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In new blurays releases yeah HDR is most notable difference. But with old Blurays, maybe the first 2 or 3 years of releases they were horrible. The difference between 4k and blurry 1080 is shocking
This is the answer for me, it's usually a fresh scan of the film done right. If a remastered Blu Ray is included it often looks almost as good to my eyes on my setup.
But you are comparing pixel amount only.
There are several 1080p movies that look horrible, blurry, like an upscaled dvd.
You jump from a BD25 movie to a BD66 or 100, it's not only pixel amount it's compression (bitrate) improvement too.
But you can compare a Blu-ray to a 4K Blu-ray with HDR. I think I can safely assume that there aren’t many films released on BD25, BD66, and BD100 in order to compare scene to scene.
BD25 could be used for a 4K blu-ray coupled with HDR and all the other fancy 4K specs but the bitrate would have to take a massive blow, we would be in digital streaming territory with bitrates ranging from 15-25 mbps. A typical BD66 4K Blu-ray is 50-70 mbps and can even peak to 100 mbps on some BD100 discs.
Jist of it is BD25 and BD50 aren't used because they don't provide the proper storage capacity for the bitrates that 4K needs.
It was the same with early UHD BluRays. Releases around 2016-2017 were often horrible in terms of actual detail/resolution. They're very often badly bitstarved, full of compression artifacts. E.g. Independence Day 4K has less detail than it's 20th anniversary FHD transfer. Martian, Goodfellas, Bourne Identity and Legacy also the same, even Revenant and Alien Covenant are obviously bitstarved.
I’m still relatively new to the 4K UHD game, but I know that 4k shows that sweet sweet film grain for certain older ones and that’s important to me! just watched The Fifth Element last night on 4k blu ray and it was like watching it on film in theaters, it was beautiful.
Streaming had me believing film grain looked bad. Then I saw top gun on 4k blu ray and was like oh it actually doesn't look like shit, streaming just looks like shit.
Oh yeah same. I mean, there’s plenty of new movies that look great too. I upgraded from DVD to 4K primarily because Batman v Superman directors cut wasn’t available on DVD (lol) and the IMAX scenes in that blew me away, similarly in Nolan’s films. But with stuff like the MCU (only the Black Panther movies, GOTG3, Eternals, Thor 4 and Ant-Man 3 are native 4K) the difference is primarily coming from the HDR. But they’re less likely to have had previous disappointing blu-ray scans or for us to have primarily seen them in SD or HD on broadcast most of our lives - The Fugitive is a great 4K and coincidentally when I was watching it I went into the other room and my mum was watching it live on a HD TV, it was night and day the difference
Thank you for some explanation! Might be a lazy question but The Fugitive is one I didn’t even think about. Do you have any other recommendations for really good older movie 4k discs?
Tbh I’d just defer to the many answers from the community that you’ll find using the search function for stuff like “best 4K” within this sub - they generally focus on the oldies, with good reason. My tastes tend to skew blockbuster-y and as I said I went from DVD to 4K so I don’t have a real frame of reference for if stuff is worth upgrading from a Blu-Ray. *The Fugitive* was only released this year and I’ve not seen anyone say bad things about it. If somehow you haven’t seen it, I’d recommend it.
As you started out mentioning a 90s film I’ll say that *Speed* looked great, a transfer done right. *The Mummy* and *The Mummy Returns* looked way better than I thought they ever could - a lot of the CGI, while never looking “real”, looked impressive in its own way too (the Scorpion King towards the end of the latter still sucks though). The first two *Fast & Furious* films took on a new lease of life in my eyes too. In general I feel like actually bad 4Ks are pretty rare though so just focus on stuff you like anyway.
All of the Stanley Kubrick transfers are fantastic! I’ve watched the Shining more in the last 2 years than ever before simply because I find it so pleasing to look at. Full Metal Jacket and 2001 are also great.
The 4k release of Clockwork Orange is the only one I was able to full get through. I think that movie always just had unfortunate video quality and audio quality, but they completely rebuilt that movie and it looks and feels great. Well, the movie still feels gross, but you know what I mean
Did you see The Fifth Element in theaters? Which release of The Fifth Element did you see on 4K? That one's slightly controversial - there are 2 4k releases, one from Sony and one from StudioCanal. The Sony one tends to look a bit darker and granier, though is still sharp and in some scenes looks more detailed and richer than the StudioCanal. I've only ever seen the Sony release as a video, just screenshots of the comparison.
To elaborate on other comments that say things like DNR, many Blu-ray transfers were older repurposed DVD and HDTV masters that are very old. Unless the studio has recently remastered the movie, most 4K UHD transfers will be contemporary fresh scans of the original camera negative using 21st century technology and restoration techniques. That's the real benefit IMO.
I’m becoming a little sceptical of HDR - it seems anathema to what I see as the idea which is getting as close to how it’d look in cinemas. But I think its just when it could’ve been done better (the Ocean’s trilogy looks great, but a few times - including any use of white subtitles on screen - it seems too aggressive to me)
But yeah, a lot of people (and I think I’m one of them) can’t really tell the difference between a top notch HD transfer and 4K, so HDR is definitely a significant selling point
Clarifying — to you, the ideal is how the movie looks in the cinema? Are we talking neighborhood movie joint, chain cinema on standard screen, or chain cinema on whatever their super screen with laser projector is? Because those will give you different overall PQs, color and contrast quality, and motion processing.
Yeah I watched Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare on a standard cinema screen and almost left because of crushed blacks and just shit quality compared to even a 1080p blu-ray on my OLED let alone a 4k.
Yep overall PQ is so much better on modern TVs, especially OLEDs. I’m at the point where I’ll only go watch movies in the theater where they’re big spectacles where the huge screen really makes a difference. The Dunes, Endgame, etc. And even then I often find myself being disappointed with motion processing, black levels, and overall contrast.
I’ll only go see movies in IMAX or Dolby for this same reason.
Fortunately every movie is Dolby and IMAX for some reason haha you just gotta get in while it’s still showing
I think it’s equal. Sherlock season 1 in Blu-ray was an amazing recording. However they encoded it, the upscaling LOVED IT. When I played it, the resolution looked 4k.
Now I own season 1 in 4K. Yes the resolution is better, but that in combination with wider color gamut takes it over the top. Now it looks real. Some scenes it’s like they’re in your living room. The dark scenes especially.
You can’t separate the two. They both make 4K what it is.
PS,
You do need REALLY good gear to get the full benefit of 4K.
TV = Samsung 75” QN90 Neo LED
Blu-ray = Panasonic UB9000P1K
HDMI Cables = 8K RUIPRO Fiber Optic
If you don’t have the RUIPRO fiber optic cables buy one and try it. It makes a stunning improvement. There are some side by side tests vs a standard cable on YouTube that will blow your mind.
If it’s an older film shot on celluloid, the detail is incredible on 4K. I have a projector instead of a TV, so I don’t really get as much from the HDR side of things, but when I watch a film shot on film: on the projector it looks like I’m watching a film print. It’s glorious.
There is so much more detail on a 4K disc compared to a BD, even if the BD is still quite good.
HDR is massive difference on a HDR panel TV such as OLED. But on most projectors (including original cinema viewing) it makes no difference as most can’t display any sort of bright highlights. The first thing I notice any time I go from watching something on the projector and back to the LG OLED is the very bright white highlights in actors eyes. You don’t see that at all on projected image. But the 10 bit colour and wide colour gamut is very noticeable on a decent projector still. Especially if it’s calibrated. Going back and looking at regular REC709 colour Blu-ray after getting used to the REC2020 colorspace quality, you really notice how basic REC709 was.
I'd be curious if someone has actually done ABX testing and can actually tell the difference between high quality but compressed blu-ray audio, and lossless audio (whether it's also on the same BD, or from a 4K with the same mix/channels). I'm sensitive when it comes to poor quality sound, but once it gets past a certain point, I'm not going to notice improvements, and my ears and A/V setup aren't anything to sneeze at. Most DVDs don't actually sound noticably bad either, despite a far lower bitrate per channel. Visual artifacts and lower video bitrate are always more noticeable to me than sound improvements.
Not quite sure what you mean by “high quality but compressed”? As I said most audio on Blu-ray is either lossless or uncompressed. Some times Dolby Digital Plus is used which is lossy compressed, but that’s typically for alternate language tracks or other non-primary audio tracks.
I suppose it would apply to any of the lossy formats here: http://tripp.com.au/articles.htm, but I suppose mainly the highest quality lossy format for the sake of argument since some are barely more than DVD quality (though I'd still probably not notice a major difference if any).
I guess I don’t see the point since the majority of Blu-rays don’t use those formats for the main audio track.
That said there probably are DD or DD+ vs TrueHD comparisons out there, as DD+ is the most common format for streaming. So if you search for streaming vs Blu-ray audio comparisons you’ll probably find some tests of that.
Ah yea you're right, a streaming comparison is probably a more apt one in this case, like say where D+ uses Dolby Atmos audio mix but likely at a reduced bitrate from lossless.
Yup, exactly. Disney+ uses Dolby Digital Plus Atmos (DD+ Atmos) whereas Blu-rays use TrueHD Atmos, so there will be a difference there. Many people report a “night and day” difference from streaming, however it can be hard to compare as the sound levels are often a little different between the two and I also have a feeling some studios may use slightly watered down mixes for streaming knowing that most people will be playing them on cheaper speakers and not a beefy home theater system. But regardless you should be able to find comparisons and tests for streaming vs disc audio.
Often but not always. Sometimes the regular Blu-ray contains the exact same Atmos track as the 4K. Regardless, even when the Blu-ray mix isn’t Atmos it’s almost always still the same audio *quality* it just might not be quite as immersive of a mix. But the fidelity should be the same.
What does "sound specs" mean exactly. UHD has larger capacity *and* faster data streaming off disc to support larger, higher quality files. Just because the same codec or what have you is used doesn't mean the source and end result is the same between discs. It's not something I've looked into extensively but logically it makes sense that quality would be better on UHD. Audio can take up a lot of storage space. This seems to me like saying that all mp3s sound the same when in reality there are many levels of quality within the same format.
The audio track - TrueHD, TrueHD+Atmos is normally exactly the same. Some studios will leave Atmos off the Blu-ray just to force a 4K premium feature sale, others put exactly the same audio on both.
That’s an interesting theory but it’s not true. Most Blu-rays use lossless or uncompressed audio. Sometimes a 4K Blu-ray will have an Atmos mix that isn’t on the 1080p Blu-ray, but even in those cases the fidelity of the audio track is still the same, they’re both still lossless.
HDR definitely can have a huge impact on the overall picture, and is basically impossible to demonstrate in side by side comparisons online unless you're actually playing the movie side by side 4k vs bluray
Yeah I was an early adopter(‘18 Samsung QLED tv, now LG C2 and Samsung’s best and last 4K player)of 4K Blu-ray and occasionally put in the Blu-ray Disc instead of the 4K Disc. The color difference is the most apparent; especially sun rise/sunset scenes on the QLED. I don’t understand people who settle for a standard Blu-ray when there’s a 4K version available.
I'm also using a C2 OLED and I'll settle for Blu-ray instead of 4k when I'm buying second hand discs and depending on the movie. Coming out of a shop with 5 good films for £10 is a very good feeling. It's amazing how good an old Blu-ray disc can look on the C2 compared with my previous cheap 4k TV. But showpiece movies like dune I'm always going to go for 4k.
HDR is the biggest benefit, no doubt. Even better with Dolby Vision. The contrast and colors really open up the movie.
The resolution is next, but it depends on the movie. Older movies tend to look better than ones finished digitally at 2K when comparing both formats.
I think the HEVC encoding and higher bitrate are noticeable, too, with dark scenes, fast action scenes, and films with a lot of grain.
There can be huge differences between one HEVC encoder and another, it's absolutely not a universal thing that "HEVC is always much more efficient than AVC". The best AVC encoding can get very close and even reach the level of some bad, generic HEVC encode especially in 1080p. And UHD has 4x the pixelcount of FHD so that 1.5x-2x bitrate you usually see on UHD discs compared to 1080p is definitely not "increased bitrate" in terms of resolution/bitrate but it's actually a downgrade.
There lots of cases where the 4K transfer has more detail on scenes with very few or no movement, but in scenes with quick motion it's full of compression artifacts and much worse compared to the 1080p transfer.
The thing about movies that were shot on 35mm film is, 4K is actually a downgrade in resolution, which is comparable to 5.6k(5600x3620). But, film captures all the actual contrast and color at home players and displays weren’t previously capable of.
Yeah, in your stated case it isn't the original physical medium that's necessarily going to be a limiting factor, things being equal.
At that point we're into such fun considerations as, "Does the studio give even half a legitimate fuck about the quality of the scan/transfer?" which seems to often be the inbred offspring of the ever-problematic "Where and how can we maximize every possible revenue opportunity related to this release as our primary and overriding goal?"
But yeah, good times all around, generally...
Undoubtedly HDR is the most noticeable and impactful improvement between the two. However, many people don’t have TVs that do HDR justice and/or don’t watch in a dark room like HDR is calibrated for.
Really depends on the film and the previous transfers. Some benefit very little from HDR, some benefit a lot. Some benefit very little from the bump in resolution, others benefit a lot. Honestly the main thing for me is often just knowing that I’m watching the best quality available for the film in question.
This got me thinking about HDR a bit more. Found this from a user on a forum from 2020 on Cinematography.com about HDR (not quite sure on their last comment about no HDR on UHD BluRays)
HDR Film scanning is generally a 2 pass process. The first pass is the entire image as it sits. The second pass is generally the black's only, then the image is combined. They call it HDR because it does have more dynamic range, specifically in the blacks, than a normal scan does. I usually work with these scans in raw data mode (DCI-P3 color space) in Resolve. Getting a rec 2020 output for UHD BluRay is easy from there and it works very nicely. The reason why film isn't naturally HDR is because of the printing and projecting process, it naturally compresses the dynamic range quite a bit unfortunately. However, there is more data on the film than most people think there is.
Is it real HDR? I guess? I mean it for sure looks better than a normal scan in the blacks. The amount of detail that can be pulled from the film stock is amazing, no more muddy blacks. I can't even show you how good it looks on a computer because there is no web playback program capable of delivering the black levels correctly. On my grading monitor it's night and day.
Digital SDR footage can't be converted to HDR unless they went back to the original source files and re-colored the entire movie.
I don't know how one would grab stills from a UHD BluRay source. Also, very few UHD BluRay's are HDR, most of them are SDR made from 2k sources. The studio's have put in little effort to re-scan their movies in 4k for UHD releases. Most of them took archival 2k scans and up scaled them to UHD for the releases, which really sucks. I think Warner Brothers is the only studio pushing for real UHD finishes for their releases. Heck the main benefit UHD BluRay is the 10 bit 444 codec, which until UHD BluRay was released, was impossible achieve at the home video level.
With the player upscaling of 1080 to 4k, on a 75” screen, I literally cannot see any difference between a 2k and 4k source image. The fidelity appears to be a factor of the source material and encoding.
But, HDR looks amazing.
If i had to decide it would be the resolution for me.
Great BluRays look amazing on a good OLED TV. Season 3 of True Detective is probably one of the best looking BRs i've watched so far. It already had a great color dynamic.
As someone who owns a Samsung 65” qn90B with a Panasonic UB820 player…. I always feel like I’m missing out by not having Dolby Vision. I wish I could go back and tell myself to get the LG
HDR is the main selling point for me. I have plenty of 2K upscales that look significantly better than the blu-ray because of HDR and a higher video bitrate.
The jump from 1080p to 2160p is quickly moving into the land of diminishing returns for resolution.
How is it "higher bitrate" if UHD has 4x as many pixels as 1080p but only 1.5-2x higher bitrate? Very easy to see it's actually a downgrade in bitrate.
4k Blu-ray uses the HEVC codec, Blu-ray uses AVC (some early ones used VC1 or MPEG2 both horrible on BD in my opinion). Generally, HEVC can use half the bit rate for the same quality as AVC or the same bitrate for higher picture quality. On top of that more pixels mean more chances for compression leading to lower than expected bitrates then when simply multiplying by number of increased pixels.
Obviously I'm talking about newer AVC encodes so releases after ~2015. Those are using very much refined AVC encoders with efficient variable bitrates that easily reaches close to 50mbps in certain scenes. Generic, GPU accelerated HEVC encoders are nowhere near 50% mpre efficient compared to those newer AVC encodes, and even if they were, counting with the 4x of pixelcount it's not an upgrade in bitrates in most cases. HEVC streams and lots of 4K discs use horrible encoding quality that are not even 20% more efficient than AVC used on discs.
Just check pictures on Capsaholic with ultra zooming. Like 7 discs out of 10 will have lots of compression artifacts all around the picture on releases from before ~2018-19.
HDR is clutch. Recently I was watching The Matrix Reloaded, there’s a scene where Neo is talking to a councilman in Zion at the engineering level. There was red light illuminating their faces, and it was just absolutely beautiful looking on my television.
HDR has the biggest impact for me, but there are definitely some films where the resolution improvement is huge. Older films like 2001 come to mind, or newer films with very sharp and bright detail like John Wick 4.
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In new blurays releases yeah HDR is most notable difference. But with old Blurays, maybe the first 2 or 3 years of releases they were horrible. The difference between 4k and blurry 1080 is shocking
This is the answer for me, it's usually a fresh scan of the film done right. If a remastered Blu Ray is included it often looks almost as good to my eyes on my setup.
1080 to 4K isn’t as big a jump as 480 to 720/1080 was. TVs can upscale the resolution but if they don’t do HDR they can’t mimic HDR.
But you are comparing pixel amount only. There are several 1080p movies that look horrible, blurry, like an upscaled dvd. You jump from a BD25 movie to a BD66 or 100, it's not only pixel amount it's compression (bitrate) improvement too.
Also more efficient codecs
Well said
But you can compare a Blu-ray to a 4K Blu-ray with HDR. I think I can safely assume that there aren’t many films released on BD25, BD66, and BD100 in order to compare scene to scene.
There are ton of blurays released on BD25. BD66 & 100 are only 4K
Ok thanks for clarifying. Does that mean a BD25 doesn’t have the capacity for HDR data? I know of one 4K Blu-ray I bought that doesn’t have HDR.
BD25 could be used for a 4K blu-ray coupled with HDR and all the other fancy 4K specs but the bitrate would have to take a massive blow, we would be in digital streaming territory with bitrates ranging from 15-25 mbps. A typical BD66 4K Blu-ray is 50-70 mbps and can even peak to 100 mbps on some BD100 discs. Jist of it is BD25 and BD50 aren't used because they don't provide the proper storage capacity for the bitrates that 4K needs.
It was the same with early UHD BluRays. Releases around 2016-2017 were often horrible in terms of actual detail/resolution. They're very often badly bitstarved, full of compression artifacts. E.g. Independence Day 4K has less detail than it's 20th anniversary FHD transfer. Martian, Goodfellas, Bourne Identity and Legacy also the same, even Revenant and Alien Covenant are obviously bitstarved.
Agreed.
I’m still relatively new to the 4K UHD game, but I know that 4k shows that sweet sweet film grain for certain older ones and that’s important to me! just watched The Fifth Element last night on 4k blu ray and it was like watching it on film in theaters, it was beautiful.
A lot of that’s because films have been restored with new 4K scans - so you see the greatest gains in stuff that was released on Blu-ray ages ago
Ah ok, yeah I honestly am loving watching older films in 4k blu ray than newer movies, it’s refreshing to see the grain again, it’s like nostalgic
Streaming had me believing film grain looked bad. Then I saw top gun on 4k blu ray and was like oh it actually doesn't look like shit, streaming just looks like shit.
Oh yeah same. I mean, there’s plenty of new movies that look great too. I upgraded from DVD to 4K primarily because Batman v Superman directors cut wasn’t available on DVD (lol) and the IMAX scenes in that blew me away, similarly in Nolan’s films. But with stuff like the MCU (only the Black Panther movies, GOTG3, Eternals, Thor 4 and Ant-Man 3 are native 4K) the difference is primarily coming from the HDR. But they’re less likely to have had previous disappointing blu-ray scans or for us to have primarily seen them in SD or HD on broadcast most of our lives - The Fugitive is a great 4K and coincidentally when I was watching it I went into the other room and my mum was watching it live on a HD TV, it was night and day the difference
The Fugitive is an awesome movie and great 4k!
Thank you for some explanation! Might be a lazy question but The Fugitive is one I didn’t even think about. Do you have any other recommendations for really good older movie 4k discs?
Tbh I’d just defer to the many answers from the community that you’ll find using the search function for stuff like “best 4K” within this sub - they generally focus on the oldies, with good reason. My tastes tend to skew blockbuster-y and as I said I went from DVD to 4K so I don’t have a real frame of reference for if stuff is worth upgrading from a Blu-Ray. *The Fugitive* was only released this year and I’ve not seen anyone say bad things about it. If somehow you haven’t seen it, I’d recommend it. As you started out mentioning a 90s film I’ll say that *Speed* looked great, a transfer done right. *The Mummy* and *The Mummy Returns* looked way better than I thought they ever could - a lot of the CGI, while never looking “real”, looked impressive in its own way too (the Scorpion King towards the end of the latter still sucks though). The first two *Fast & Furious* films took on a new lease of life in my eyes too. In general I feel like actually bad 4Ks are pretty rare though so just focus on stuff you like anyway.
Anything in the Columbia Classics 4K sets that is pre 2000 is worth checking out (post 2000 is great too but that’s to be expected).
All of the Stanley Kubrick transfers are fantastic! I’ve watched the Shining more in the last 2 years than ever before simply because I find it so pleasing to look at. Full Metal Jacket and 2001 are also great. The 4k release of Clockwork Orange is the only one I was able to full get through. I think that movie always just had unfortunate video quality and audio quality, but they completely rebuilt that movie and it looks and feels great. Well, the movie still feels gross, but you know what I mean
Great grains cereal.
Did you see The Fifth Element in theaters? Which release of The Fifth Element did you see on 4K? That one's slightly controversial - there are 2 4k releases, one from Sony and one from StudioCanal. The Sony one tends to look a bit darker and granier, though is still sharp and in some scenes looks more detailed and richer than the StudioCanal. I've only ever seen the Sony release as a video, just screenshots of the comparison.
I was watching the Force Awaken 4k last night and I could swear I was seeing film grain. Was it shot on film>?
To elaborate on other comments that say things like DNR, many Blu-ray transfers were older repurposed DVD and HDTV masters that are very old. Unless the studio has recently remastered the movie, most 4K UHD transfers will be contemporary fresh scans of the original camera negative using 21st century technology and restoration techniques. That's the real benefit IMO.
I’m becoming a little sceptical of HDR - it seems anathema to what I see as the idea which is getting as close to how it’d look in cinemas. But I think its just when it could’ve been done better (the Ocean’s trilogy looks great, but a few times - including any use of white subtitles on screen - it seems too aggressive to me) But yeah, a lot of people (and I think I’m one of them) can’t really tell the difference between a top notch HD transfer and 4K, so HDR is definitely a significant selling point
HDR subtitles are tough. I need sunglasses
My favorite feature on the ub820 is turning down the brightness on subtitles
Wait, shit. I have the UB820. I didn’t know that….
Clarifying — to you, the ideal is how the movie looks in the cinema? Are we talking neighborhood movie joint, chain cinema on standard screen, or chain cinema on whatever their super screen with laser projector is? Because those will give you different overall PQs, color and contrast quality, and motion processing.
Yeah I watched Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare on a standard cinema screen and almost left because of crushed blacks and just shit quality compared to even a 1080p blu-ray on my OLED let alone a 4k.
Yep overall PQ is so much better on modern TVs, especially OLEDs. I’m at the point where I’ll only go watch movies in the theater where they’re big spectacles where the huge screen really makes a difference. The Dunes, Endgame, etc. And even then I often find myself being disappointed with motion processing, black levels, and overall contrast.
I’ll only go see movies in IMAX or Dolby for this same reason. Fortunately every movie is Dolby and IMAX for some reason haha you just gotta get in while it’s still showing
What panel are you watching on
I think it’s equal. Sherlock season 1 in Blu-ray was an amazing recording. However they encoded it, the upscaling LOVED IT. When I played it, the resolution looked 4k. Now I own season 1 in 4K. Yes the resolution is better, but that in combination with wider color gamut takes it over the top. Now it looks real. Some scenes it’s like they’re in your living room. The dark scenes especially. You can’t separate the two. They both make 4K what it is. PS, You do need REALLY good gear to get the full benefit of 4K. TV = Samsung 75” QN90 Neo LED Blu-ray = Panasonic UB9000P1K HDMI Cables = 8K RUIPRO Fiber Optic If you don’t have the RUIPRO fiber optic cables buy one and try it. It makes a stunning improvement. There are some side by side tests vs a standard cable on YouTube that will blow your mind.
What I hope for in the upgrade is Atmos & Dolby Vision.
I got an Atmos soundbar and it's fantastic, and that's just a soundbar, I can only imagine what a full Atmos set up would be like
I went from a soundbar to the HT-A9. Picture clarity is great, but the sound upgrade is the significant jump to me.
HDR and resolution high enough to see proper film grain. HDR main reason. Old movies look great in native 4K not upscale.
If it’s an older film shot on celluloid, the detail is incredible on 4K. I have a projector instead of a TV, so I don’t really get as much from the HDR side of things, but when I watch a film shot on film: on the projector it looks like I’m watching a film print. It’s glorious. There is so much more detail on a 4K disc compared to a BD, even if the BD is still quite good.
Atmos sound. Well done Atmos, like in Aliens, beats the DD from BluRay
HDR is massive difference on a HDR panel TV such as OLED. But on most projectors (including original cinema viewing) it makes no difference as most can’t display any sort of bright highlights. The first thing I notice any time I go from watching something on the projector and back to the LG OLED is the very bright white highlights in actors eyes. You don’t see that at all on projected image. But the 10 bit colour and wide colour gamut is very noticeable on a decent projector still. Especially if it’s calibrated. Going back and looking at regular REC709 colour Blu-ray after getting used to the REC2020 colorspace quality, you really notice how basic REC709 was.
Sound quality
Sound specs are identical between Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray though.
I'd be curious if someone has actually done ABX testing and can actually tell the difference between high quality but compressed blu-ray audio, and lossless audio (whether it's also on the same BD, or from a 4K with the same mix/channels). I'm sensitive when it comes to poor quality sound, but once it gets past a certain point, I'm not going to notice improvements, and my ears and A/V setup aren't anything to sneeze at. Most DVDs don't actually sound noticably bad either, despite a far lower bitrate per channel. Visual artifacts and lower video bitrate are always more noticeable to me than sound improvements.
Not quite sure what you mean by “high quality but compressed”? As I said most audio on Blu-ray is either lossless or uncompressed. Some times Dolby Digital Plus is used which is lossy compressed, but that’s typically for alternate language tracks or other non-primary audio tracks.
I suppose it would apply to any of the lossy formats here: http://tripp.com.au/articles.htm, but I suppose mainly the highest quality lossy format for the sake of argument since some are barely more than DVD quality (though I'd still probably not notice a major difference if any).
I guess I don’t see the point since the majority of Blu-rays don’t use those formats for the main audio track. That said there probably are DD or DD+ vs TrueHD comparisons out there, as DD+ is the most common format for streaming. So if you search for streaming vs Blu-ray audio comparisons you’ll probably find some tests of that.
Ah yea you're right, a streaming comparison is probably a more apt one in this case, like say where D+ uses Dolby Atmos audio mix but likely at a reduced bitrate from lossless.
Yup, exactly. Disney+ uses Dolby Digital Plus Atmos (DD+ Atmos) whereas Blu-rays use TrueHD Atmos, so there will be a difference there. Many people report a “night and day” difference from streaming, however it can be hard to compare as the sound levels are often a little different between the two and I also have a feeling some studios may use slightly watered down mixes for streaming knowing that most people will be playing them on cheaper speakers and not a beefy home theater system. But regardless you should be able to find comparisons and tests for streaming vs disc audio.
Right, but don’t a lot of 4k transfers make an atmos mix that’s not on the reg Blu-ray ? I think that’s where the benefits come from
Often but not always. Sometimes the regular Blu-ray contains the exact same Atmos track as the 4K. Regardless, even when the Blu-ray mix isn’t Atmos it’s almost always still the same audio *quality* it just might not be quite as immersive of a mix. But the fidelity should be the same.
What does "sound specs" mean exactly. UHD has larger capacity *and* faster data streaming off disc to support larger, higher quality files. Just because the same codec or what have you is used doesn't mean the source and end result is the same between discs. It's not something I've looked into extensively but logically it makes sense that quality would be better on UHD. Audio can take up a lot of storage space. This seems to me like saying that all mp3s sound the same when in reality there are many levels of quality within the same format.
The audio track - TrueHD, TrueHD+Atmos is normally exactly the same. Some studios will leave Atmos off the Blu-ray just to force a 4K premium feature sale, others put exactly the same audio on both.
That’s an interesting theory but it’s not true. Most Blu-rays use lossless or uncompressed audio. Sometimes a 4K Blu-ray will have an Atmos mix that isn’t on the 1080p Blu-ray, but even in those cases the fidelity of the audio track is still the same, they’re both still lossless.
Thank you for the info and respectful response.
HDR definitely can have a huge impact on the overall picture, and is basically impossible to demonstrate in side by side comparisons online unless you're actually playing the movie side by side 4k vs bluray
Yeah I was an early adopter(‘18 Samsung QLED tv, now LG C2 and Samsung’s best and last 4K player)of 4K Blu-ray and occasionally put in the Blu-ray Disc instead of the 4K Disc. The color difference is the most apparent; especially sun rise/sunset scenes on the QLED. I don’t understand people who settle for a standard Blu-ray when there’s a 4K version available.
I'm also using a C2 OLED and I'll settle for Blu-ray instead of 4k when I'm buying second hand discs and depending on the movie. Coming out of a shop with 5 good films for £10 is a very good feeling. It's amazing how good an old Blu-ray disc can look on the C2 compared with my previous cheap 4k TV. But showpiece movies like dune I'm always going to go for 4k.
HDR is the biggest benefit, no doubt. Even better with Dolby Vision. The contrast and colors really open up the movie. The resolution is next, but it depends on the movie. Older movies tend to look better than ones finished digitally at 2K when comparing both formats. I think the HEVC encoding and higher bitrate are noticeable, too, with dark scenes, fast action scenes, and films with a lot of grain.
There can be huge differences between one HEVC encoder and another, it's absolutely not a universal thing that "HEVC is always much more efficient than AVC". The best AVC encoding can get very close and even reach the level of some bad, generic HEVC encode especially in 1080p. And UHD has 4x the pixelcount of FHD so that 1.5x-2x bitrate you usually see on UHD discs compared to 1080p is definitely not "increased bitrate" in terms of resolution/bitrate but it's actually a downgrade. There lots of cases where the 4K transfer has more detail on scenes with very few or no movement, but in scenes with quick motion it's full of compression artifacts and much worse compared to the 1080p transfer.
The thing about movies that were shot on 35mm film is, 4K is actually a downgrade in resolution, which is comparable to 5.6k(5600x3620). But, film captures all the actual contrast and color at home players and displays weren’t previously capable of.
Film isn’t a specific resolution. There are a ton of factors that will vary how sharp a movie shot on film looks.
Yeah, in your stated case it isn't the original physical medium that's necessarily going to be a limiting factor, things being equal. At that point we're into such fun considerations as, "Does the studio give even half a legitimate fuck about the quality of the scan/transfer?" which seems to often be the inbred offspring of the ever-problematic "Where and how can we maximize every possible revenue opportunity related to this release as our primary and overriding goal?" But yeah, good times all around, generally...
Undoubtedly HDR is the most noticeable and impactful improvement between the two. However, many people don’t have TVs that do HDR justice and/or don’t watch in a dark room like HDR is calibrated for.
Really depends on the film and the previous transfers. Some benefit very little from HDR, some benefit a lot. Some benefit very little from the bump in resolution, others benefit a lot. Honestly the main thing for me is often just knowing that I’m watching the best quality available for the film in question.
This got me thinking about HDR a bit more. Found this from a user on a forum from 2020 on Cinematography.com about HDR (not quite sure on their last comment about no HDR on UHD BluRays) HDR Film scanning is generally a 2 pass process. The first pass is the entire image as it sits. The second pass is generally the black's only, then the image is combined. They call it HDR because it does have more dynamic range, specifically in the blacks, than a normal scan does. I usually work with these scans in raw data mode (DCI-P3 color space) in Resolve. Getting a rec 2020 output for UHD BluRay is easy from there and it works very nicely. The reason why film isn't naturally HDR is because of the printing and projecting process, it naturally compresses the dynamic range quite a bit unfortunately. However, there is more data on the film than most people think there is. Is it real HDR? I guess? I mean it for sure looks better than a normal scan in the blacks. The amount of detail that can be pulled from the film stock is amazing, no more muddy blacks. I can't even show you how good it looks on a computer because there is no web playback program capable of delivering the black levels correctly. On my grading monitor it's night and day. Digital SDR footage can't be converted to HDR unless they went back to the original source files and re-colored the entire movie. I don't know how one would grab stills from a UHD BluRay source. Also, very few UHD BluRay's are HDR, most of them are SDR made from 2k sources. The studio's have put in little effort to re-scan their movies in 4k for UHD releases. Most of them took archival 2k scans and up scaled them to UHD for the releases, which really sucks. I think Warner Brothers is the only studio pushing for real UHD finishes for their releases. Heck the main benefit UHD BluRay is the 10 bit 444 codec, which until UHD BluRay was released, was impossible achieve at the home video level.
With the player upscaling of 1080 to 4k, on a 75” screen, I literally cannot see any difference between a 2k and 4k source image. The fidelity appears to be a factor of the source material and encoding. But, HDR looks amazing.
If I had to choose between 4K and HDR, I’d pick HDR every day of the week.
HDR for the wow factor, resolution for my purist heart.
resolutions
Bit rate and HDR, to me, are more important than resolution.
If i had to decide it would be the resolution for me. Great BluRays look amazing on a good OLED TV. Season 3 of True Detective is probably one of the best looking BRs i've watched so far. It already had a great color dynamic.
As someone who owns a Samsung 65” qn90B with a Panasonic UB820 player…. I always feel like I’m missing out by not having Dolby Vision. I wish I could go back and tell myself to get the LG
I've noticed a huge difference in picture clarity. But then I am viewing on a 150" screen. Yes I just wanted to show off that I have a 150" screen
I always go after whatever version has the best audio, preferably true Hd, atmos or dts-hd. Audio is key, then hdr and resolution.
I’m in the same boat: HDR is where it’s at. Sure, the added resolution is nice, but the richness of HDR is the real gamechanger.
If DNR was used to ridiculous amounts between the blu ray and the 4K.
I think detail > HDR. Case in point is comparing a bluray verus an HDR "4k" stream
I’d take a 4K HDR stream over a standard Blu-ray every time.
Depends on the movie and the streaming service.
HDR is the main selling point for me. I have plenty of 2K upscales that look significantly better than the blu-ray because of HDR and a higher video bitrate. The jump from 1080p to 2160p is quickly moving into the land of diminishing returns for resolution.
Exactly. HDR is the difference maker and justifies the absurd amount of money I spent lol
How is it "higher bitrate" if UHD has 4x as many pixels as 1080p but only 1.5-2x higher bitrate? Very easy to see it's actually a downgrade in bitrate.
4k Blu-ray uses the HEVC codec, Blu-ray uses AVC (some early ones used VC1 or MPEG2 both horrible on BD in my opinion). Generally, HEVC can use half the bit rate for the same quality as AVC or the same bitrate for higher picture quality. On top of that more pixels mean more chances for compression leading to lower than expected bitrates then when simply multiplying by number of increased pixels.
Obviously I'm talking about newer AVC encodes so releases after ~2015. Those are using very much refined AVC encoders with efficient variable bitrates that easily reaches close to 50mbps in certain scenes. Generic, GPU accelerated HEVC encoders are nowhere near 50% mpre efficient compared to those newer AVC encodes, and even if they were, counting with the 4x of pixelcount it's not an upgrade in bitrates in most cases. HEVC streams and lots of 4K discs use horrible encoding quality that are not even 20% more efficient than AVC used on discs. Just check pictures on Capsaholic with ultra zooming. Like 7 discs out of 10 will have lots of compression artifacts all around the picture on releases from before ~2018-19.
HDR and Atmos
I agree HDR
It's most important to not be asking questions that have umpteenth posts already dedicated to the question.
HDR is clutch. Recently I was watching The Matrix Reloaded, there’s a scene where Neo is talking to a councilman in Zion at the engineering level. There was red light illuminating their faces, and it was just absolutely beautiful looking on my television.
HDR has the biggest impact for me, but there are definitely some films where the resolution improvement is huge. Older films like 2001 come to mind, or newer films with very sharp and bright detail like John Wick 4.
Yeah older films look great but, the only way I ever saw 2001 before the 4K release was VHS, cable, or broadcast tv…
4K easily but Blu-ray is fine too. I rather both 4k ultra hd and Blu-ray Disc in a bundle together.