First, he acknowledged, a lot of people said the same thing about LPs not long ago-and now vinyl outsells CDs (though both are vastly overshadowed by audio streaming). Still, he noted a few caveats to that assessment. John Buffone, executive director of the NPD Group, told me that 4K UHD discs are likely to remain a product for film or video “enthusiasts”-and “a narrow segment” of even that market. Now it’s 175 Mbps, nearly four times faster than what you comfortably need to stream 4K.) (Not long ago, my router’s speed was around 25 megabits per second, barely enough for HD. Streaming is much better these days, in part because companies have devised better compression techniques, in part because the internet is now much faster. If “HDR” or “Dolby Vision” appears in the upper right-hand corner of the screen at the start of the program or the movie, that means you’re watching 4K UHD.Ī few years ago, 4K streaming was pretty bad: Resolution wasn’t great, contrasts were gray, viewing was marred by frequent buffering. Eleven streaming channels offer at least some 4K content, usually (though not always) at no added cost: Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max (though not HBO cable or, for that matter, any cable or terrestrial channel as yet), Hulu, Apple TV+, Disney+, Paramount+, YouTube, YouTube TV, Epix Now, and Fubo TV. Another obstacle to 4K’s blastoff, probably the biggest, is streaming. ![]() This may be why, five years after their debut, 4K discs are not the commercial hit that DVDs or Blu-ray discs were at the same point. More than that, you have to have a very good 4K television (not all of them are the same), and you have to calibrate it at least a little bit to tell much of a difference. But 4K? In some cases, it’s a lot better than Blu-ray in others, not so much. The DVD was far superior to VHS and Betamax tapes. Still, the inconsistency of 4K’s edge over lesser mediums is one way in which it differs from previous advances in home video. (In his Home Theater Forum reviews, he’s awarded five-star ratings to many more 4K discs, based on their fidelity to the original film.) I agree with Harris’ top picks and would add, among the 4K films in my collection, Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Die Hard, 1917, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Rear Window, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. His favorites include My Fair Lady, Vertigo, and Lawrence of Arabia, all shot on large-format film, and the 1977 horror film, shot in 35 mm, Suspiria among the Criterion 4Ks, he particularly admires Mulholland Drive for its immersive colors and clarity, even in the darkest scenes. ![]() The camera negatives don’t even have 4K’s worth of information.” Citizen Kane notwithstanding, Harris says the best candidates for 4K treatment are large-format films, mostly shot on 70 mm, with bright colors and black backdrops. Robert Harris, a prominent film-restoration artist who also reviews Blu-ray and 4K discs in Home Theater Forum, told me, “Probably 70 percent of these discs have no reason to be in 4K. By comparison, even the Warner Blu-ray-which was revelatory at the time, especially compared with the earlier DVD (or a 16 mm print that I’d seen in college)-seems dull and sluggish. It’s axiomatic that Kane was a movie whose bold images revolutionized cinema, but I’d never absorbed the full whack of its brilliance until I watched this 4K disc. HDR and WCG also include the array of grays between black and white, and the Criterion version shows a vast range of grays in the metallic sign, its palpable wear and tear, the full menace of the wire fence. Then there’s the opening scene, the camera slowly crawling up the gate of Kane’s property with the “No Trespassing” sign, the high fence, the mansion in the distance. In the 4K transfer, the bold capital letters that spell out Kane’s title beam like white neon against a jet-black background. So what could 4K do for a film like Citizen Kane, an 80-year-old movie in which the fastest-paced scenes show a little boy throwing snowballs and an old man messing up a room? The answer is clear even before the first shot. ![]() That’s why bright-colored, high-contrast, fast-action movies look so terrific in 4K UHD, and why they’ve been the ones that sales reps and early adopters play to show off their fancy new wares. WCG allows a wider swath of colors, 10-bit color depth supplies the extra colors, HDR extends the range of brightness and darkness within that swath, and 4K scanning lets you see all of this with a clarity and detail that nearly matches that of the original film. Each of these four technologies-4K, HDR, WCG, and 10-bit color depth-reinforces the others.
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