Gadgetory

ignoring the abortion that was stereoscopic 3d blu-ray the entertainment industry pushes a revolutionary new media format down our throats with promises that it will completely change the way we enjoy our movies about once every 10 years but while DVD promised very mainstream benefits over VHS in addition to better image quality more convenient storage increased longevity and no rewinding blu-rays adoption has been challenged at every stage from HD DVD and the less obvious image quality benefits versus DVD on the average viewers TV in the early days - the cost and convenience advantages of online streaming today so does 4k blu-ray offer up an obvious enough benefit to bring online streaming aficionados back to physical media or failing that is it at least enough to prompt enthusiasts to upgrade let's talk about that mass drop is hosting a drop for the high five n 8350 headphones which you can get for $99.99 u.s. dollars check it out at the link in the video description let's open up with the gear that you'll need to enjoy your shiny new 4k blu-rays 4k blu-rays use the BD excel format which can hold up to a hundred and twenty eight gigs on a triple-layer disk but it isn't backwards compatible so you'll need a new player we chose the Xbox one s since add no support isn't terribly important to anyone without a redonkulous speaker set up in a dedicated theater room and it costs the same as the standalone players anyway while having much more functionality next you'll need a 4k TV HDR support strongly preferred as we'll get into in more depth later I'll be using LG's signature g6 65 inch OLED since it's one of if not the best home HD our experiences at the moment and representative of what will be more widely available in the year or two to come after that you will need more expensive 4k blu-ray discs we chose these movies because we wanted to experience many of the different types of original formats that could be converted to 4k blu-ray and finally you'll need the as-yet uncracked hdcp 2.2 support at every link in your data chain which usually means a special port or two on the back of your receiver and TV plus some faffing about Sims from my experience it is buggy as heck at the moment I actually ended up taking my receiver out of the mix halfway through our session because it just stopped handshaking with the Xbox 1's now let's talk about the test our resident Cinema dork Brandon and I shut the blinds and chained ourselves to my couch for the better part of a day doing everything from watching longer uninterrupted chunks of the films to pausing as close to the same frames as we could and pixel peeping at least that's what we did once we finished bickering over what settings to use on the TV for HDR it was simple since all the normal picture profile modes are replaced with three HDR ones we just turned off obvious nonsense like clear motion and edge enhancement and set it to HDR for a dark room but for our standard blu-ray comparison system a PC playing lossless MKV rips over the network in MPC HC we eventually settled on the ISF expert dark mode with neutral color temperature all those enhancements off and either standard or wide color gamut depending on the film more on that later first up the lego movie the first blu-ray HDR experience for either of us since this was our first crack at a B evaluation we ended up trying to tune the non HDR image in TV quite a bit to get the most fair comparison this was one movie where wide color gamut got blu-ray close to the vibrancy of HDR without looking like best buy TV syndrome but what our compensations lacked was subtlety in this scene the HDR version looks like a blueish shadow on a gray Street the Blu ray looks like a blue Street as for the 4k upsampling there is a difference in wide shots with distant text or objects but from a normal viewing distance I would describe it as not a huge deal next up Sicario we found our wide gamut setting was overpowering in this film and went back to normal in this night scene the higher bitrate and increased color depth give the sky a more natural less bandit appearance and in this one the parking lot of the bars darkness and the brightness of the lights make the bar seem like a beacon or an oasis more than just a building HDR had a true emotional impact moving indoors again the difference is there in the vibrancy of the sign on the character's right as she walks in and in the lighting on our character's face as she sits at the bar in the blu-ray version it looks like there's a light shining on her face in HDR she is clearly lit in multiple colors from multiple different sources just like she would be if she was sitting in a bar the revenant was a funny one for us as a movie that was mostly shot in natural light at native 4k we were expecting to be blown away and we did get a difference I mean look at the difference in color in the burned church scene here between blu-ray and 4k blu-ray but we also observed that we could compensate for a lot of that difference by shifting the tint of the TV to minus 23 and in the bear scene we saw the same thing again leading us to agree on a couple of things one that 4k resolution on the disc itself had a negligible impact to the viewing experience and that HDR didn't affect the appearance of the lighting nearly as much as we'd expected it wasn't until a fire lit scene that our tin tak was defeated and the HDR version flexed its range muscles but even then while the teal cast of the first two scenes may have been closer to the director's vision the more blue like appearance unlike in Sicario didn't affect the emotional impact of the scene though to be clear this isn't so much a criticism of the HDR master as much as it is praised for the blu-ray master the 4k version of the amazing spider-man 2 is simply put a disappointment in side-by-side comparisons sure the cop cars are a little whiter and the shadows are a little deeper but for a 35 millimeter film to 4k digital scan I was expecting more than just more accurate representation of the filmic look we both were amazing spider-man 2 was easily the low point of our HDR day which is okay because our last title Life of Pi made us immediately forget about it holy actual balls this movie looks like the difference between a competent if unexceptional color grading job and turning the TV into a window into a completely different reality in my living room the visual difference once again isn't in the increased resolution which makes sense since it's up sampled from a 2k master but rather from the incredible difference in the way the scenes lighting looks cloth shadows skin tones this is the first movie that's made me sip and go Wow now that I've seen the HDR version I have no desire whatsoever to settle for the blu-ray words don't do it justice it's absolutely beautiful which leads us pretty well into the conclusion which is a little complicated first the good while I'm still not sold on 4k from a normal viewing distance until home tvs are a hundred inches or greater HDR is not a gimmick no amount of tooling around with your TV's menu can simulate its effects across an entire film and we did try my TV's fake Oh simulated HDR mode and done right it dramatically improves the movie viewing experience and I'll be surprised if streaming HDR can compete with 4k blu-ray HDR since traditional blu-ray already blows streaming out of the water in terms of color depth though I'd love to be proven wrong here second up some big problems so first the increased cost versus the benefit is the highest we've ever seen with only a V nerds and movie buffs likely to be able to tell the difference without a side-by-side comparison sorry to all of you guys but most of the world doesn't calibrate their TV and uses the built-in speakers and second if we're being honest it's not actually here yet there's always that transition period every time where we have a new standard where the hardware is like sort of there and the standards are like sort of there but the content needs time to catch up and in this case even the content that does exist well frankly most of it doesn't benefit from it in the way that content a year or two from now will so for now now then I'd say the money is better spent on almost anything else calibrating your existing TV buying literally twice as many movies or even a comfy couch I do plan to invest in it eventually when more than you know one out of five discs that I buy feel like I really got my money's worth but I will also be waiting for hdcp 2.2 to be cracked so that I'm not paying extra for the privilege of putting physical media into a slot instead of streaming everything off of mine as tunnel there is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open Internet whatever products it is that you want to buy on Amazon or anywhere else yes my friends tunnel bear makes it so the services and websites that you use cannot see your IP address or where you're from as soon as you turn tunnel bear on it encrypts your connection and lets you tunnel through a different country altogether Tunnel bear has a top rated privacy policy and does not log your activity and you can try it for free with five hundred megabytes of data with no credit card required then if you choose to get a year of unlimited data you can save 10% my gonna tunnel bear comm /l tt all right so thanks for watching guides if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured at Amazon in the video description also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button and check out our latest video over on channel super fun