Sony tempts 4K Ultra HD TV buyers with free films
Bundled on a gratis video server, natch
Fancy a 4K x 2K TV - aka '4K Ultra HD' - but you’re worried you won’t have any native content to watch on the living room filler? Look to Sony. Today, the consumer electronics giant announced a server box stuffed with ten 3840 x 2160 movie transfers ready to play.
The Amazing Spiderman, Total Recall (2012), The Karate Kid (2010), Salt, Battle Los Angeles, The Other Guy, Bad Teacher, That’s My Boy, Taxi Driver and The Bridge on the River Kwai - all these can be yours, along with “a gallery of 4K video shorts”, Sony said.
Unhappy with the selection? At least you won’t be paying for it. Not up front, anyway. Sony said it will "loan" the 4K Ultra HD Video Player to buyers of its 84in XBR-84X900 4K Ultra HD TV - you can read our review of it here - in the US.
Since the TV costs just a cent less than $25,000 (£15,593), we’d say chucking in some content for free is the least Sony could do.
And more material is coming: "Additionally, Sony’s 4K Ultra HD delivery solution is designed to be updated with additional 4K titles and video clips," the company promised.
The telly will also automatically upscale any standard-definition or HD content fed in through one of its HDMI ports. ®
COMMENTS
Re: The Bridge on the River Kwai
Why is that a big deal? If it's shot on film it should be possible to make a newscan of the 35mm film at a better resolution (to a point at least).
Automatically upscale..
That's nice, as it would be a bit crap looking at a small image in the middle of the screen..
Re: The Bridge on the River Kwai
Needed to have at least one good film to truly tempt people.
Re: The Other Guys and esolving limits
Nigel's right: we often confuse, and manufacturers and broadcaster peddling new things encourage us in this, resolution with other factors. The difference in codecs between SD and HD is probably what most people notice and think it's the resolution whereas it's largely artefacts caused by the codec and reduced detail down to lower sampling rates. But resolution is much more marketable than boring things like that hence the "retina" fad. Me, I'll take higher contrast and colour range over resolution any time, but maybe I'm just weird.
Re: The Bridge on the River Kwai
At those resolutions, the film grain's probably gonna stand out. Meaning we're approaching the detail limits of the original films (they were already pretty close with 1080p resolutions). Higher resolutions probably aren't going to do much from here out with older content.
