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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.

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  1. Re:2018 was a sad year for all 4k lovers by jaa101 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    From reality. The scanners are not the limiting factor, it's rather the film itself. Take "Bad Times as the El Royale" as an example - it was shot on Kodak film of which you can read the specs at https://www.kodak.com/uploaded...

    Look at the logarithmic scale of the spatial resolution diagram - the contrast of the higher spatial frequencies drops very quickly, while granularity quickly increases under all but the most ideal lighting conditions. In reality, the resolution you will get from such a film, even when using good scanners and 4k digital intermediates, is nowhere near the resolution of a decent digital camera (like let's say an Arri Alexa 65).

    To explain a little further, he's talking about the "Modulation Transfer Curves" graph, which essentially shows how well the film records fine detail. It's 100% at 10 cycles per mm but below 50% (and falling steeply) by the time you go up to 80 cycles per mm. Now there are, crudely, 2 pixels per cycle and the 35mm film frame is 25mm wide, so that's 4000 pixels across. Remember, that's the film coming out of the camera; the quality of prints will be worse. Another factor is that camera lenses will struggle to match the resolution of this film.