Manufacturers Need You to Buy an Ultra-High-Def 4K TV. Save Your Money

Every TV manufacturer that could haul itself to the home of gambling, sand and lost weekends wants you, needs you, to buy a 4K in the near future. The 3-D HDTV didn't pan out and now it's up to 4K to keep those profits in the black.
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LAS VEGAS — Every TV manufacturer that could haul itself to Sin City wants you, no, needs you, to buy a 4K television soon because 3-D HDTV didn't pan out. The industry is looking to 4K to keep themselves in the black.

2. Follow Wired's Live Coverage of CES3. Read More Features From CESBut just as HDTV was slow to take off, it'll probably be awhile before you decide that a 3840 x 2160 pixel (or 4096 x 2160) TV is exactly what you need to make your life complete. It's more than the price that's keeping these things from hitting critical mass. The entire ecosystem isn't ready for 4K, and neither are you. The prices are too high and the content choices too low for it to really make sense just yet.

"4K is only for ultra-premium markets this year," Peter Gagnon, an industry watcher with Display Search, told Wired.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Not now. The industry started pushing 4K last year, when the uber-sharp, uber-expensive TVs were, like OLEDs, the big news at CES. Well, we're back again this year, being told again that 4K — a.k.a. UltraHD — will be so awesome that no one will believe their eyes.

It's true, 4K TVs are stunning to behold. The images are razor sharp, the colors explode and the experience makes you think, “This is what a TV should be.” But too often we see the same video looping over and over because, so far, there’s precious little content to appreciate on these beauties.

And then there’s the price. Good lord, the price. Early adopters are paying $20,000 or more for one. That’s because 4K resolution is especially amazing on TVs larger than 80 inches. Anything with 1080p resolution starts looking pixelated on anything that big, so that’s where 4K has made the biggest splash.

It's hard to sell a lot of TVs with five-figure price tags, which is why Sony, Toshiba and Sharp are here at CES pushing smaller 4K TVs with smaller price tags, hoping you'll make the leap. Toshiba is telling anyone who’ll listen that UltraHD 4K is "real category" now. During its CES presentation, Sony talked about an end-to-end 4K hardware and content solution that no one else can match.

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Cord Cutters: Switching Off Cable, ForeverSony CEO Kaz Hirai told the CES audience, "4K is not the future. It's now and Sony is leading the way."

That's great for Sony customers. But what about everyone else? Well, Sharp rolled into town with a pair of UltraHD TVs with 3-D, one of which is the first ever 4K certified by THX. Look for both in stores this summer. LG is keeping OLED alive with 4K 55-inch and 65-inch 4K TVs. And everyone's favorite low-cost TV company, Vizio, introduced 55-, 60- and 70-inch 4K televisions. Every single one of them looks fantastic.

The big question is how much these smaller 4K TVs will cost. So far, everyone's keeping pretty mum on pricing. That rarely suggests we’re looking at anything remotely affordable. LG was the one company to announce a price. Its 84-inch OLED 4K TV will retail for $12,000.

That's a lot of money, and most people may not think 4K is worth the truckload of money they'll pay for it. The truth is, as nice as these TVs are, you probably won’t see much difference. A 60-inch 4K won't look dramatically better than the 1080p TV you have in your home right now unless you shove your nose into the screen. The average person's eyes can't see the difference when sitting 10 feet away from a 60-inch TV.

Even if you decide you simply must have the latest and greatest TV tech, and you’re willing to max out your credit card to get one, the content isn’t there. The 4K TVs on the market can up-sample the content. Sort of how your current Blu-ray player up-samples DVDs. But it's not ideal and there are no actual content devices on the market yet. Sony currently has a device it loans to customers that have purchased its 4K TV to watch Sony Pictures movies. At CES the company announced that it would have a 4K solution in the summer that included a device that would connect to a Sony Pictures Entertainment distribution service. The service will play, you guessed it, Sony Pictures Entertainment movies.

Broadcast is an even bigger issue. Broadcast TV only recently switched to all digital signals in June 2009 and it's not even good enough for the TVs we have now. Peter Vasay, part of THX's video certification team, told Wired, "As far as infrastructure, we're pretty far away from that. We're only at 1080i now. We're not at full HD over broadcast."

If broadcast TV isn't ready, streaming video is even less so. It simply cannot handle the enormous size of 4K video files. Remember, 4K video quadruples the pixel content of a video. That 1GB file just became 4GB. Storage, server load and your ISP are not ready to handle all those extra bits of data.

Of course, like everything in technology there will be an update. Maybe it's 4K. Maybe it's 8K. But whatever it is, for the next few years, it's not worth your money.

"It should capture a respectable share of the 50-inch+ market in a few years," Gagnon told Wired.

For now, though, you should wait.

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