What will the difference be......ordering a Sony 4K TV using the Sony BDP-S790 4K Player but using Blu-ray Discs and not 4K Blu-ray Discs?

[ontheline]

hey all

like probaly many others i can't wait to get my hands on Sony's new 65'' 4K 3D TV. I have already pre ordered mine and already own the Sony BDP-S790, the question is, as the S790 can play Blu-ray and upscale to 4K would there be any point in spending more money on say for example The Amazing Spiderman, i already own this on on 3D Blu Ray and as far as i know this is one of the first to be released on 4K, so playing The Amazing Spiderman (blu ray) through my 4K TV and my 4K player is it true that there would be no need to upgrade to the 4K release of Spiderman as my player is already upscalling it to 4K, OR would there be a good difference feeding the 4K player with the 4K disc (released in june) instead of the blu ray version i already own?

:dance:

 

[bigboss]

4K TVs will upscale pictures to 4K in any case, so it won't matter if your blu ray player is able to upscale to 4K or not. With regards to "Mastered in 4K" blu rays, it sounds pretty pointless. Still waiting for reviews to confirm if there is indeed an improvement. I suspect it's just a marketing hype.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/7/3848972/sony-planning-to-release-a-range-of-4k-blu-rays

 

[ontheline]

thanks boss think you may be right.

 

[Son_of_SJ]

Perhaps someone knows the answer to this please. If you have, say, a 4K 65" television, and an ordinary Full HD 65" television, feeding them the same Full HD Blu-Ray (which I presume the 4K display would upscale) would you actually see the difference, if the two TVs were side by side? And, how close would you have to be to the TVs to notice the difference? Would any difference still be noticeable at about nine feet away? I genuinely don't know the answer to this question. Or do you have to go to monster display sizes, like 84" for instance, to notice any difference between Full HD and (upscaled) 4K?

 

[bigboss]

1) If you feed 1080p content, the 4K 65-inch TV will have to upscale it to 4K, while the full HD 65-inch TV can display it natively at 1080p. So it will be better on a 1080p TV.

2) No idea what happens with "mastered in 4K" releases.

3) If you feed 4K content, the 4K TV will display it natively, while the 1080p TV will downscale it. Naturally, 4K TV will be far better here.

 

[bigboss]

Also, SD content will look terrible on a 4K TV, due to the amount of upscaling involved.

 

[f1only]

Also, SD content will look terrible on a 4K TV, due to the amount of upscaling involved.

Like dvd on a Blu-ray player upscaled?

 

[bigboss]

Also, SD content will look terrible on a 4K TV, due to the amount of upscaling involved.

Like dvd on a Blu-ray player upscaled?

Even worse!

576i will have to be upscale to fill an ultra HD (4K) screen.

 

[ontheline]

but it should make a considerable difference. sd content looks great upscaled

 

[bigboss]

Upscaling does not mean better quality. It means filling up a picture designed for lower resolution screens to a higher resolution screen. The result will always be worse in a higher resolution screen when compared with a lower resolution one. The quality of scaling is important to minimise the deterioration in picture quality. But the deterioration will happen.

The picture has to stretch to fill up the extra pixels in the higher resolution screen. The more it has to stretch, the worse will the results be.

 

[ontheline]

Upscaling does not mean better quality. It means filling up a picture designed for lower resolution screens to a higher resolution screen. The result will always be worse in a higher resolution screen when compared with a lower resolution one. The quality of scaling is important to minimise the deterioration in picture quality. But the deterioration will happen.

The picture has to stretch to fill up the extra pixels in the higher resolution screen. The more it has to stretch, the worse will the results be.

but like for example the sony s790 blu ray player and most other blu ray players it upscales sd content to near blu ray quality on a full hd 1080p screen, so on a 4k screen sd content dvds should look great or much better like blu ray does on 1080p full hd screens?

 

[ontheline]

Upscaling does not mean better quality. It means filling up a picture designed for lower resolution screens to a higher resolution screen. The result will always be worse in a higher resolution screen when compared with a lower resolution one. The quality of scaling is important to minimise the deterioration in picture quality. But the deterioration will happen.

The picture has to stretch to fill up the extra pixels in the higher resolution screen. The more it has to stretch, the worse will the results be.

Sony BDP-S790: 4K support[/b]
4K, ultra high-definition is one of the hot topics at the moment, and the Sony can currently claim to be the only 4K upscaling player on the market. This means it can take a picture, be it standard definition or high-def, and output an image of 3840 x 2160 pixels to a compatible display.

u

this is from the review on here, so sd definition should look great on a 4k screen( the compatible display ) using this 4k player? maybe if a standard dvd player was used to feed the discs to a 4k it would look worse but the s790 will output the the better quality image to the 4k screen be it sd or hi def content? are you saying when i get the 4k tv hook up my s790 and stick in a standard dvd it will look terrible?

 

[strapped for cash]

Upscaling does not mean better quality. It means filling up a picture designed for lower resolution screens to a higher resolution screen. The result will always be worse in a higher resolution screen when compared with a lower resolution one. The quality of scaling is important to minimise the deterioration in picture quality. But the deterioration will happen.

The picture has to stretch to fill up the extra pixels in the higher resolution screen. The more it has to stretch, the worse will the results be.

Gotta agree with BB here. Upscaling can't make lower resolution material look better; extra detail isn't added or retrieved.

The greater the upscaling task (i.e. the greater the difference between the source and display resolution), the ropier the results. Upscaling SD to fill a large 4K screen won't look pretty, however sophisticated the scaling chip and algorithm.

As I argued on another thread, there's little sense in buying a 4K TV right now. The content simply isn't there and it's better to match your display's resolution with the majority of content you'll be watching.

Always wait for the content before buying the hardware. It's a false economy the other way round.

 

[ontheline]

Upscaling does not mean better quality. It means filling up a picture designed for lower resolution screens to a higher resolution screen. The result will always be worse in a higher resolution screen when compared with a lower resolution one. The quality of scaling is important to minimise the deterioration in picture quality. But the deterioration will happen.

The picture has to stretch to fill up the extra pixels in the higher resolution screen. The more it has to stretch, the worse will the results be.

Gotta agree with BB here. Upscaling can't make lower resolution material look better; extra detail isn't added or retrieved.

The greater the upscaling task (i.e. the greater the difference between the source and display resolution), the ropier the results. Upscaling SD to fill a large 4K screen won't look pretty, however sophisticated the scaling chip and algorithm.

As I argued on another thread, there's little sense in buying a 4K TV right now. The content simply isn't there and it's better to match your display's resolution with the majority of content you'll be watching.

Always wait for the content before buying the hardware. It's a false economy the other way round.

is says it on the s790 review that it takes sd or hi def material and upscales it to uhd quality with a compatible screen.

 

[mr malarky]

Hi ontheline, upscaling can be like putting brandy in your coffee; a little can be quite nice (ie up scaling a DVD into an HD ready/720p 42" screen, where there's very little up scaling being done and the screen isn't so big as to magnify what is being done), but too much and it can go horribly wrong - ie up scaling a standard def DVD into a 4k 55" screen. No scaler can upscale standard def content to "UHD" quality, in the same way listening to a film in Proligic II will ever sound as good as Dolby Digital - the source data just isn't there to begin with; the scaler is just using using software to plug extra pixels of the same/similar colour/luminescence in between the pixels contained in the source material, in order to provide enough data to fill the screen.

Or to put it another way, why would everyone have gone out and brought BluRay players and replaced their DVD collections with Bluray discs, if upscaling DVD players could genuinely upscale DVD's to BluRay quality?

 

[BenLaw]

Agree with the principle BB and strapped put forward. My only question is, will it really matter, if you have a comparable screen size? 4k has 4x as many pixels as HD (2x horizontally and 2x vertically) so for each pixel on say a 65" HD TV you have four pixels on a 4k TV. Each set of four pixels on the 4k tv will take up the same area as one pixel on the HD TV if the screen size is the same. So if that one pixel shows exactly the same colour as the four pixels covering the same area, won't it look exactly the same?

 

[mr malarky]

I think its a question of 'stretch' ben, stretch the source material a little and it looks ok, stretch it too far and the cracks start to show - SD content stretched to a large UHD screen that SD content was never designed for will not look as good as SD content on a native SD resolution screen

 

[ontheline]

I think its a question of 'stretch' ben, stretch the source material a little and it looks ok, stretch it too far and the cracks start to show - SD content stretched to a large UHD screen that SD content was never designed for will not look as good as SD content on a native SD resolution screen

what about SD content on a small 4K screen as sony are rumoured to be releasing a 30" 4K Tv in 2014 to kick start the 4K to smaller screens,

 

[mr malarky]

I think its a question of 'stretch' ben, stretch the source material a little and it looks ok, stretch it too far and the cracks start to show - SD content stretched to a large UHD screen that SD content was never designed for will not look as good as SD content on a native SD resolution screen

what about SD content on a small 4K screen as sony are rumoured to be releasing a 30" 4K Tv in 2014 to kick start the 4K to smaller screens,

Suspect SD content upscaled on a 30" UHD screen would look fine, as SD content looks fine anyway on screens up to 32". Think the bigger question here would be, what's the point of a 30" UHD screen? Probably great if your viewing it from 3 feet away, but at normal viewing distance are you really going to see the difference even if you could find some native 4k content?

Not trying to be negative here, just genuinely think there's little point in paying an "early adopter" premium for a 4k display until there's a decent amount of native 4k content to watch on it - hold on to your money, if the technology takes hold then the content will come (probably be another 2-3 years) and by then the screens will have halved in cost and improved in quality.

 

[strapped for cash]

is says it on the s790 review that it takes sd or hi def material and upscales it to uhd quality with a compatible screen.

Remove the word "quality" from that sentence and it starts to make sense. The statement sounds like Sony marketing rhetoric.

The suggestion is that the S790 can make sd material look like native 4k content. Anyone that's watched SD material upscaled to 1080p knows that can't be true.

 

[Son_of_SJ]

what about SD content on a small 4K screen as sony are rumoured to be releasing a 30" 4K Tv in 2014 to kick start the 4K to smaller screens,

I asked earlier in this thread about minumum viewing distances, and minimum screen sizes, for the difference between Full HD and 4K to be noticeable. I'll be amazed if a 4K screen as small as 30" will show the difference between genuine 4K source material (which certainly doesn't yet exist on Blu-Ray or other disc) going to the 4K screen and normal Full HD material going to an equivalent Full HD 30" screen. 3D looks more effective the bigger the screen, and I would imagine that the same is true of 4K.

Others have said that the more upscaling that has to be done, the worse the results will be. Please understand that you will not be getting a true 4K experience unless and until there is 4K source material!!! But if you want to be one of the first people to buy a 4K TV even without there being any 4K discs, you are quite free to do so and the TV companies will be very pleased, and possibly more than a trifle surprised, to separate you for your considerable amount of money for a device that will, initially at least, not be being used to its full potential. For instance, the only reason that I have 3D TVs is because 3D came built-in the TVs, not because I wanted 3D, a feature which I never use. I will most certainly be waiting for more - sorry, any - 4K source material and a demonstration that, at a screen size that I could consider buying, that 4K looked noticeably better than ordinary Full HD.

 

[strapped for cash]

I think its a question of 'stretch' ben, stretch the source material a little and it looks ok, stretch it too far and the cracks start to show - SD content stretched to a large UHD screen that SD content was never designed for will not look as good as SD content on a native SD resolution screen

Effective upscaling will likely render SD content watchable on a 4K display that's not too huge, but as we all know, it's not going to look like native 4k content; and it's not going to look any better than SD content upscaled to 1080p.

I agree that there's no point whatsoever in a 4k 30" TV. I wouldn't consider 1080p necessary on a screen that size.

 

[BenLaw]

I think its a question of 'stretch' ben, stretch the source material a little and it looks ok, stretch it too far and the cracks start to show - SD content stretched to a large UHD screen that SD content was never designed for will not look as good as SD content on a native SD resolution screen

I agree with that, but as with the question about a small 4k TV, isn't the problem screen size rather than number of pixels? If using blu rays then 100% a 1920 x 1080 screen should be best. But if upscaling from sd, why would a 60" (or 32") 4k TV look any worse than a 60" (or 32") HD TV?

 

[mr malarky]

is says it on the s790 review that it takes sd or hi def material and upscales it to uhd quality with a compatible screen.

Remove the word "quality" from that sentence and it starts to make sense. The statement sounds like Sony marketing rhetoric.

The suggestion is that the S790 can make sd material look like native 4k content. Anyone that's watched SD material upscaled to 1080p knows that can't be true.

Ontheline, if your still not convinced then here's a simple test - you've probably got an HD TV? If so then it will have a video scaler built in. If upscaling gives the same quality as HD source material then you should see no difference flicking between BBC1 and BBC1HD; so start watching a programme and then switch between the two channels every few minutes, and see if you can see a difference. Have a go and see what you think?

 

[mr malarky]

I think its a question of 'stretch' ben, stretch the source material a little and it looks ok, stretch it too far and the cracks start to show - SD content stretched to a large UHD screen that SD content was never designed for will not look as good as SD content on a native SD resolution screen

I agree with that, but as with the question about a small 4k TV, isn't the problem screen size rather than number of pixels? If using blu rays then 100% a 1920 x 1080 screen should be best. But if upscaling from sd, why would a 60" (or 32") 4k TV look any worse than a 60" (or 32") HD TV?

Good question! Logically I'd say its because the upscaling software is having to extrapolate (ie 'guess') four times as many 'missing' pixels in the source data (or plug four times as many gaps), but would be interesting to see the two side by side to find out.