DEVICES WHICH CAN PLAY A 4K DISC

• April 16, 2018

Here is the list of devices which can play a 4K disc.

(That was short.)

All the heavy-weight studios support the standard; they just don’t have any content yet. One of the “heavy-weights” is Lionsgate. That was quick. Some of us remember Lionsgate as an independent studio which needed the profits of one film in order to make the next one.

No wait, Samsung came out with one in September. Oh, false alarm, they announced one, sort of. “Samsung expects the UBS-K8500 to hit the market next year for an unspecified price.” Can’t get more definite than that.

But here is a question for you: when was the last time you bought or rented a disc ? There used to be a company with real brick-and-mortar stores in blue, who rented you discs. I love old movies and was part of their DVD-in-the-mail program. I had the max, 3 at a time with one coming, one going, and me watching one. Netflix asked them to buy out Netflix – and got laughed out of the office. Who’s laughing now.

But 4K across the Internet; that’s a horse of a different color. The amount of data required is mind boggling (for now). I’ll give one example: 8-bit color can provide 16.7 million different colors while 10-bit High Dynamic Range (HDR) can give you 1.07 BILLION. That’s a lot of zeros and ones.

So when you Google “4K Players” and Amazon comes up with a web-page for what they are selling, it’s really ‘JK’. They mean up-scale to 4K. Then there are the ones who say 4K, but don’t really mean 4K at true UHD. Add to that the ones who say 4K Ultra HD, but mean it will take a download and send it on to your TV. But nothing yet plays native 4K on a disc.

To add to the fun, there are connections. There are several disc players out there with the word “network” in their name. But they mean they have a USB port and you can attach an external hard-drive to them. Others mean they can connect to your WiFi, but down-load streaming only. Some actually (imagine that) have an RJ-45 Ethernet port and can be part of a network.

Then we get to content providers. If you buy a Sony TV or up-scaling disc player, you can get Netflix or Sony Movies. But things like YouTube, Amazon movies, etc., may not be part of the firmware (software saved to Read-Only-Memory / ROM that you can’t change). Buy a competitor’s disc-player, get a different combination of what you can have or not have. Everybody has an ax to grind, territory to protect.

Frustrated yet ?

Save yourself time and the aggravation of buying a device which does not have what you want. Call Dynamiq AV and let them help you.

Chuck

P.S. You might have noticed in my previous blog, I mentioned a product and a competitor’s store where you can buy it. It takes a confident group of professionals to let me do that on their web-site. But here’s some advice. Buy it (or something similar) from Dynamic Av. Do you really want to hire the best and when they get to your home discover the mount you bought is missing some bolts ?
After all, you are hiring experts to save yourself time and headaches. Let them do their job. The whole job.