Confused About What The 4K It's All About? Here's What You Need To Know About Ultra-HD TV

No matter where you look, 4K – or Ultra HD – seems to be trumpeted as the latest big thing in home entertainment. Cult and classic films, TV shows and video games alike are being remastered in the format (local streaming service Stan has announced it will be hosting the entire James Bond film franchise remastered in 4K from January, for example, while a litany of other 4K re-releases are on the horizon), and retail shelves are lined with crystal-clear in-store displays touting its many apparent benefits.

With most brand-name models still costing anywhere from $1,000 to upwards of $10,000, we had to ask whether it’s worth sinking your hard-earned dollars into this nascent technology – or whether this is just another fad (remember 3D TVs?) with a useful life shorter than its warranty.

What is 4K TV, anyway?

Essentially, veteran videographer and photographer Michael Cranfield tells The Music, the ‘4K’ moniker boils down to the resolution packed into these machines – 3840 pixels wide (hence the name) by 2160 high, four times more overall than Full HD.

“The height [in Full HD] is 1080, and the width is 1920,” he explains. “With 4K, the width of it is 3840, and the height is 2160.

“The main difference is that the more lines that you have in the screen, the more information can be contained. The picture’s much sharper, it’s much clearer, with better colours and deeper blacks.”

OK, but… $10,000? For a deeper black?

According to Cranfield, “There’s 4K and then there’s 4K.”

“If you go to Aldi and buy a cheap TV for 200 bucks, it’s not going to be the same as going to JB Hi-Fi or Harvey Norman and spending $6,000 on a 4K television,” he says. “One of the reasons for that is the refresh rate.

“A cheap TV might have a refresh rate of 60Hz, so that’s 60 frames a second of being refreshed; your high-end expensive ones, their refresh rates are normally about 200Hz. So that is a big thing for TV.

“If you think you’re going to spend a lot of time watching high-quality, high-definition footage, you should go for a TV that has a high refresh rate.”

What are the benefits for broadcasters?

Most of the spoils of 4K seem to land on the consumer side of the equation but adopting the technology is not without benefit to broadcasters, Cranfield says. At a minimum, it’s about ensuring each station is on par with their rivals – “There’s a certain amount of competition to keep up with the Joneses,” he says – but, beyond that, it’s just good business sense, because 4K is an ideal way to make Australian viewers – or, at least, a large segment of them – very happy campers.

“I would imagine that probably 80% of our population are sports-mad,” Cranfield says. “They love watching sports. So in a sporting scenario, say, like cricket, where you’ve got subjects spaced quite far apart, you can get that extra detail. On a standard television, you’d look at a cricket game and go, ‘Who’s that out on the boundary? I can’t tell.’ But with 4K, the resolution is so much better, you can go, ‘Oh, I reckon that’s so-and-so.’ So, for a sporty nut who loves that kind of stuff, you find that would be great.

“But then you get to things like 8K, and then it just starts to look hyper-real,” he continues. “It doesn’t look normal anymore.”

Wait – 8K? Already? Man, is it even worth investing in a 4K TV?

If you’ve been burnt before by buying some newfangled tech that was trumpeted as ‘the next big thing’, only to find a few months later that everyone had moved onto something else, it’s understandable that you might baulk at the notion of taking another leap of faith, especially given the wild price range 4K TVs still tend to occupy at retailers and the fact we literally just mentioned the term ‘8K’.

However, Cranfield says, even with the 8K experimentation and evolution happening abroad, this latest development in home entertainment isn’t likely to be a flash in the pan for consumers or broadcasters – at least here in Australia – for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, he explains, “as you get up in those higher-quality televisions, to produce 4K content is exceptionally time-consuming, just because of the size of the files".

 “When I’m shooting at full tilt, at the highest possible settings on my 4.6K camera... if I put a 256GB SSD drive in my camera, I get four to six minutes’ recording time,” he says. “So those files are enormous.

“And, then, you’ve got to edit it – and when you’re editing files of that size, you have to have a computer that’s got serious, serious grunt to put that together. That’s just 4.6K, so I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to edit 8K quickly, efficiently and economically. So, I don’t think that 4K's going to go anywhere in a hurry.”

Part of the reason for this, Cranfield says, comes down to the fact that, simply put, Australia just doesn’t have the necessary infrastructure to accommodate something as demanding as 8K (yet).

Hell, from the sounds of it, we can barely handle 4K as it is – but maybe we’ll get there by the time you’ve saved up enough dosh to buy one.

“Foxtel have only just started broadcasting in 4K,” he says. “If you’ve got crappy ADSL2, you’re not going to be able to receive 4K into your television from Foxtel. It’s just going to be too slow, because the amount of data that has to come down the pipe is just so horrendously large that an ADSL2 pipe is not going to handle it, so you need the NBN – and, of course, that’s a whole other story.

“In Australia, we’re only just scratching the surface, so we’ll be 4K for a long time.”