Overview:

Digital movies were promised years ago. The promise was 2K digital movies (roughly 2000 pixels wide), followed by 4K (4000 wide) to come after that. The content would be “delivered” to the movie house by secure digital feed (over the Internet or by satellite feed) and stored temporarily (on hard disk) at the theater.

This is pretty much the case with places like Cinetopia, here in the Portland area. I’m not sure how the movie is delivered to the location but it is stored on a hard disk and the disk (the “film”) is put into the 4k projector, which is a DLP device. “DLP” is digital light projector. It uses digital micro-mirrors to form the image. So you can have a very bright light source for a bright screen. It is a projector like you would use for a business meeting, with a screen.

For smaller screens, like a home TV, you can get more brightnessl and far less complication by using a flat-screen LCD or plasma panel. The lowest power being the LCD.

The latest rage is the upcoming transition to 4k resolution for the home TV. This year at the recent CES (new consumer products show) Vizio showed off a 4k 50″ LCD for $1000. They also had a 65 and a 70 inch model. We can consider this the opening salvo to begin the 4k wars in the coming years. The Vizio models are called the P series. The have 64 zones of variable LED backlighting (the premium way to get exceptional brightness range) and a quad-core processor for the screen image and, reportedly, an extremely high rate of image update, and 5 HDMI 2.0 inputs with HDCP 2.2 (the latest) compliance and (whatever it is) HVEC hardware decoding for 4k streaming. This keeps it compatible with Netflix and Amazon. There are engines for upconverting the image and sharpening it. It also “supports 802.11ac Wi-Fi, with “dual-band MIMO support for UHD streaming.” (I’ll get into WI-FI later.)

There are more features, but I want you to know this is a lot of stuff that will be “good enough” to serve as your next TV for the foreseeable future. This set costs about twice as much as the cheapest model 50″ LCD without any of these features and it looks like the incremental price change for a 50″ set with similar features is, maybe $200. This is HUGE.

The result is that by Christmas, the (“old fashioned”) 1080P sets will plummet is price and the battle will be on for the 4K sets.