4K TVs are becoming cheap and ubiquitous enough for everyone to buy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to start watching 4K Blu-rays. This video shows the benefit you really get from those.
Streaming movies and TV shows has become so commonplace that it’s replaced much of the disc-buying market. If you want to take advantage of a new 4K TV, you can either pay Netflix three extra dollars and open the app that’s already on your phone, or shell out hundreds on a 4K Blu-ray player and all the discs and HDMI cables you need to upgrade the whole system. It’s a pretty expensive upgrade.
The video above from Linus Tech Tips shows you what you get for your trouble. The short version is you’re really getting great HDR. 4K resolution itself has some minor benefits, but HDR is the future of television. It provides substantially better colours than what your TV provides right now and, as the video shows, it’s even better than you can squeeze out of your TV by tweaking colour settings.
However, those benefits only really exist for some movies. First, you have to actually have a 4K HDR Blu-ray of the movie you want to watch, and discs still aren’t as commonplace as streaming 4K movies. Then, those movies have to be calibrated well. Linus Tech Tips found that some movies, like The Revenant, weren’t a huge improvement over their Blu-ray counterpart in that department.
The big takeaway here is that if you’re a home theatre nut that wants to squeeze the very best video quality you can out of your system, 4K HDR Blu-rays are superior to streaming. However, most of us can wait to upgrade the parts of our system over time, rather than plunging a ton of money into the hardware right now while the market is still adapting.
4K HDR Blu Ray – Is it worth it? [Linus Tech Tips]
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.