'd be 46 or 50, instead of 40 now, and it wouldn't really be obtrusive because of where we have it - wall mounted, centre of large wall. A new TV however would be a lot thinner and closer to the wall so would probably even be less obtrusive.
Who doesn't have a cinema room these days? Do you not even watch Grand Designs?
So true. And what's thos obsession with huge tvs? Anything much above 42: in an average sized living room is daft. Our 32" tv sits in the corner being relatively unobtrusive. Anthing much larger wold seriously impose on the whole room.
So because your telly fits nicely in your front room, there is no need to produce anything bigger?
Seems a bit unfair on those with the room to have a bigger TV.
My 50" plasma fits just fits into an alcove at one end of the sitting room - far less obtrusive than the 28" CRT it replaced. The room could take more inches but as the alcove couldn't doubt I'll go bigger.
Massive super high res displays are for people to watch shit like Transformers on, not proper cinematic films. Sharpness is massively over-rated.
I have a 72" 'screen' on my (720p) projector. It looks great.
Unless you have a separate TV room that's not your sitting room then having a massive telly just dominates the room and looks shit.
So because your telly fits nicely in your front room, there is no need to produce anything bigger?
No sily; read:
"Anything much above 42: [b]in an average sized living room[/b] is daft."
If you live in an enormous mansion, then go buy a 150" tv. Sticking a massive telly into an average sized living rom, as many people do, is daft.
No sily; read:
This is STW, you don't expect me to actually read other posts properly?
What should be the TV to room size ratio then? Not sure what average room size is or when a TV is deemed big.
Certainly I have seen big TVs in small rooms which did look pretty silly.
Hi all,
Well I was at media city the other week with regards to 4K and to be honest there is very little content out at present, sports (as usual) will eventually lead the way with regards to 4K but it will be another premium channel I think.
In your living room depending on the size of it, of course you will see very little difference in quality of content. We were watching content on a 4K projector in a studio projected at (approx) 20 feet wide and even still the HD stood up very well against the 4K footage. The detail in 4K is stunning though
I think what may/is happening everything will be shot in 4K (or 6 or 8 TBH) and then finally sent out at HD for a whlie which means before everything is 4K your HD will start to look VERY VERY good.
We are capturing 4K at present which is making storage and post a bit of a nightmare with regards to file sizes but all the commercial stuff is still at a HD final output.
Oh and UHD is not TRUE 4K just like 1280 was never TRUE HD 🙂
Is there some sensible, scientific explanation for why some people see the difference between image quality more than others?
For example I don't see a big enough difference in image quality to justify the extra cost of a Retina Macbook vs a Macbook Air. I can't see a significant difference on my 42" plasma between a broadcast in SD and it's equivalent in HD.
I wondered if the fact I'm shorts-sighted and astigmatic (and mildly colour blind) means I don't see the huge difference that others do even when wearing my glasses.
Even if we got the 6Mb that they reckon is potentially possible, it would still take 23hrs!
Hardly feasible for a quick decision of what film to watch on a Friday night!!
Sorry, I didn't explain myself very well. The 60GB would be the size of the film if it were stored at very low compression on a disc format such as 3 or 4 layer BluRay. A downloaded or streamed film would typically have a much higher compression applied to it and would probably be around 11GB for 90 minutes based on the 4k streaming that netflix currently do which is around 7GB per hour. So on your 3Mbps connection you'd still be looking at around 10-11 hours but on any connection over 25Mbps that time comes down to less than an hour.
So my point was that I would be happy enough to have some level of compression between the two (streamed and physical copy) and wait 2-3 hours for the download. If it meant the it looked awesome.
I appreciate that not everyone has access to faster broadband which as has been said above is probably the limiting factor to the take up of 4K TV's.
Sharpness is massively over-rated.
I'd rather give directors the option of complete clarity and allow them to soften the picture if they feel the need. They do it already with a lot of closeups so it's not like the technique would be new to them.
not even a DVD player for it.
How very amusingly last century.
The new LG OLED TVs interest me. Better blacks than plasma.
This is why you need big screens -
[img] 
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the picture comes alive
...aaaaaand bingo!
we've found the 650b of the audio visual world.
IMO what 4K will be good for is driving hardware advances for gaming. The Xbox One and PS4 won't really be able to push that kind of resoloution and it does make a nice if somewhat smaller difference than antialiasing in terms of jaggies.
Is there some sensible, scientific explanation for why some people see the difference between image quality more than others?
Yes, some people have better eyesight than others and like most things (hearing, tatse) as you get older you vision quality diminishes.
^ but is there a relationship between those who wear glasses and those who find HD TV not as "wow" as others? I remember my old boss raving about HD TV when they first came out and she wore glasses (and was a lot older than me).
Would anyone want to watch a screen as close as suggested in the diagram above? I think I sit around 10 feet from my 50"er and switch between normal BBC and the HD version (Virgin) and can see they're slightly different but makes no difference to my viewing pleasure.
Meh, I can't see the big deal. I've gone on the John Lewis link and the picture quality on the TV on that page looks no better than the rest of the webpage. I get a much better picture on my actual TV, and my actual TV is about 10 times bigger screen size than that John Lewis one, my hand nearly covers the whole thing for god's sake!
Hard to say - glasses aren't an exact thing - they don't restore perfect vision. Sometimes the optician has to compromise on distance vs close-up, sometimes there are just limits on what can be done. And frequently people's eyes change so glasses that were great 3 years ago are now not that great. Lots of factors.
But then again, people who don't wear glasses possibly don't have perfect eyesight either.
And some people just don't notice shit, like my mum.
by the time 4k broadcasts are numerous the technology will be cheap, and the next greatest thing will be out. Currently (well, the last time i looked into it) Netflix have 1 'box set' in 4k to watch and no one else is broadcasting in 4k. waste of your money atm
Bit late to the thread, but just purchased a 4K TV.
Dunno about the science but the picture is much better than the existing HD that I was getting on the old TV (HD ready). I don't think anything is as sharp as the demo's they run in the store, but for what I paid i'm pretty pleased with it.
Using cheapo £5 HDMI 1.4 spec cable and a Sky HD box
Using cheapo £5 HDMI 1.4 spec cable
Ha ha! HDMI cables... 😆
I'm not sure you quite understand the concepts here. Upscaling makes fewer pixels into more pixels by spreading out the existing detail over more pixels
That is too simplistic - upscaling does more than that - de-interlacing, interpolation of likely extra deatil, edge enhancement, deinterlacing, anti-aliasing, etc.
http://www.techradar.com/news/television/everything-you-need-to-know-about-upscaling-484345#null
For those who can't see the point in any of this, ITV switched the TdF from HD to SD today at around 3:45 p.m. and for me at least, watching on a big screen, it was as different as night and day.
It's a bit like some conspiracy theorists claim 650b to be. Sony are massively pushing 4k, both getting cameras into studio's and TV's into houses because they want people to upgrade their TV's.
It seems that a lot of photographers shooting video for commercial use are shooting in 4k. I was down on the Somerset Levels earlier in the year, to see the starling murmerations, and there was a bloke with a very whizzy camera on a tripod. I went over to have a closer look, and it was a RED modular camera with a Canon DSLR lens on the front. He was shooting 4k for a documentary he was putting together about the starlings. Storage was a bunch of SDXC cards arranged in a RAID array, either 32 or 64Gb, I can't remember for certain. He was from Devizes, and not from a particular station like the Beeb.
The new Sony A4s DSLR mirrorless camera can shoot 4k up to ISO 406,900, but requires a separate recorder pack to do so, I think because of heat issues, the results in almost complete darkness are astonishing.
