# 4K Upscaling Blu ray players???



## phillihp23

What exactly does a 4K upscaling Blu ray player do? 
Does it do what it seems to say?
Can i play a blu-ray disc or DVD disc and have it dispaly in 4K resolution?

Of course it would be assumed you would need a 4K compatible Receiver and Projector along with the player.

Anyone with information or experience with one of these players please comment.

Are they really this cheap?
Sony BDPS790 3D Blu-ray Player with Wi-Fi $248


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## tonyvdb

You will get varying results depending on what processor they use to do the upscaling. Its no different than the players that upconvert DVD to 1080p some do it well and others are awful. My personal thoughts are that "ultra HD" is much more a gimmick like 3D was/is until there is content to support it available.


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## phillihp23

tonyvdb said:


> My personal thoughts are that "ultra HD" is much more a gimmick like 3D was/is until there is content to support it available.


I would agree with that statement. I guess you could say being on the edge of the newest technology is not always the best idea. Kinda like HD DVD. I was all over that...:yikes: 

Until they make the technology more mainstream, and it becomes common place in the home, they really don't have a vested interest in making commercially available 4k movie Discs. Theaters on the other hand I can see moving quickly to a 4k format across the board. They have to give everyone a reason to keep going to the theaters with the increasingly low price point big screen tv's in the home.


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## RBTO

The player (or any device that upscales) guesses at missing information based on what is available in a lower resolution file and, as mentioned, some upscalers do better than others, but none give as good an image as a 4K native image. To answer the second part of your question, the display system, being a projector or other device, would have to be capable of 4K imaging before you could put that 4K information (native or upscaled) on the screen.

Once you get actual 4K information on the screen, it's left to optical theory as to whether you'd actually see it or not. Once the angular separation between two points decreases to a certain value, your eye cannot see them as two separate objects anymore. For a TV image, the angular values depend on screen distance and size. The limit for an individual depends on their vision acuity and if you have poor vision, you might even be waisting money on HD.

The following illustration is a good one for determining screen size and distance for a given image quality (HD, or even 4K UHD). Keep in mind, it is based on an individual with good eyesight. As eyesight quality decreases, the slope of the lines will decrease in proportion (meaning you'd have to sit closer to a given screen size to appreciate the image details).


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## phillihp23

RBTO....Thanks for the info. That graph is especially interesting. This is why i find HTS to be such a great site. So many people with such great information, never too many resources. :T


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## RBTO

phillihp23 said:


> RBTO....Thanks for the info. That graph is especially interesting. This is why i find HTS to be such a great site. So many people with such great information, never too many resources. :T


You're quite welcome. In this case, thank's goes to Carlton Bale for the chart. It is an interesting chart and shows that sometimes, even at movie theaters, 2K (which is just a tad beyond 1080 HD) is sufficient for part of the audience.


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## Doug Blackburn

The thing is... who cares about 4K upscaling in a disc player?

The only 2 home-oriented 4K display products so far Sony's 1000ES projector and Sony's 84" LCD panel ($25,000 each) upconvert everything they receive to 4K so what's the point? They do a fantastically good job of the upconversion also and the projector (can't speak for the LCD panel) even allows you to select whether you use the higher resolution of the projector to near elimnate visible aliasing... the other choice simply turns each HDTV pixel into 4 pixels. The option that reduces aliasing "fills" in those choppy corners to eliminate stairstepping on any lines that are not perfectly vertical or perfectly horizontal. Since these two 4K displays (actually, 3.8K is more correct, but the real name of the new tech is UHD or UltraHD) already, apparently, do a "perfect" job of converting HD resolution to UHD and the disc players with "4K" upconversion lack the 2 options present in the Sony projector (to improve/eliminate aliasing or just convert each HD pixel to 4 pixels without trying to eliminate aliasing). I have to say, having spent 3 months total with Sony 1000ES projectors, the option to improve/elminate alising is EXCELLENT and the 1000ES does produce UHD images from HD images that look obviously better than HD images from ANY "normal" HD projector (I've had projectors here ranging in price from $3000 to $55,000 so I've seen quite a range and I've calibrated quite a few others, but none have produced images as excellent as Sony's 1000ES. (though it still has a little ghosting... 30-60 seconds worth over the course of a 2 hour movie... on average... but you only see the ghosting for 1-3 seconds at a time, only DLP displays have operated 100% ghost free on every problem disc I have).

Anyway... back to "4K" upconversion... it's not really a useful feature if the available UHD displays already upconvert fantastically well. So it's not something to get excited about. Maybe some day there will be some cheap UHD display that does a horrible upconversion job (just converting each HD pixel to 4 UHD pixels would be as bad as it could possibly get though, and even that doesn't look bad... until you see the anti-aliasing applied. Upconverting HD to UHD is trivial compared to trying to get something viewable on HD displays from DVDs where every little advantage/improvement can make the DVD look better on an HD display (though moving twice as far back from the screen is still the best way to make DVD look good on HD displays).


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## lcaillo

Nicely stated Doug. Perhaps in other threads you could elaborate on what aliasing is and why anti-aliasing filters are necessary, and on the ghosting you mentioned.


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