Slashdot Mirror
Samsung To Stop Making 4K Blu-Ray Players, Report Says (cnet.com)
According to a report from Forbes, Samsung may be exiting the 4K Blu-ray player market. "After launching its first 4K players in 2017, the company didn't add any new players to its lineup in 2018," reports CNET. "A high-end player for 2019 along the lines of its UBD-M9500 was in the works, the report says, but has now been scrapped." From the report: One of the reasons for pulling out could be that the existing players' format support has lagged behind the rest of the industry. For example, instead of supporting Dolby Vision, Samsung created its own version of HDR10, HDR10+, which was designed for use in streaming and physical media. Competitor Oppo was the first company to support both HDR10 and Dolby Vision but announced it was ending production of its 4K Blu-ray players in April 2018. Meanwhile Sony announced the M2 player at CES 2019 with support for Dolby Vision and Panasonic recently released the high-end DP-UB9000 player in Europe and Australia.
That was a robbery.
Samsung has got its filthy fingers in too many pies already.
Regardless of what Samsung does and does not support, their Blu-Ray players have significant quality and reliability issues along with poor service. Buying one really soured me on buying anything Samsung - I recently broke down and bought a Samsung refrigerator and while it has been fine, it's delivery and setup were a real story.
I know a number of other people with the the same experience (of course, there will be people here who have had a Samsung Blu-Ray players that haven't given them a second's worth of problems even though they left it out in the snow).
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
so now we are going to be limited with lower bitrate streaming options and datacaps, and content being split between an ever greater number of subscription services, the future is so wonderful.
As one who was disappointed at the industry's abrupt dropping of 3D TVs, let me among the first to invoke Nelson Muntz.
Blu-Ray requires always online for the authentication methods in use now, and it is more convenient to just use Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/Apple or pirate. Furthermore the R&D into higher density disc formats has stagnated. 100GB discs are out, but still 20/disc for regular ink. M-Disc format 100GB discs are COMPARABLE PRICING, despite costing 3-10 dollars for DVD/25GB discs compared to .10-.50 cents per regular DVD/Bluray recordable.
The optical market, without some major changes, is effectively dead, despite the fact that it is one of the few ways to produce read only copies (or was before they added erase capabilities to newer burners.) As one of the few semi-immutable storage formats, if anything bad ever happens requiring recovery from an earlier time, DVD/Bluray are the last read-only storage technology one might be able to use to recover complete systems. Flash/Tapes, Hard Disks, etc are susceptable to EMPs or magnetism. PROM capacity has never been improved to Flash storage sizes, and any alternative storage formats have no longevity or history of longevity to fall back on.
Old generation is tired of upgrading CD, SACD, LaserDisc, DVD, 4k, 8k, Ultra, 3D. New generation doesn't care - the hit play in the browser.
Who else makes a good 4K Blu-Ray?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Finally some common sense. I can't wait until they release their 8k players. No one wants 4k anymore.
What market do you expect to develop when not only all the initial UHD discs released but also the vast majority of all UHD discs released right now contain "fake 4k" content, that is, content just up-scaled from 2k, devoid of any actual additional details?
There are laudable exceptions (like for example "Lucy", which was produced in excellent 4k quality), but among all the UHD releases in 2018, very few reached actual 4k quality. Many were from 3.4k resolving cameras at best, many used 2k digital intermediates, and surprisingly many were filmed on grainy 35mm analog film, which is nowhere near actual 4k quality.
"Streaming" services like Netflix may produce material at 4k, but then compress it into such low bandwidths that ultimately, any significantly complex/moving scene looks worse than a 2k BluRay.
I really hope this ugly trend will change - one glimmer of hope is that the increasing number of productions from China seem to more frequently employ decent cameras and 4k digital intermediates.
I was in a bunker with my HD-DVDs, in order to survive the great HD format war. I gave it a bit over a decade, and I thought now should be safe to emerge and, naturally, slashdot was my first stop. Soo, from this news do I sense HD-DVD is winning? Did I make the right format choice?
and surprisingly many were filmed on grainy 35mm analog film, which is nowhere near actual 4k quality.
You're right, 35mm is *much* higher resolution then 4K. 4K translates to roughly 2.1 megapixels. 35mm film can resolve the equivalent ~90 megapixels. If a 35mm transfer looks overly grainy or soft, then it's a bad transfer.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
"One of the reasons for pulling out could be that the existing players' format support has lagged behind the rest of the industry"
The more likely reason is that nowadays many people prefer to watch stuff from a streaming media, Netflix, Az... And besides the few otakus always seeking the highest pixels, most people don't upgrade/buy their existing BR/DVD players to the latest thing.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The main strength of the Blu-Ray format is that the format itself is fairly open-ended, and left the door open from the very start to multi-layer discs that exceeded the manufacturing capabilities available at the time the standard itself was defined. Older PLAYERS are constrained to specific codecs, bitrates, and formats... but as long as you have enough storage space, the standard gives itself wide latitude to add future interleaved streams that older players can simply ignore if they don't understand.
The biggest problem with 4k, and ESPECIALLY 3D, is the fact that it's hard to rent 4k discs, and damn-near IMPOSSIBLE to rent 3D discs... they're too niche for Redbox, and Redbox is just about the only place LEFT where you can cheaply rent discs in person without advance planning in most parts of the US.
As far as I'm concerned, "glasses" are a minor problem. LCD shutter glasses are practically FREE compared to the cost of the display, player, audio system, and content. I mean, seriously... we're talking $10-20 for a "shit" pair, and not a whole lot more for good ones. We aren't talking about high-tech items here... they're basically cheap sunglasses with a single-pixel LCD laminated onto each lens with a simple controller whose only job is to react to an external timing signal and hide one side or the other.
A larger problem is screen size and placement that comes down to consumer education. You need a screen that fills most of your field of view. A 52" TV hanging on the wall 10' away over a fireplace just isn't going to cut it. 3D on a 65" TV sitting 5-6 feet in front of the sofa looks fantastic.
Side note: if you have your TV more than 6 feet away or more than a foot off the floor, you're seriously compromising your viewing experience of ALL TV content whether you realize it or not. Seriously. The next time you have the house to yourself for a few days (and don't have to worry about spouse-acceptance-factor), put the TV on a cement block 5 feet in front of your chair, and try watching it in that position for a few days. Trust me... you'll never be satisfied with the TV hanging on a wall 10 feet away after that. It's a completely different viewing experience. If you're GenX or older, think about where YOU used to sit watching TV when your mom wasn't there to yell at you for sitting "too close". You're an adult now, it's your house, you aren't sitting in front of an electron-emitting vacuum tube, and the resolution is much better now. Try it... you'll like it.
Anyway, the biggest technical hurdle when 3D first came out was the fact that HDMI 1.2 didn't have enough bandwidth to gracefully deal with frame-packed 3D, so players had to package up 1080p48 as 1080p60 to send over HDMI, which the TV then ripped apart and used its own video processor to treat as 1080p48 that was internally displayed as 1080p120 or 1080p240. Now that HDMI 2.x can handle 1080p120 (and possibly 1080p240) directly, a sufficiently smart PLAYER could "bitbang" 3D on any TV capable of being directly driven at 120 or 240hz (with the player itself controlling the timing of the glasses). As far as the TV were concerned, it would just be blindly displaying 120fps video in "videogame mode" (with its own internal video processing and interpolation turned off). For a given sequence of two 24fps film frames "A" and "B", the player would simply send "AL AR AL AR AL BR BL BR BL BR" at 120fps (or at 240fps, "AL AR AL AR AL AR AL AR AL AR BL BR BL BR BL BR BL BR BL BR").
One solution might be to create a new combo format that could have a name like "Blu+UH3D" that contains two sets of interleaved streams: one that respects the bitrate limits of legacy Blu-Ray, and one that requires the faster bitrate provided by UHD Blu-Ray:
The first set of interleaved streams would be compatible with legacy Blu-Ray players.
1.1. The only stream legacy Blu-Ray players would pay attention to. It could be any video format supported by legacy Blu-Ray. The additional 1.2x streams would simply be ignored.
1.2a. A variable-bitra
Samsung Group is a business conglomerate, called in Korean a chaebol. In addition to Samsung Electronics and Samsung SDI (battery maker), Samsung has its fingers in other pies. Among them: