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 option 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 to the cost and convenience
advantages of online streaming today so
does 4K Blu-ray offer up an obvious
enough benefit to bring online streaming efficient Autos 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 high5 man ich 350 headphones which you
can get for $999.99 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 bdxl
format which can hold up to 128 gigs on a triple layer disc but it isn't
backwards compatible so you'll need a new player we chose the Xbox One S since
Atmos support isn't terribly important to anyone without a redonkulous speaker
setup 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 in OLED since
it's one of if not the best home HDR
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 htcp
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 since 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 One S now
let's talk about the test our resident Cinema dor 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
mpcc 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 AB 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 widecolor 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 bluish 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 sario we
found our wide gamut setting was overpowering in this film and went back
to normal in this night scene the higher bit rate and increased color depth give
the sky a more natural less banded appearance and in this one the parking
lot of the bar's 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 burn
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 bare 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 firit scene
that our tint hack 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 Blu like
appearance unlike in sakario didn't
affect the emotional impact of the scene
um though be clear this isn't so much a criticism of the HDR Master as much as
it is praise 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 wider and the Shadows are a little deeper but for a 35mm 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 piie 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 upsampled
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 sit up 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 is a little
complicated first the good while I'm
still not sold on 4K from a normal viewing distance until home TVs are 100
in 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 Foo
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 AV 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 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
comfier 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 htcp 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 my
NZ TunnelBear 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 all together tunnel
bear has a top rated privacy policy and does not log your activity and you can
try it for free with 500 megabytes of data with no credit card required then
if you choose to get a year of unlimited data you can save 10% by going to Tunnel
bear.com LTT all right so thanks for watching
guys 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 for 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