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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.

9 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. If my Samsung Blu-Ray is an indication - Good by mykepredko · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
    1. Re:If my Samsung Blu-Ray is an indication - Good by GreatDrok · · Score: 5, Informative

      "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.

      --
      "I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
  2. 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.

  3. Go HD-DVD! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

  4. 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.

  5. Re:35mm by pezezin · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.