A new 4K Blu-ray player is well within the price range for most movie lovers, and its a great upgrade to future-proof your home collection. Now that 4K Blu-ray is a few years along, pricing of both the players and the discs themselves are coming down drastically. Almost every title you watch in 4K Blu-ray is like seeing your favorites for the first time. Storied classics like Apocalypse Now and 2001: A Space Odyssey look absolutely stunning in 4K Blu-ray, while modern titles like Star Wars: The Last Jedi and movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe offer definite upgrades over their DVD and Blu-ray counterparts. Most new popular titles are available in 4K Blu-ray, and more and more classic titles are being announced all the time. But 4K Blu-ray is established enough now that title selection is really picking up steam. Title selection is growing quicklyĮvery time a new format is adopted, it seems like the studios are slow to roll out titles, especially beloved catalog titles like The Wizard of Oz. Studios will also bring the original filmmakers in to consult on the remastering and HDR grading of new 4K Blu-rays, which means you are truly seeing these films the way they were meant to be seen. The newer 4K Blu-ray is a vast improvement over the older muddy-looking Blu-ray with lossy sound. One major example of this was Mission: Impossible, a title that came out early in the age of Blu-ray. Upgrading to 4K gives these neglected titles a new lease on life because in most instances the studio has to go back and remaster them for the 4K format. Studios often re-package titles with older masters in new packaging when they re-release them in stores. Sadly, sometimes these early release cycle titles don’t necessarily get remastered later in the life cycle of formats, even Blu-ray. Sometimes they used older masters, employed older compression techniques like MPEG-2 (versus more efficient and higher-quality MPEG-4 AVC H.265/HEVC codecs) or used older lossy sound formats like Dolby Digital. It was often true that in the early days of both DVD and Blu-ray, the first titles out in those formats didn’t necessarily look or sound as great as they should have. 4K is truly a cinephile’s dream! 4K titles improve upon older masters That gives you a true representation of what the filmmaker intended you to see (and hear). When studios go back and scan original negatives for a 4K Blu-ray release, you are seeing more clarity than you’d find in a highly-duplicated film print in theaters. In fact, many recent 4K Blu-ray restorations present the film even better than when it was first projected in theaters. With most titles, and especially classics shot on film, 4K really brings out the depth and detail of film that you’ve never seen at home before. Older “lossy” formats found on DVDs and streaming platforms sound pale in comparison. Newer lossless audio formats like DTS-HD Master Audio and “object-based” surround sound formats like Dolby Atmos further heighten the realism and rival the real theater experience, truly immersing the viewer in three-dimensional sound. The picture quality is four times sharper than standard Blu-ray (and many times that of DVD), and high dynamic range (HDR) more closely recreates the range of brightness and color the human eye sees. Sound is often also highly compressed in streaming formats.ĤK Blu-ray preserves the picture and sound quality intended by the filmmakers, often rivaling the presentations found in your neighborhood movie theater. It may not be obvious in every scene, but you are more likely to notice less vibrant colors, pixelation or blocking and other compression-related anomalies with streaming titles. No matter how robust your Internet speeds are, there is a lot of compression applied to get it down the pipe. But there are a lot of factors that seriously impact the quality that reaches your TV. Here are some good reasons to make the jump to 4K Blu-ray: Picture and sound qualityĭon’t get us wrong - streaming movies online, even ones purchased for your personal movie collection, are certainly convenient. While it seems like streaming digital movies are the future of home video, reports of the death of physical media, to quote Mark Twain, “have been greatly exaggerated.” You may have noticed the selection of DVDs and Blu-rays shrinking on store shelves, but there are very real advantages to purchasing Blu-rays even now, especially with 4K Ultra HD Blu-rays becoming more common. When’s the last time you bought a physical copy of a movie?
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