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Samsung To Stop Making 4K Blu-Ray Players, Report Says (cnet.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the sign-of-the-times dept.

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.

6 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. generation mismatch by kiviQr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:generation mismatch by JamesNorton · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Streaming" 4K quality is almost never the same quality as 4K on a disc. I prefer the discs. https://www.whathifi.com/featu...

    2. Re:generation mismatch by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Old generation is tired of upgrading CD, SACD, LaserDisc, DVD, 4k, 8k, Ultra, 3D

      GenX here. "Old generation" also only upgrades every decade or so, to whatever tech has cemented itself as the new standard. So for me for physical media it's been -

      Vinyl => Cassette => CD

      VHS => DVD => Blu-Ray

      480i curved CRT => 480i flat CRT => 1080p flat panel

      HD-DVD, MiniDisc, Betamax, Laserdisc, SelectaVision and every other fad were just that - Fads.

    3. Re:generation mismatch by philmarcracken · · Score: 4, Insightful

      New generation doesn't care - the hit play in the browser.

      Which is really sad. Streaming should never have become the product over a single download. They have created network peak hours and incentivized crushing the bitrate and therefore quality to save on bandwidth costs.

  2. Re:Good riddance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Home electronics is what they've always done. I hardly think this is an extra "finger in the pie"

  3. 2018 was a sad year for all 4k lovers by ffkom · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.