Gadgetory

hello everybody welcome to one of our sort of digest and really comprehension segments of CES 2015 as we are at this closing part of the show we are starting to put it in perspective and today right now it's TV's so our TV showing my favorite parts of the show every year I get to sit down with cats David cats Meyer who is the big brain behind TVs in our New York labs fits in there it's a 4k brain you know it's the size the regular brain but twice to either pitch yeah that's it okay so we're gonna round up what's going on in TV and of course TV needs no introduction here at this show this is it has always been a TV show first and foremost this is kind of your house yeah the TV's made great demos on the show floor they're big they're bright you can pack the booth with them you can show whatever you want on them using to demonstrate the TVs themselves or the technology you know in the TVs so yeah this has always been about the big TVs 105 inches you know we always have those let's get on to some of the specifics now 4k TVs are not new here but they seem to have flooded the floor with a sense of reality this year where are we going on 4k adoption in the year ahead well CES you're not gonna see anything but 4k TVs in the boos there's very few 1080p TVs you look around manufacturers have only announced 4k TVs they'll talk about there at 1080p DS a little bit but really they want even focus on 4k that's where the profit is that's the new technology is so you know 4k is pricing is gonna fall a lot we saw the Vizio P series announced last year yeah 50 inches $9.99 that's still a pretty good baseline price that Vizio P is kind of the go-to inexpensive 4k right now is that right yeah we're looking at some of these right here Vizio of course has always been a great well performing but value brand absolutely yeah okay and so if we're talking about a set that's a thousand bucks for it's not like any premium at all no it's it's like well you can get a $6.99 50-inch 1080p TV from Vizio that performs pretty good oh absolutely so you know the TV prices are at that point where guys are not eating that much profit especially from the 1080p s yeah so they'd have to get the 4k they have to get the prices up and interesting ly with that price erosion of 4k you see guys like Samsung and LG the leaders in TV introducing newer technologies that are even bigger and better than for Casey had curved you have su HD which is Samsung's new term for their you know better 4k TVs yeah and LG with this OLED says as we take a look at what's going on with these screens the resolution of 4k is better the amounts of color it can show are theoretically better and HDR we know that from still cameras yes what does HDR mean in a television because I didn't hear that at 4k around 4k last year yeah HDR something new this year they're pushing it was a Dolby vision sort of showed some demos last year but this year they're they're telling about a lot more HDR stands for high dynamic range the idea is that you can have a really dark black which you can get with the better TV technologies today and also a brighter white so picture like a glint of sunlight officer armor or a lightning or so the fireworks going off normally the bright parts blown out right yeah this is really bright specular highlights they're called and at the end of the day you see a really realistic picture the problem is that the displays of yesteryear cannot get that bright they can't produce you know our beloved plasma couldn't really get that bright yeah and OLED can get that dark and get that bright and Samsung says it's s UHD TVs Sudz if you will are able to get right who knows HUD's we don't really know yet they haven't told us how to pronounce it but those sets also get extremely bright up to up to a thousand nits so at the end of the day that's where they're going is to make this contrast which is a lot more visible by the way than 4k resolution yeah make that show up on the screen and give a lot of pop and yet it's a lot harder to sell contrast consumers have always seen these amazing pumped-up numbers I mean they'll put any number on a TV right and 4k they kind of get it's like okay it's a number it's a grid of pixels sounds better contrast is a harder sell color space is a harder sell but it's more important well it's true and those are a lot more difficult to manufacture it's a lot it's really easy to throw a whole bunch of pixels on an LCD TV LCD technology look at phones they have you know 4k resolution phones now they're tiny yeah so it's really easy to get you know a lot of pixels on the screen to get the the HDR stuff to get the high dynamic range to get the color space it requires you know better TVs and a lot better manufacturing more expensive TVs more LEDs and in the case of LG's OLED entirely new TV technology now I want to get to content around this because that's really the big issue the last thing I want to ask you while we're on the heart though is you and Ty and our TV lab oven very skeptical of curved TVs since the big splash a year ago yeah he's still there yeah I mean the curve didn't really do much for me I lived with it for a while in my house and the kids like playing with a funhouse mirror and daddy I'm why am I so fat but you know at when you when you look at these curved TVs and you're at the home you kind of forget about them after a while it kind of becomes more of an aesthetic decision and the Curt TV premium is still pretty high you know you're looking at a few hundred bucks at least between the curved and the flat versions so I don't think you know unless you really like that look it's worth springing for a curved TV thinking you're gonna get a more immersive picture which is what they try to tell you okay good to know let's go to the content 4k TV needs 4k content to look its best correct right streaming seems to be the majority of the content offerings this is first for TV and the previous resolution improvements it was carried largely on discs on broadcast on satellite this is the first Hardware up-res that's been carried on the back of the Internet right so the streaming is here because it's really hard to do discs again you know you got to get everybody to agree to a disc standard whereas with a Netflix or Amazon they can just go you know what let's just make some 4k streams and put them out there yeah so they're able to do that they have decoding built into the TVs to get that streaming out there one of the things we haven't seen that this show is a lot of announcements about new 4k content really hasn't happened much so that's true there's stuff to show you we've got the same old Netflix YouTube to a small degree who hulu amazon comcast a little bit right Comcast and Comcast and Amazon it's a yes last year announced they would have streaming 4k by the end of 2014 and they did barely they were late December when they finally were able to do it so you know these guys made those announcements we haven't seen really many new announcements we seen a couple 4k hardware announcements 4k Joey and a new prototype for the blu-ray player that's coming by the end of the year 4k blu-ray blu-ray player ok are we ready are we ready and here's that here's that Joey which by the way is a 4k set-top box that feeds off their DVR feeds off their existing DVR is that right right it's basically to get the 4k hardware connection that'll go to your TV out there it's basically their version of an Apple TV of a sort kind of but it's also it doesn't require a new DVR new 4k DVR from what I understand we're not sure exactly how it works but yeah this this thing is based just an add-on that enables your existing dish hard to do to do 4k okay now about that blu-ray disc are we really gonna rebuy our disc library for a third time well if Hollywood has its way yes you will imagine the Lord of the Rings 4k extended edition boxset you know with all of them The Hobbit and everything I mean that's that's that's what you're looking at there it is there there's the the first really mainstream prototype for KBD all right manufacturer panic Panasonic jumped in and did this I mean all these guys are gonna have 4k blu-ray players by the end of the year and we'll see a couple titles out and 4k blu-ray by the end of the year I think will be really interesting because you're gonna have 4k blu-ray on one end of the quality spectrum then you're gonna have 4k streaming Netflix and Amazon where sometimes a little hard to tell that it's 4k he's gonna say streaming doesn't always live up to the full potential of 4k does it no and and you know they've been doing this forever with streaming they'll say they're 1080p they'll you know and but it's not really it's just a slightly better version so they kind of play fast and loose with the definitions but you know you're gonna need a 4k TV relatively recent to get these streams on your set they'll be a little indicator that says you're getting 4k so you know you got the warm fuzzy anyway I was reading in one of your pieces that I think I guess it's Netflix the streaming 4k at about 15 or 16 megabits per second you need which for perch people have a good internet connection at home that's a pretty small slice for folks have a basic broadband connection that probably eats up most of it it's tough yeah and there's plenty of place the United States we just can't get that especially on a primetime evening you know depending on your on your provider yeah so you know all that is still up in the air the streaming thing is definitely the low end of the spectrum but you know 4k blu-ray will give the video files and people that are really into getting that BEC special quality finally an alternative so that'll be nice still crit me if I'm wrong I feel like we have more content available or imminent for 4k than we almost ever had on 3d blu-ray well you know you'd think to have a 3d blu-ray they're still coming out it's still quite a few of them nobody ever uses them though so you know you get the blu-ray pack it's got a 3d disc in there that you're just gonna you know use for as a coaster and then you can watch the actual blu-ray disc of frozen over and over and over and over that was a usage problem a real compelling use case problem all right the pipeline is we were talking about a lot of old content can be rescanned from film to 4k so Hollywood's got a huge vault they're looking at saying we can make new money on this and so that's part of the ideas they'll be able to pipe out the 4k they'll be able to add an HDR layer which is pretty cool and get that high dynamic range on a lot of they'll both those new technologies from an old vault print and Netflix cool they announced that they're gonna have HDR streaming at the show so that was one you know nice announcement it's a part of the Netflix recommended label separate announcements Netflix is also saying that they're gonna be certifying TVs for what it's worth maybe a little bit like THX certification whatever they'll put a badge on a TV but the that's it Netflix is doing HDR Dolby is also doing some HDR streaming so you're finally going to see some of this content come out which is again looks a little bit better than we've seen in terms of in 4k okay and there's no 4k broadcast coming in the u.s. anytime soon is there now they dabble in Asia and Europe I think yeah there's some stuff out there actually Japan is talking about 8k you know they're way ahead of the thing yeah but you know in terms of the u.s. the the cable companies and all those guys they're having a hard enough time delivering a decent you know in 1080i stream okay now let's talk about the last area that was really big here perhaps the biggest area was not the res or the tech but the policies and the offers we saw the beginnings of what might have been hard to imagine a year ago the unbundling of the big pay TV channel bundle yeah sling television yeah and Dish Network pretty much told the show with this announcements the $20 package that gives you access to ESPN a few Disney Channel's TNT CNN a basically basic cable there's no broadcast channels on there but for 20 bucks a month you can hook up an antenna or get you know for example Hulu Plus it's not just on TV it'll be on phones tablets through set-top boxes integrated into smart connected televisions about all they're missing I think is Apple and PlayStation for obvious competitive reasons all right and and you might see that a little bit later in the year there's also PlayStation view which is Sony's service they announced that before CES and they're saying it's going to come out around the same time as the dish service probably a little bit more expensive I've heard that'll say about 60 bucks for say say for you yeah and you get a lot more channels on it so there's this proliferation of ways to get cable without subscribing to cable utilize your internet connection for live TV as opposed to segmented episodic you know streaming stuff do you get from Netflix and Amazon you've been doing now but listen there's nothing quite like live and one key to these services that I think really appeals to the guys signing the contracts that you can't skip commercials so the issue with the DVR these people could go through the commercials now if you get this net for this you know disservice you're not be able to blow through the commercials anymore so what about that because there's no DVR in the mix right and it is carrying the full broadcast commercial schedule that's why Plus has like 1.5 stars on the you know Apple Store it's like nobody really likes those cameras yeah you get what you pay for it interesting okay that's that's a very good point now as we look forward here what was the biggest story in television 4k TVs 4k content or unbundling television I mean it was unbundling it was it was the content side I think I mean the 4k TVs have been around for a while I think the TV Hardware stuff you know it's really cool that they're getting these really high-end TVs with you know they can get some really good image quality and especially with HDR that stuff's a little bit in the future and the prices aren't really mainstream yet the TVs the 4k TVs that will be mainstream prices aren't gonna have much better picture than the current 1080p TVs so it's gonna be interesting on the hardware side to see where the pricing goes but I think these guys are trying to get as much premium as they can while we're telling me that by end of the year perhaps the 1080p TVs they're almost they most moved to the bargain category which makes a lot of folks feel really good with what went in for the holidays the manufacturers are holding your breath before ke TVs don't go to the bargain category by that point to just give us a quick peek when you get back to base back to New York and you're back in the TV lab what are you guys looking forward to getting in soon maybe for the first time or a refreshed a lot aligned well we have right now in the lab a ten thousand dollar television that I'm pretty excited to review I got a host expensive you've had in it's the LG 65 inch OLED so we're gonna get a chance to crack that we saw actually some 77 inch OLED 's this year at the show LG's putting out a couple flat OLED TVs I called it the best TV ever last year it really is a beautiful TV technology again really expensive nobody's gonna be buying these things anytime soon unless you know you got money to burn but I really like the sort of OLED versus you know LCD it's it's kind of like it fills my heart with you know my hankering for plasma gets replaced by wonderful eggs right OLED gets back into that really gorgeousness but it's almost wet looking right looks beautiful that was that was that was the beauty of plasma had a certain certain juice to it you know just it was just different than crystals right right when plasma goes away we get a new thing and so it's it's more than ya alright folks that's the estimate of the definitive take on where things are going to television here at this show and it's of course the center of CES still in so many ways the biggest the biggest and the biggest in every definition at the show I want to thank David Katz Meyer and thank you for watching as we've digested TV here at CES 2015 i'm brian coulis relied from CES in Las Vegas