Samsung To Stop Making 4K Blu-Ray Players, Report Says (cnet.com) 71
According to a report from Forbes, Samsung may be exiting the 4K Blu-ray player market. "After launching its first 4K players in 2017, the company didn't add any new players to its lineup in 2018," reports CNET. "A high-end player for 2019 along the lines of its UBD-M9500 was in the works, the report says, but has now been scrapped." From the report: One of the reasons for pulling out could be that the existing players' format support has lagged behind the rest of the industry. For example, instead of supporting Dolby Vision, Samsung created its own version of HDR10, HDR10+, which was designed for use in streaming and physical media. Competitor Oppo was the first company to support both HDR10 and Dolby Vision but announced it was ending production of its 4K Blu-ray players in April 2018. Meanwhile Sony announced the M2 player at CES 2019 with support for Dolby Vision and Panasonic recently released the high-end DP-UB9000 player in Europe and Australia.
Good riddance (Score:2)
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Home electronics is what they've always done. I hardly think this is an extra "finger in the pie"
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Other Samsung Group companies (Score:2)
Samsung Group is a business conglomerate, called in Korean a chaebol. In addition to Samsung Electronics and Samsung SDI (battery maker), Samsung has its fingers in other pies. Among them:
If my Samsung Blu-Ray is an indication - Good (Score:5, Informative)
Regardless of what Samsung does and does not support, their Blu-Ray players have significant quality and reliability issues along with poor service. Buying one really soured me on buying anything Samsung - I recently broke down and bought a Samsung refrigerator and while it has been fine, it's delivery and setup were a real story.
I know a number of other people with the the same experience (of course, there will be people here who have had a Samsung Blu-Ray players that haven't given them a second's worth of problems even though they left it out in the snow).
Re:If my Samsung Blu-Ray is an indication - Good (Score:5, Informative)
"their Blu-Ray players have significant quality and reliability issues along with poor service."
You're not wrong. I bought a Samsung blu ray player and they put out a firmware update that knocked the audio out of sync. I waited for a fix which never came so I returned the player as faulty and they replaced it with another one which was fine until it did the same firmware update. Samsung had moved on to another model and weren't updating their previous player so I was stuck with a 6 month old player that didn't work. I ended up returning it as faulty and replacing it with a Panasonic which has been faultless. My wife works for a white goods repair man and he won't service Samsung gear because their parts availability is atrocious. Samsung just doesn't care it would seem.
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This is roughly my experience as well, only mine never had a firmware version that real
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If the three 4k players I've had to buy, the Samsung was the worst. It's like they mounted the motor crooked and it makes a loud vibrating noise when you play a disc. I sent it back for repairs and it still does the same thing, only maybe 10% quieter because they put some foam in there.
I finally opted for an Xbox One X, which supports Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, and hey, it plays games to boot.
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It doesn't get that cold.
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No, but it handles 4C without any problems.
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While I am at it, 4k is fine but now they have to start artificially blurring actors because some people don't like seeing real to life flaws in their celebrities. Sometimes leaving things to the imagination is a beautiful thing.
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Streaming won. (Score:1)
Blu-Ray requires always online for the authentication methods in use now, and it is more convenient to just use Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/Apple or pirate. Furthermore the R&D into higher density disc formats has stagnated. 100GB discs are out, but still 20/disc for regular ink. M-Disc format 100GB discs are COMPARABLE PRICING, despite costing 3-10 dollars for DVD/25GB discs compared to .10-.50 cents per regular DVD/Bluray recordable.
The optical market, without some major changes, is effectively dead, despite
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Citation?
In my experience, a bluray player needs to be online when it is first turned on, to download updates, but after those updates are installled, the player will play discs just fine.
generation mismatch (Score:5, Insightful)
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Old generation is tired of upgrading CD, SACD, LaserDisc, DVD, 4k, 8k, Ultra, 3D. New generation doesn't care - the hit play in the browser.
You forgot VHS and Betamax, DivX and 16MM films made for home use.
Oh I guess the whole UltraViolet thing is dead now too.
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eh, I have most of those, and while I've ripped the DVD's to NAS and digitized the laserdiscs already I only own a few Blu-rays and those are just for the works of photography that also happen to have a story associated with it.
For most rentals, streaming SD is fine. There are some young kids who are nerds for quality too.
Same with audio - my subwoofer has enough power to shake the house but very few films use it. It's nice when a dinosaur walks across the screen, and even young kids appreciate that.
Truth
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They said streaming SD is fine. VHS is nowhere near that good.
Re:generation mismatch (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:generation mismatch (Score:4, Insightful)
Old generation is tired of upgrading CD, SACD, LaserDisc, DVD, 4k, 8k, Ultra, 3D
GenX here. "Old generation" also only upgrades every decade or so, to whatever tech has cemented itself as the new standard. So for me for physical media it's been -
Vinyl => Cassette => CD
VHS => DVD => Blu-Ray
480i curved CRT => 480i flat CRT => 1080p flat panel
HD-DVD, MiniDisc, Betamax, Laserdisc, SelectaVision and every other fad were just that - Fads.
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I still have a working LaserDisc unit, and let me tell you DVD is way, way better.
First, the resolution. LaserDisc was about 580x420 for NTSC and 580x440 for PAL (interlaced), whereas DVD is 720x480 for NTSC and 720x576 for PAL (interlaced or progressive). Second, the compression. LaserDisc was encoded as composite color and recorded using PWM. It doesn't suffer the artifacts of digital codecs like blocking or ringing, but it suffers all the artifacts of composite signals, like abismal color separation and
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As a Gen X too, this hits hard, it's exactly the same here, I stopped at CD, BD, and 1080p non-smart TV.
Re:generation mismatch (Score:5, Insightful)
New generation doesn't care - the hit play in the browser.
Which is really sad. Streaming should never have become the product over a single download. They have created network peak hours and incentivized crushing the bitrate and therefore quality to save on bandwidth costs.
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Which is really sad. Streaming should never have become the product over a single download. They have created network peak hours and incentivized crushing the bitrate and therefore quality to save on bandwidth costs.
I'd agree with you except that the people who create BluRay discs are often sloths, as long as it fits the disc it doesn't matter. There's hardly any incentive to find the optimal encoding settings or to deliver 95% of the quality with 50% of the bitrate. Compared to DVDs BluRays was almost 6x in size (8.5 -> 50GB) for 6x the pixels (720x480 -> 1920x1080) but then on top of that you had H.264 and the encoders have matured a lot since then. There's a reason Netflix says they deliver FullHD with 5 Mbps
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Bluray bitrate may be overkill, so what? If you have space to spare, why not use it? The final price will be the same, and the quality much better. A physical copy playing on your local machine doesn't have the bandwith limitations of a streaming service.
And Netflix can say whatever the want, but 1080p at 5 Mbps looks like shit, unless the scene is really static.
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I'd sooner buy a video on betamax than bluray. After years of physical media, they come out with network-reliant crap where the future can make disks from the past stop working. No thank you.
I wouldn't mind paying an extra dime on a rental for higher resolution than DVD, but I'm not going to buy some crap player to do it.
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It's not just video medias. Same for computer technologies. Others and I got sick of it. We'll just keep using the old stuff that still work, stable, cheaper, etc. For an example, I still use my decade old home built desktop PCs, OmniCube KVM from Y2K, inkjet printer from 2006, etc. I finally went HDTV from CRT TV in late 2014. When I was younger, I used to want the (new/lat)est stuff but things got buggy, costly, annoying, etc. :(
I refuse to buy Sony. (Score:2)
Who else makes a good 4K Blu-Ray?
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The summary says Panasonic.
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I have an LG 4K player and I'm very happy with it. Especially how quickly it will start playing after inserting a disc. It's super fast and just works. I picked it up on sale for like $80.
2018 was a sad year for all 4k lovers (Score:3, Insightful)
There are laudable exceptions (like for example "Lucy", which was produced in excellent 4k quality), but among all the UHD releases in 2018, very few reached actual 4k quality. Many were from 3.4k resolving cameras at best, many used 2k digital intermediates, and surprisingly many were filmed on grainy 35mm analog film, which is nowhere near actual 4k quality.
"Streaming" services like Netflix may produce material at 4k, but then compress it into such low bandwidths that ultimately, any significantly complex/moving scene looks worse than a 2k BluRay.
I really hope this ugly trend will change - one glimmer of hope is that the increasing number of productions from China seem to more frequently employ decent cameras and 4k digital intermediates.
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and surprisingly many were filmed on grainy 35mm analog film, which is nowhere near actual 4k quality.
The most common resolving power of 35mm scanners is 3543 x 2350, not much less than 3840 x 2160. I don't know where you get the 'nowhere near 4k' from.
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I don't know where you get the 'nowhere near 4k' from.
From reality. The scanners are not the limiting factor, it's rather the film itself. Take "Bad Times as the El Royale" as an example - it was shot on Kodak film of which you can read the specs at https://www.kodak.com/uploaded... [kodak.com]
Look at the logarithmic scale of the spatial resolution diagram - the contrast of the higher spatial frequencies drops very quickly, while granularity quickly increases under all but the most ideal lighting conditions. In reality, the resolution you will get from such a film, even
Re:2018 was a sad year for all 4k lovers (Score:4, Interesting)
From reality. The scanners are not the limiting factor, it's rather the film itself. Take "Bad Times as the El Royale" as an example - it was shot on Kodak film of which you can read the specs at https://www.kodak.com/uploaded... [kodak.com]
Look at the logarithmic scale of the spatial resolution diagram - the contrast of the higher spatial frequencies drops very quickly, while granularity quickly increases under all but the most ideal lighting conditions. In reality, the resolution you will get from such a film, even when using good scanners and 4k digital intermediates, is nowhere near the resolution of a decent digital camera (like let's say an Arri Alexa 65).
To explain a little further, he's talking about the "Modulation Transfer Curves" graph, which essentially shows how well the film records fine detail. It's 100% at 10 cycles per mm but below 50% (and falling steeply) by the time you go up to 80 cycles per mm. Now there are, crudely, 2 pixels per cycle and the 35mm film frame is 25mm wide, so that's 4000 pixels across. Remember, that's the film coming out of the camera; the quality of prints will be worse. Another factor is that camera lenses will struggle to match the resolution of this film.
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The problem with Chinese productions is that the writing and acting is far below even the typical pablum churned out by Hollywood.
I'll take I Claudius with Derek Jacoby and 70's Dr. Who level production values over 99% of the standard Hollywood drivel and 99.9% of Chinese garbage 7 days a week.
35mm (Score:1)
and surprisingly many were filmed on grainy 35mm analog film, which is nowhere near actual 4k quality.
You're right, 35mm is *much* higher resolution then 4K. 4K translates to roughly 2.1 megapixels. 35mm film can resolve the equivalent ~90 megapixels. If a 35mm transfer looks overly grainy or soft, then it's a bad transfer.
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Or bad photography, bad film in the first place (early color), bad post, bad prints. There are _many_ possibilities.
Re:35mm (Score:4, Informative)
For a full frame 35mm film (36x24mm) to resolve 90 megapixels, it should have a resolution of 160 lines/mm. Such film exists (Fuji Velvia 50, for example), but only under ideal lighting conditions and high contrast images. Cinema used a film format half as big (24x18 mm), so the resolution would have to be 230 lines/mm. Without getting into a very long winded debate, getting 90 megapixels out of 35 mm film is pure fantasy. From IMAX, sure, but from 35mm, no.
Go HD-DVD! (Score:5, Funny)
I was in a bunker with my HD-DVDs, in order to survive the great HD format war. I gave it a bit over a decade, and I thought now should be safe to emerge and, naturally, slashdot was my first stop. Soo, from this news do I sense HD-DVD is winning? Did I make the right format choice?
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One reason? (Score:3)
The more likely reason is that nowadays many people prefer to watch stuff from a streaming media, Netflix, Az... And besides the few otakus always seeking the highest pixels, most people don't upgrade/buy their existing BR/DVD players to the latest thing.
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They need to combine 2k, 4k, and 3D on one disc (Score:2)
The main strength of the Blu-Ray format is that the format itself is fairly open-ended, and left the door open from the very start to multi-layer discs that exceeded the manufacturing capabilities available at the time the standard itself was defined. Older PLAYERS are constrained to specific codecs, bitrates, and formats... but as long as you have enough storage space, the standard gives itself wide latitude to add future interleaved streams that older players can simply ignore if they don't understand.
The
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^^^ Side note about legacy 3D encoding.
There's actually a good technical reason why it took so long for 3D Blu-Ray to exist -- the first 3D-ready TVs weren't actually DESIGNED to be "3D". It was mostly a lucky accident.
Rewind back to the early 2000s, when DLP was the norm for large-screen HDTVs and LCDs were still small, expensive, and riddled with dead/stuck pixels. Someone at TI (or possibly one of TI's customers, like Samsung or Matsushita) figured out that with a more sophisticated DLP and faster video