How much detail is too much detail? If the high definition clarity of standard Blu-ray movies isn’t quite enough for you, the good news is that it just got even more crystal clear with the arrival of 4K Blu-ray to the UK. Not all movie releases will be getting the super mega hyper definition treatment, but there are more than enough big hitters in terms of visual impact to make it worth take big a look at.
This will be like the second coming of the messiah for people who went early on buying a massive 4K TV, because up until now there hasn’t been all that many opportunities to really open it up. The release of the first wave of 4K Blu-ray movies, which you can see a selection of below, will be your first chance to let the huge flat-screen monolith in your front room burn as bright as the massive entertainment bonfire that it’s meant to be.
For anyone that grew up with Betamax and then VHS, you know that if you watched one of the old school tapes now the action would look hazy and nearly unrecognisable. Even if you take the nightmarish fuzz and crackle of tracking out of the equation, or the crazy faff of cleaning your heads (that’s not a euphemism, it was an actual thing), you could still barely make out what the hell’s going on half of the time, especially during a certain crucial scene in Basic Instict.
However, if you’re being really honest with yourself, did you have any complaints when you were a kid watching a dodgy copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on a council estate in the midlands? Probably not, which takes us back to the question at hand: how much detail is too much detail?
For us, there’s a pretty simple answer to the question, which is that new and improved definition technology only becomes irrelevant when you can no longer spot the difference between it and the previous model with the naked eye. Luckily for 4K television set manufacturers the world over, the latest upgrade is frustratingly easy to spot, so if you’re still languishing in the 1080p, or worse still (gasp and indeed shock horror), 720p, of standard HD televisions then you might as well make like a rock star, take it to you’re nearest hotel and do the honourable thing.
OK, so maybe that’s a step too far, but the reality is that this is the technical leap forward that television manufacturers like Samsung, Panasonic and Sony have pinned their flat-screen caps on. So much so in fact that it has completely overshadowed the other great TV hope, 3D TV, which suddenly looks dead in the water in the face of low adoption from customers and the subsequent removal of 3D televisions from manufacturer product lines.
For us, it’s a bit of a downer that 3D TV is out of the equation for the time being, because when it works well it looks amazing, but with such low uptake manufacturers have been left with no alternative but to look at other areas for new technological steps forward and 4K TV appears to have won the battle.
To keep you up to speed with the IT department and retired engineers everywhere, 4K is essentially a bajillion more pixels than you’re used to seeing, which results in your iris wildly flickering to pick out detail that you never knew was there. Dot Cotton’s hitherto unnoticed youthful complexion, Richard Madeley’s moobies and Sharon Stone’s fast-paced fleshy bit flash would all stand out so much more starkly under the aegis of 4K definition.
4K Blu-ray players
The slight snag for owners of 4K TVs is that you’ll also need to buy yourself a 4K Blu-ray player to accompany your shiny tower of visual glory to be able to watch the new 4K Blu-ray movies that have started to arrive. You could argue that if you can afford a 4K TV then you should be able to sum up the spondules for the Blu-ray player too, but it’s worth shopping around to find yourself a bargain.
While you can save money on a cheap 4K up-scaling Blu-ray, it wouldn’t be true ultra high definition 4K, so you wouldn’t be getting the full experience out of your TV. The dedicated 4K Blu-ray players are the only real option if you want every pixel of clarity that you can get and they’re in the region of £500 so you’re going to need to be a wealthy film buff to get on the gravy train with either the Panasonic DMP-UB900 or the Samsung UBM-K8500 being your main two choices at the moment.
As time goes by, these will start to get more affordable as they become more mainstream and more manufacturers release competitor models, but with talk of 4K action for both the Nintendo NX and the PlayStation 4.5, you might want to wait until E3 2016 before making any decisions. If either of them are announce with a 4K Blu-ray tech bundle then it’ll be a significant game-changer for both Blu-ray players and games consoles alike.
4K Blu-ray launch movies
To launch the arrival of 4K Blu-ray movies and players to the UK, there are a selection of Blu-rays available from April 2016 onward. These include The Amazing Spider-Man, Kingsman, Total Recall, X-Men: Days Of Future Past, Exodus, The Life Of Pi, The Martian, Fantastic 4, Mad Max: Fury Road and Hitman: Agent 47. There are also 4K remastered versions of Ghostbusters, Taxi Driver and Bad Boys I and II.
These will be followed by Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice later in 2016 and we’re expecting a further batch of releases in the coming months. It’s obviously early days for the technology, but it is the future of home entertainment for the time being, so it’s going to be interesting to see whether or not 4K Blu-rays fair much better than their 3D counterparts did when they were the flavour of the month.
