The new hype right now and for the last year have been 4k resolution tv sets. It seems that just about every manufacture from LG, to Sony, to Samsung, to even Vizio have them. But why? Is the bump in resolution really worth the bump in price. Granted, 4k tv prices have been dropping considerably in the last year, so the financial cost isn’t quite as bad any more, but that still leaves you with the biggest problem of all, content.
Big box stores like Best Buy advertise 4k tv’s during sports games, claiming you can see so much better with the higher resolution panel. And that would be true, if your content was in 4k. But it’s not, its the same 1080 content that you were getting before, only this time your tv has to stretch it to fit the 4k screen size. And if you have ever taken a small image and blown it up bigger, it always looks worse. Same principle with feeding a 4k tv with 1080 content, in most cases its going to look worse then if you were to play that same 1080 content on a 1080 TV.
So the next thing you could ask is, when are we going to get 4k content. Unfortunately, its not a simple answer, There is some 4k content out there right now. Sony has a 4k box that has some 4k movies that you can download, and YouTube allows its users to upload and view in 4k and BluRay is claiming that we will have 4k BluRay disks very soon, but as far as broadcast 4k content like sports, it doesn’t look like we will be getting that anytime soon. There are still too many issues like bandwidth, compression, and formatting that need to be solved before that will happen. Also more or less the entire broadcast infrastructure will need to be revamped which for the United States is no easy task. But there is a little hope, DirectTV is says they are working on a 4k box that will allow them to “broadcast” 4k content, but then you run into the issue of producers in the TV industry upgrading all their cameras to 4k, and that won’t be easy.