Many people are happy to sacrifice quality for convenience, and with streaming all about instant access, this is where it makes up ground. MORE: Dolby Atmos: What is it? How can you get it? 4K versus: content
And if you don’t have an Atmos setup, the disc defaults to Dolby TrueHD 7.1. There aren’t many Atmos-compatible Blu-rays right now, but it is standard spec on all the UHD Blu-rays we’ve seen so far. Netfix is confident that it won’t be doing that any time soon. Then there’s Dolby Atmos, which makes your surround taller and more immersive, with eerily accurate effects placement. Audio quality between standard Blu-ray and 4K BD is hard to differentiate. The weight, scale, detail and dynamic range on disc is a lot more intense, making for a more cinematic experience. A few titles offer that in 7.1, but mostly it’s a 5.1.Ĭompare that to the uncompressed Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD Master Audio you get on Blu-rays, typically in 5.1 but regularly in 7.1. So what you tend to get from streaming is compressed Dolby Digital Plus. Most people watching video on streaming services will not be doing so with a surround sound system. This is one area where streaming loses out rather badly. MORE: Panasonic DMP-UB900 review 4K versus: sound quality
MORE: Ultra HD Blu-ray: everything you need to know
4k uhd vs 4k hdr 1080p#
In conclusion: 4K streaming and 1080p Blu-rays have their own strengths and weaknesses, but both are easily beaten by the dynamism and subtlety witnessed on 4K Blu-ray. With HDR, the picture is gorgeous, and we reckon it is the future of home cinema. High peak brightness means greater increments at both ends of the light spectrum, which equals more detail in the lightest and darkest areas. Better contrast means a much harder visual kick. More colours makes for more realistic shading. One of the best things about 4K BDs is high dynamic range (HDR) which ramps up contrast, brightness and colour range. That’s just with the standard dynamic range, a fairer fight against 4K streaming and Blu-ray. Colours are vivid and subtly shaded, especially in dark scenes. The picture is crisp, with stunning clarity making the most of fine textures. The video quality of a UHD Blu-ray (played on Panasonic's excellent DMP-UB900 Ultra HD Blu-ray player) is leaps and bounds over 4K streaming and regular Blu-ray. With 4K streaming and 1080p Blu-rays almost neck-and-neck: slightly greater resolution and sharpness of the streaming versus greater subtlety in colours and contrast on the Blu-ray, we look at 4K on disc. You may not get the outright sharpness of a good 4K stream, but it is at maximum resolution the moment the video starts playing, and the latest 4K TVs do a good job of upscaling. Shading, especially in the dark, is more nuanced on the Blu-ray. We compare a 4K stream with a 1080p Blu-ray. The faults are less apparent in bright, busy and fast-moving scenes, but darkness proves a challenge.
Regardless of the picture resolution, it impacts on the picture’s overall subtlety. The usual markers, such as the definition and texture on hair, skin, clothing and buildings are all very impressive, especially for a large screen, and you can sit a lot closer than you could before with a 1080p TV.īut this is a streamed video, and it is subject to the usual streaming niggles: higher compression and low bitrates. But after a few seconds of buffering, the picture loads up to 1080p, and then 4K. It doesn’t start well – the Sony Columbia logo couldn’t be blurrier if we’d smeared Vaseline on the screen. We begin streaming from Amazon Instant Video.
4k uhd vs 4k hdr tv#
But how does it compare against BD and 4K BD? We watch The Amazing Spider-Man 2, one of the only titles available across all formats, on a Panasonic TX-65DX902B – at the time of writing the best 4K TV we’ve seen.
4k uhd vs 4k hdr full#
What you get is four times the pixels of a Full HD 1080p resolution – approximately 8.3m pixels.