Over the past few years, new 4k televisions are growing in popularity and slowly becoming less expensive. But what exactly does ‘4k’ mean? 4k refers to the amount of horizontal pixels that the TV is capable of displaying, which is exactly 4096. Compare that to current HD standards, which is only 1920 horizontal pixels, you can see that 4k doubles the resolution. For some time now, cameras have been able to record in 4k and higher resolutions, but only really got to show off this amount of detail in theaters, until now. Being able to bring these high-res movies to the home theater is relatively new.  This is a big deal.

Is it really worth it though? In short; It Depends. The current standard for HD is 1080p, measured by the number of vertical pixels. 4k measures the horizontal pixels instead, and any TV described as 4K will have a resolution of at least 3840 x 2160. The result is a picture with about 8.3 million pixels, or about four times as many as a standard HDTV. When Blu-ray discs were first introduced, they were touted as being amazing for their HD capabilities, comparing them to DVDs, which could only display standard definition. However, since being introduced in 2006, they have yet to eliminate the DVD market. It was, (and still is somewhat) difficult to tell the difference in quality. This was largely due to the fact the professional movie studios had been encoding their films in high quality formats for DVDs already, making blu-rays not really necessary.

But Blu-rays are slowly taking over, as studios began to utilize the technology more efficiently. 4k is a little different however. We will soon simply be able download movies from the internet right to our TV. Meaning discs and their capabilities are no longer an issue. We could see 4k take over Blu-rays before Blu-ray even takes over DVDs! And with 4k being a massive improvement in resolution, home theaters really have no more restrictions in terms of size. HD TVs could really only get about 50-60″ big before you’d start to notice the lack of detail. 4k Tv’s could get up to 10 feet wide before you’d start to notice any lack of detail!

Thats all in the future however. For now, I think we’ll have to wait for the market to catch up with 4k before its ultimately worth it to buy a 4k TV. This could come a lot sooner than you think however.

By: Adam Baxter