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Is It Time to Replace Your First HDTV? (Video)
Millions of Americans bought their first HDTVs between four and seven years ago, because that's when prices for 40" - 50" sets started dropping below $700. Those sets are obviously between four and seven years old now. Are new ones so much more wonderful that it's time to get a new HDTV? Not necessarily. Alfred Poor, long-time display technology expert and senior editor for aNewDomain, has some insight here, which he shares with us in today's video. There's obviously a lot more to discuss about TV technology advances (such as 3d) that we didn't get to today, so look forward to another discussion on this topic in two or three weeks.
Those are not real 4k Blu-ray players - they only upscale standard Blu-ray discs to 4k. When the 4k standard will be ratified, even if it will still use Blu-ray discs, those discs won't play in these players because the standard will almost certainly use new codecs.
Also those 4k discs you can buy are really only standard 1080p discs. They are "4k mastered", meaning they are encoded from a 4k source, but downscaled to 1080p, and are usually using a much higher bitrate than ordinary Blu-ray discs in order to preserve as much of the quality of the picture as possible, since they most likely will be used in those upscaling players. Upscaling magnifies encoding artefacts.
Those 4k mastered discs also play in normal Blu-ray players, since they are really only 1080p. At the moment they are probably the highest quality video source available for consumer purchase.