Why 4K is more important than you think

RedShark by Patrick Jong Taylor

In a recent article on The Hollywood Reporter, the paper questioned if 4K was "the best way to attract consumers." It's a fair question, but it may be missing the point.

Back in January, I donned my prognasticator's cap and wrote an article on the 2013 outlook for consumers. In it I doubted the prediction by NPD Display Search that 154,000 4K sets would be sold in 2013. According to a more recent estimate by the Consumer Electronics Association, the true number is more likely to be around 57,000.

I also penned another article where I wondered aloud if consumers even want 4K. Don't get me wrong; as someone who works in video production, I'm am deeply interested in 4K acquisition and the production pipeline in general. But the professional market is much different than the consumer market and simply adding more pixels isn't going to excite many people who rarely get the best picture on their current HD sets.

So, you may think that an article on The Hollywood Reporter entitled 'Why 4K Might Not Be the Best Way to Attract Consumers' would be right up my alley. But after reading it, I came away thinking that perhaps I've been looking at consumer 4K the wrong way.

According to Dolby
The THR article covered a symposium of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (you probably know it as SMPTE). The professionals in attendence overwhelmingly declared that 4K, in itself, is not enough to lure consumers, but that a combination of more pixels, faster frame and refresh rates, and brighter, more colorful pixels would be the ticket. read more...