The 4K TV future

How does it work at home?

For a home installation, you’ll experience 4K on one of the TVs we’ve mentioned, or via a home projector. Both use the TV-standard version of 4K which is 3840 x 2160 pixels.

Just like your current full-HD TV, 4K will accept HDMI connections. HDMI 1.4 supports 4K, and many of the current models of AV receiver will pass it through from a 4K video source. You do need HDMI cables that are fully version 1.4 complaint though, and this can be tricky because it won’t be written on the actual cable. You’ll need to check the packaging.

Under that fancy new 4K TV, you’ll have some kind of player.

It could be a dedicated 4K player with internet storage and a USB socket for a thumbdrive or external hard drive. Or it could be a Blu-ray player with 4K compatibility and upscaling. It’s hard to say for sure, because consumer level 4K players don’t exist yet.

Will it use discs ?

With current technology, an external hard drive or media server is the most likely transport for 4K content. That’s because 4K needs masses and masses of data. How much? Well, industry insiders suggest – using current compression rates – a full-length 4K feature would need something over 200 25GB Blu-ray discs.

Of course distributors will be able to use compression algorithms to reduce this size down to something almost manageable, but the challenge is very real.

There’s a 4K film you can buy right now called ‘Timescapes’ shown below (it’s mostly slow-motion and timelapse landscape cinematography of the American south west –  check it out at www.timescapes.org) which is being hyped in pretty much every HD format you can think of.

The 4K format of Timescapes that’s most sensible for a home viewer (4096 x 2304) comes in at 21GB and is sent to you on a USB stick. It costs US$99.95, but uses H.264 compression so it’s not, you know, pristine.

So you could go mad and get the low-compression 4K Cineform version which takes up a whopping 120GB and is sent on an actual hard drive. It costs US$300 though.

While these sizes aren’t disc-friendly and might seem like a real roadblock to the uptake of 4K, it’s worth remembering that a 1TB hard drive can cost as little as $60.

How about streaming?

At the moment, there are no streaming service offering 4K resolutions.

YouTube briefly offered it, then removed it. And who can blame them? The bandwidth required is in the order of 160 megabits a second, or nearly double what the National Broadband Network will initially provide.

Again though, this might not be as bad as it looks. Most home network routers now support a wired connection speed of 1000 megabits a second, and higher-end routers can support a wireless connection speed of 600 megabits a second.

So 4K streaming within the home – off, say, a home media server – should be possible already, especially for the kind of AV enthusiast prepared to spend $20K on a TV.

Still, with a compressed full length 4K movie representing around 20GB of data, any movie buff would be wise to keep a close eye on their monthly download quota.