4k smart TV… What do I need to know?

10 year old 32″ Sony flat screen is due for relegation to the kitchen.
Seen a good deal on ao
http://ao.com/product/40uf770v-lg-tv-grey-36157-108.aspx

There’s £50 off code and 10% cash back..
Is 4k the future or stick with HD?

Depends when sky or terrestial tv decide to go 4k. I think some bt channels ar now 4k.

Would be interesting to visially compare hd and 4k.

Not much help im afraid.

I purchased a large hd tv last year, based on the fact i couldnt get a 4k signal at the time.

Not seen anything broadcast in 4k yet, not sure how long it will be either so it might be a premium you don’t need for a good few years.

Daft question but do TV s upscale HD to 4k?

Do people really sit in front of an HD tv and think ‘you know, this just isn’t sharp enough, it’s time for a new TV’..?

What do you mean by “upscale”? It’ll blow up the image to fit the screen, but you can’t add detail that isn’t there to start with.

We discussed this at length not so long back. Summary is, there’s little point paying extra for 4K, doubly so with a set that’s “just” a 40″ screen. And for that matter paying for “smart” features is arguably not the best option, you’re better off with an external device of some description.

I’d wait a little while longer to for 4k until it’s taken up a bit more universally myself. You can get a stunning HD set for £500 which would be great for a few years until 4k has set in and is much cheaper and more accessible.

Any suggestions / recommendations?

Depends how big the screen is and how far away it is. If you want a big screen and it’s relatively close then it might be worth it. (watch the bandwidth on 4k downloads etc. though!)

Personally I think it’s all a bit of a red herring to sell more tele’s now that everyone has a flat tele that doesn’t break down. I find once the picture quality is “good enough” the quality of acting / production / screenplay / Ratboy’s riding is about 1 million times more important than whether you can see the pixels or not. It’s like watching subtitles – I only notice them for the first 5 minutes then you forget you’re even watching a foreign production.

We don’t have a tele – either watch on a 15″ laptop or a projector with a 90″ screen. The projector looks fantastic for the first 5 minutes but again, you kind of forget you’re watching it after a while (the big screen is great when there are lots of people though)

I do like higher res computer screens though but then you’re sat much closer to those and often viewing text.

I’ve seen a few 4k TVs around and they do look stunning. Not only is the resolution a lot higher, but the higher dynamic range does seem to help.

I think Netflix have started making 4k available, so I think my next TV will likely be 4k.

As for that TV, it only does HDMI1.4, so it will only do 4k at 30fps.

I’ve heard that the jokes sound funnier on a 4K telly so I’m definitely thinking of getting one.

I’ve got a Samsung 4k 55 inch tv. No idea which model. I’ve got Netflix 4k package. The picture seems to be very good to a luddite such as myself.

Bought a 65″ one as a monitor for a PC in the office… Very very good. However I can’t quite see the point of a 40″ one.

Is 4k ever going to be worth having on a 40″ TV, no matter how much content is available?

I think Netflix have started making 4k available, so I think my next TV will likely be 4k.

How much of the actual content is 4k?

When I was in vegas the Sony salesman showed me a wall of tvs in different sizes up to one that was the size of an entire house wall. He said the eye can’t tell the difference between 4k and the 1920×1080 screens until 70 inch or above so it’s a complete waste of money unless your going huge. Get a good quality samsung tv instead

We were relatively early adopters to the whole flat screen thing and have a SD definition 42″ Panasonic plasma. Without exception when visitors come round and the telly is on they comment on the stunning picture quality – and they all have HD TVs at home.

Image quality is as much about the screen quality as the definition imho.

And the setup. A lot are bobbins out of the box.

Rather have OLED than 4k at this point, there simply isn’t the content other than netflix and some random stuff on BT.

The eye can tell the difference between 4k and 1080. Go and look at a 4k telly on demo playing true native 4k content. It is a whole other league. An awesome picture.

However the points made about lack of 4k content is true and for that reason not worth it for the sake of 4k on its own. After all these years you can’t even get true HD on anything but Blue Ray (Sky HD and other broadcast and streamed HD content is interlaced not progressive scan so only half the image is refreshed – every other row, to half the information streaming in. Only BR gives you full HD progressive scan picture), By the time we have 4k streaming into our homes the TV panel technology will have moved on and we’ll probably be looking at even higher resolution.

A 4k telly will upscale an HD input, but, for me, the quality of the picture of an HD signal upscaled to 4k is not as good as a proper HD panel playing HD (as with an upscaled SD picture). I got a new telly last year and in the shops demo room had a back to back comparison of a 4k telly and equivalent HD set playing a Bue Ray. The HD set was better. Marginally I’ll admit, but noticeably. And since the UHD set was another £500 or so more (prices have probably dropped since) I got the HD set, and it is a big telly, so you’d have thought the 4k set would have edged it.

I wouldn’t say don’t buy a 4k set. I think we’ll see 4k play stations and xboxes soon, so if you’re a gamer it may be worth it, and the main brands have now agreed a 4k standard so are now pressing ahead with developing 4k blue ray players, but there are challenges in squeezing the sheer volume of data onto a disc, so who knows when they will be available. But I wouldn’t pay a premium for 4k or change a TV just to get 4k just yet. If you need a new telly and you can get a 4k set that ticks all your features list boxes at the right price, then why not.

Content generally is getting lower in quality rather than increasing as everything shifts to online streaming with poor bitrates and heavy compression. 4k broadcasts will be decades away from being mainstream. 4k otherwise is only really available with very select 4k Blu Ray dics (for which you need a 4k player), but the majority of people still stick with DVDs, not even standard Blu Ray!

It’s much like how audio has gone. Vinyl downgraded to CD, downgraded to low bitrate MP3s, and few people seem to care. HD CD and DVD (even Blu Ray) audio formats exist, but purely audiophile territory only and become extinct after a while.

And good point that pixel based displays work best with content matching the display resolution.

Vinyl downgraded to CD

Don’t talk toot.

The 4K TV’s look great in the shops, when you are stood 2 feet away. In a typical UK living room, they are largely pointless. Check out the viewing distance calculators on the net before you buy.

The settings you choose will have a far more affect on picture quality than any differences between mainstream brands. We have a Samsung 65″ 1080 and with the right settings, it looks great. Some of the default settings totally destroy the image quality….turning everything ‘off’ (like motionflow, enhancers etc) and putting it in Cinema mode is usually a good place to start.

Unless you are mounting it on your forehead, paying a premium for a 40″ 4K seems like a pointless idea at the moment.

The biggest problem with TV today (damn it I sound old), is the same issue that clouds modern photographic equipment.

It’s all about numbers that the average customer can understand, give me the choice between a 4k picture with 10Mb bitrate, and a 1080p picture with a 50Mb bitrate I know where my money would be. I am sure if you asked 100 customers in currys what the average bitrate of the programs they are watching is they would look at you like you had just grown horns.

LG55EC930V is my next set, hoping the price comes down when LG release their new OLED sets.

Rather have OLED than 4k at this point, there simply isn’t the content other than netflix and some random stuff on BT.

Any good deals on the LG OLEDs floating around at the moment? (Not the £25000 down to £12000 kind of deals…)

Don’t talk toot.

Vinyl widely known to be better quality than CD, particularly appreciated by classic music lovers. Note classic music was (is?) pressed on higher quality vinyl and to higher standard than rock/pop music.

Vinyl widely known to be better quality than CD, particularly appreciated by classic music lovers. Note classic music was (is?) pressed on higher quality vinyl and to higher standard than rock/pop music.

Don’t talk toot

What do you mean by “upscale”? It’ll blow up the image to fit the screen, but you can’t add detail that isn’t there to start with.

Interpolation is very important when the broadcast is in SD and your TV is HD/4k. How your TV does this ‘on the fly’ has a big influence on image quality when the screen res doesn’t match the broadcast res.

Personally I wouldn’t buy a 4k TV as there is so little content available.

OK.. im bored of looking at TVs now.

Quite like the look of this sony..

http://www.johnlewis.com/sony-bravia-kdl40w705c-led-hd-1080p-smart-tv-40-with-freeview-hd-and-built-in-wi-fi/p1919512

(JL will price match it for £399 and 5 year guarantee included)

As long as it fits on my fancy pants Vogels wall bracket
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vogels-Televisions-Hinged-Inclinable-Maximum/dp/B0094B0CCC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1441051577&sr=8-1&keywords=Vogels+EFW6345

Good deals is relative, if you are looking at OLED, you are looking at £1600 minimum.

LG’s new 4K OLED TVs will be available starting at the end of August in Germany, Korea, the US and UK with the roll-out to continue over the next several months in select markets.

With a bit of luck this will see reduction in the price of the current models.

Probably best deal is get JL to price match and get their 5 year warranty?

4k TV now : X pounds

HD TV now : Y pounds

4k TV in future when there is enough 4k content to watch : Z pounds

where X >= Z + Y

and the future 4k TV will be more capable as well.

Vinyl widely known to be better quality than CD

vinyl might ‘sound’ better than CD on some systems, but that doesn’t mean that it is actually better quality.

Early CD had problems with the sharp filters required to stop aliasing, but that is largely overcome with various techniques now.

But vinyl has a raft of bigger problems : such as channel crosstalk, distortion due to the mistracking angle of the arm across the record (unless you have one of the parallel arm decks), motor speed inaccuracies, arm resonances, reflections between the vinyl and the platter, etc.

Some of those problems, like channel crosstalk and compression, are what can lead to the preferable sound.

Basically to compete with even a cheap CD player you need serious investment in your record deck, arm, cartridge, riaa pre-amp – so a different magnitude of expenditure.

i just bought a 4k TV. it’s a sony one for £900.

Quality is excellent. Marco Polo on Netflix looks amazing. My recent footage from my gopro in the alps (at the 4k setting) looks even better. Almost more intense than actually being there.

Plus if england win the world cup then i get £100 back. Carry them home!!

vinyl might ‘sound’ better than CD on some systems, but that doesn’t mean that it is actually better quality.

The argument I’ve heard is that it sounds ‘warmer’ and presumably some people like the effect of someone frying chips in a thunderstorm whilst listening to music. A record sounds like a record, and for those of a certain age it’s quite an evocative sound. I guess it’s akin to hearing fingers squeaking on a fretboard or some such. By contrast, CD sounds clinical to some ears.

Plus, vinyl is a nice thing; pretty covers a foot square, gatefold inlays and the whole ritual of slipping the discs carefully out of the sleeve (twice), cleaning the surface, lowering the needle into the groove, turning it over halfway through, it’s a very tactile and satisfying experience. It’s the difference between listening to an album and just sticking some music on, and I do get that.

But to argue that vinyl is better quality than CD is pure fantasy. It just isn’t. CD is a digital medium, it’s more accurate a sound reproduction than vinyl can dream of. And now we live in a world with lossless audio and, well, the clue there is in the name.

Oh yeah, and happy new TV. (-:

Vinyl downgraded to CD

Wot Cougar and Turnerguy sed.
Vinyl is by the very nature of converting a signal on a piece of tape to a groove stamped into a piece of viny a compromised format, for starters, it’s compressed. Or EQ’d, I believe the technical term is.
The EQ-ing is done to stop the stylus jumping out of the groove because peaks don’t get too close and the grooves actually run into one another, and to stop high frequencies causing ‘ringing’ on the cutting lathe head when the metal stammers are cut to press the vinyl, kinda like running a wet finger round a glass rim and overheating.
Which is why lots of early CD’s were actually crap, because the stereo master tape used was EQ’d for vinyl and lacked the top and bottom end. Which is why remastering has been so lucrative, going back to the multitrack mastertapes and cleaning things up to get a stereo master with maximum info.
Some of this shit I picked up from reading Ken Kessler articles in Hi Fi News and Record Reviews over thirty years ago, still relevant today.
And I’ve heard more than enough really shitty vinyl recordings to know I’d much rather have CD, or a 320Kb AAC file, and that vinyl was being played on over £2k-worth of turntable.
Which is gathering dust upstairs.

“Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don’t have any surface noise. I said, ‘Listen, mate, *life* has surface noise.”
John Peel

Does anyone remember 3D tellys? This is all about shifting “units” and thats a direct quote from a man very high up at Sony. The pixel density of 4K is only distinguishable above 80″ so anything smaller is a waste of time.

As well as the sceens, the processors in Tv’s are what matters, and a good 50″ HD tv at say £600 will look as good if not better than a 4K 50″ at the same price.

UHD will be the format of the future (possibly not 4K!) but not for a long time. It costs alot of money to produce and broadcast 4K, and right now in the UK, the two big players, Sky and BT are battling it out over rights and not formats.

The content is just not there, not yet, and is it worth spending big money for that? The thing is….consumerism. If you want a new Tv/car etc you want one, and you will go out and buy one whatever.

alot of money to produce and broadcast 4K

Or you can get it on Netflix for £10 a month.

4K? Pah! If you want a TV with no content 8K is where it’s at now[/url].

The argument I’ve heard is that it sounds ‘warmer’ and presumably some people like the effect of someone frying chips in a thunderstorm whilst listening to music. A record sounds like a record, and for those of a certain age it’s quite an evocative sound. I guess it’s akin to hearing fingers squeaking on a fretboard or some such. By contrast, CD sounds clinical to some ears.

My mate has a very good setup – Technics SP10, Corian Plinth, SME V, Denon DL304 Valve-based riaa stage, etc, and a very good CD setup – 3K Denon transport into a valve dac stage.

A good piece of vinyl can sound better than the same recording on CD – much smoother, etc.

But he also deals with broadcast gear and the same sort of effect can be heard as the output from one of the expensive compressors that radio stations use for compressing their transmissions.

One of the HiFi World guys used to sell a box that you put between your amp and CD player which ‘bleed’ the channels together to reproduce the crosstalk effect, and that was well received as well.