UHD might be all the rage right now in the manufacturers' marketing, along with the curios obsession for curved screens, but aside from some nice looking demo material, is it the future or just the next 3dtv?
The main feature of 4k TVs over HD sets is obviously the resolution. At 3840 x 2160 that's double the horizontal and vertical image dimensions of Full HD, giving 4 times the amount of image information on screen. Ironically, this is the feature that most people are going to be able to appreciate least.
Let's ignore the dearth of 4k content sources at the moment; after all, UHD Blu-Ray should have its specification finalised sometime soon, you could stream some content from Netflix and Sky will have a UHD service at some point. No, the problem is, even if you're feeding your set with lovely 4k goodness, the chances are you won't be able to tell the difference between 4k and HD. What the manufacturers are keeping quiet about is that to see the benefits of that extra resolution, most people will either need to buy a much bigger TV than they have at present or to sit a lot closer to their TV than they do right now. In fact, you may even need to do both.
Don't believe me? Just check out any of the numerous viewing distance charts you can find on the internet, or indeed, this article, which has its own. In my own, far from atypical, UK dwelling the distance between the TV and seating position is 2.8m, or around 9'. According to the viewing distance charts, to actually see the extra detail in a UHD image at that distance, I'd need a 70" TV. Like, I would imagine, most people, my lounge is laid out as a living space, not a TV watching space, even if the TV does spend more hours on a day than I'd care to admit. So, while I could move the settee closer to the TV, I'm not sure where my daughter would play or what we'd do with the fold-up dining table where we eat meals. I'm also not sure that I'd want to be that close to the TV, or be sat opposite such a big screen, when I wasn't watching 4k material. Heck, my current 40" set shows up the current compression artifacts from Sky's supposedly HD service enough at the moment, without me discovering more.
So, are UHD TVs more marketing than actual consumer benefit? Well, not necessarily. While the increased resolution may be the headline feature, it's not the only feature. The other technology that may be coming your way is High Dynamic Range, or HDR. The dynamic range of an image is a reference how bright and dark the image is. Not only should sets with HDR be able to show much brighter scenes but you should be able to see more detail in shadow areas than you would without it. This is something that you should get the benefit of no matter what the screen resolution. How much material will make use of this remains to be seen - from my limited reading around the subject the standard for how this is encoded is still in progress, even though some manufacturers are currently marketing sets claiming an enhanced colour range. And not all UHD sets have HDR capability yet.
There is another potential area where 4k TV sets might provide a benefit. All the major TV manufacturers these days seem to have made their TVs "smart", by which they mean that there are built-in apps, like those found on smartphones, for a number of functions, including streaming video services such as Netflix and Amazon Instant Video. Some services, I'm thinking particularly of Netflix here, already have a UHD streaming service and the apps on some smart TVs can stream these. Why might this be a benefit when we've established that for the most part you won't be able to see the difference in resolution? Well, the theory goes that these 4k steaming services will be providing a better quality stream than HD services. As HD streaming services generally aren't up to the quality of Blu-Ray anyway, there's a good prospect that you will see an improvement in picture quality overall. As with HDR thought, not all sets will necessarily support this.
At the moment then, it's pretty hard to make the case for going to 4k, with the benefits limited to those who can cope with (and afford) larger screens or those who consider the limited amount of streamable material at the moment to be worth upgrading for.
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