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.

Comments

If my Samsung Blu-Ray is an indication - Good

[mykepredko]

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).

Re:If my Samsung Blu-Ray is an indication - Good

[GreatDrok]

"their Blu-Ray players have significant quality and reliability issues along with poor service."

You're not wrong. I bought a Samsung blu ray player and they put out a firmware update that knocked the audio out of sync. I waited for a fix which never came so I returned the player as faulty and they replaced it with another one which was fine until it did the same firmware update. Samsung had moved on to another model and weren't updating their previous player so I was stuck with a 6 month old player that didn't work. I ended up returning it as faulty and replacing it with a Panasonic which has been faultless. My wife works for a white goods repair man and he won't service Samsung gear because their parts availability is atrocious. Samsung just doesn't care it would seem.

Re:If my Samsung Blu-Ray is an indication - Good

[dgatwood]

You're not wrong. I bought a Samsung blu ray player and they put out a firmware update that knocked the audio out of sync. I waited for a fix which never came so I returned the player as faulty and they replaced it with another one which was fine until it did the same firmware update. Samsung had moved on to another model and weren't updating their previous player so I was stuck with a 6 month old player that didn't work.

This is roughly my experience as well, only mine never had a firmware version that really worked. There were spots in playback (perhaps at each layer switch?) where the audio invariably dropped out on one of them, and the other one had problems with audio dropouts at the DVD layer switch. I ended up switching to LG and never had a problem after that. Unfortunately, in my case, by the time I started finding discs that each player couldn't deal with, I had owned them for a year or more, and was stuck with them.

And my Samsung TV isn't much better. Though it lasted many years, what eventually killed it was capacitor plague. In most of the industry, this was fixed by 2005. Not Samsung. They kept using junk until at *least* August of 2007. And as soon as I fixed that, I had another failure a few months later, this time caused by the T-Con board being bad. No big deal, I thought. I'll just buy a replacement board. And that one was bad. And then I replaced that, and got another bad one. It turns out that this board fails so often that "working pulls" from existing equipment are approximately *never* actually working. Fortunately, this part is used by multiple companies (presumably by anybody that ships a Samsung panel in their TVs), so there's a manufacturer that actually builds new replacement T-Con boards. But it took about a month before I got TV was working again, all because (at least according to the working theory) these chips are so sensitive to thermal stress that they end up slightly damaged when they solder them onto the boards, and as a result, they fail prematurely a few years later, without warning.

Samsung is, at this point, basically on my blacklist, right alongside companies whose products nearly started fires, had dead shorts across power pins, and other nightmares.

generation mismatch

[kiviQr]

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.

Re:generation mismatch

[JamesNorton]

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

Re:generation mismatch

[CohibaVancouver]

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.

Re:generation mismatch

[philmarcracken]

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.

Re:generation mismatch

[Kjella]

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.

I'd agree with you except that the people who create BluRay discs are often sloths, as long as it fits the disc it doesn't matter. There's hardly any incentive to find the optimal encoding settings or to deliver 95% of the quality with 50% of the bitrate. Compared to DVDs BluRays was almost 6x in size (8.5 -> 50GB) for 6x the pixels (720x480 -> 1920x1080) but then on top of that you had H.264 and the encoders have matured a lot since then. There's a reason Netflix says they deliver FullHD with 5 Mbps and BluRay is up to 54 Mbps, they're both extremes on opposite sides of the sweet spot.

The pirate scene had much better numbers on this, like how low could you go in bandwidth before the codec got starved and it made sense to drop resolution instead. Back when I looked into it that was around 0.2 bits/pixel, so 3840x2160x24 = ~40 Mbps. With the 30-50% savings HEVC is supposed to give over H.264 I'm thinking 25 Mbps is not bad for an UHD stream. Sure, all other things being equal a 100 Mbps stream will always win but the bits would probably be better spent on an 8K stream and downscaling. It's that much overkill.

Re:generation mismatch

[Aighearach]

I'd sooner buy a video on betamax than bluray. After years of physical media, they come out with network-reliant crap where the future can make disks from the past stop working. No thank you.

I wouldn't mind paying an extra dime on a rental for higher resolution than DVD, but I'm not going to buy some crap player to do it.

Re:generation mismatch

[pezezin]

Bluray bitrate may be overkill, so what? If you have space to spare, why not use it? The final price will be the same, and the quality much better. A physical copy playing on your local machine doesn't have the bandwith limitations of a streaming service.

And Netflix can say whatever the want, but 1080p at 5 Mbps looks like shit, unless the scene is really static.

Re:Good riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

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

2018 was a sad year for all 4k lovers

[ffkom]

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.

Re:2018 was a sad year for all 4k lovers

[ffkom]

I don't know where you get the 'nowhere near 4k' from.

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).

Re:2018 was a sad year for all 4k lovers

[jaa101]

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.

Go HD-DVD!

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Go HD-DVD!

[ffkom]

No, sorry, but D-VHS won: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:I refuse to buy Sony.

[bill_mcgonigle]

The summary says Panasonic.

One reason?

[hcs_$reboot]

"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.

Re:35mm

[pezezin]

For a full frame 35mm film (36x24mm) to resolve 90 megapixels, it should have a resolution of 160 lines/mm. Such film exists (Fuji Velvia 50, for example), but only under ideal lighting conditions and high contrast images. Cinema used a film format half as big (24x18 mm), so the resolution would have to be 230 lines/mm. Without getting into a very long winded debate, getting 90 megapixels out of 35 mm film is pure fantasy. From IMAX, sure, but from 35mm, no.