I don't think you really have any idea about what is actually happening now on the 4K front. If you still think 4K will be years away from the mass market fine, leave your head in the sand.

Well, we'll come back to this in a year and see how far the like of Haier and HiSense have made inroads, eh?

Splitting hairs I think. So they're making 4K TVs but without panels are they?.... yeah, right

So had HD before it. What's that go t to do with anything?


And I saw an engineering demo of HD on the BBC stand at NAB back in 1990.

The development and launch to market of 4K has been much shorter than for HD. Things are moving faster than you think.

Think you have that the wrong way around.

You are the one obsessed with the Chinese.....Samsung, Sony and LG will have plenty of 4K TV's at market moving prices come 2014. There will even be some tempting prices come Christmas.
Chinese 50" 4K The price is equivalent to £734.37p, but of course, it will be years before this really happens.......won't it?

Nice find on the 50" Seiki. The 39" would interest those obsessed with supermarket pricing... £479 as a rough equivalent

Yes, the 39" is cheap but I figure 50" would be the minimum to make 4K worthwhile. I'll wait until I see one though before condemning it completely....
Think this is the correct link for it though..

Looking at a 4K demo on a 55 inch Sony TV in John Lewis there is a small problem most people haven't thought of. At a typical domestic viewing distance the picture is only slightly better than good HD, at around 4 feet it is truly amazing but if you sit at that distance the rest of the family will just get a view of the back of your head. A 110 inch TV would solve this problem but even if they were affordable, where would you put it in a typical house? It would look hideous when switched off hanging on the wall, like an old fashioned school blackboard. Before anyone says use a projector and a motorized screen, check the life and cost of the lamp. Perhaps it should only show programmes for bachelors.

Was as low as $965.99 a few weeks ago.

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1481241/se...#post_23519689

Yep......There is always a downside in a pokey Brit house....But, where there's a will there's a way......Besides, these TV's aren't designed to watch your soaps on.
I don't even use my HD TV for that. It's just used for an evenings entertainment or a major sporting event. Plenty of small TV's around for the mundane stuff, that have little visual value.
But, like HD before it, size and distance won't matter to most people....

The Sony demo in PC world is really badly placed with no nice viewing area.....I think they are still trying to offload all the 3D sets....

Oh No!! You are really spoiling the illusion that it's going to be an expensive niche market for years to come........!!!

im lucky enough to have got a samsung ue55f9000 on order for del this week its going to replace my old 36 inch sony CRT model i had together with the normal sky plus so i imagime this together with my new sky HD box and infinity 2 wifi im going to see some changes

Has anyone bothered to read the Seiki commercial reviews though. Completely barebones, 4k looks good but very little to compare it with and has poor upscaling so HD and SD content looks poor.

Also I suspect the low price comes simply from having to get rid of their stock of panels. The panels them (and most of the 4k sets currently on the market) are only 30Hz as that's all that can be passed into them as its all HDMI 1.4 can handle. Its highly unlikely 30Hz will be the adopted standard so it will be the next gen with HDMI v2 with the better panels.

And 50" is still too small to get any real benefit in a standard home layout. Why is anyone going to pay so much more for a TV where 4k doesn't really look any better than 1080p on other sets and which produces a worse HD and SD picture.

Its going to be like Bluray. Yes prices will get lower but the improvement won't be enough to justify the demand to bring prices down to that killer level. And content becomes important as content can drive sales too but content hardware needs to reach a certain point where all content is released in the format (Not everything is released on Bluray yet, some things still,only get DVD releases). Infact content needs also needs 4k media players to be adopted too which is going to hold 4K TV prices back also.

There was a whole load of cheap HD TV's that weren't really fit for purpose in the early days. All those really did was harm the uptake. They basically appeared as companies were trying to get rid of stock of these panels that were going to become obsolete and these prices strike me as being the same situation. I'm guessing the bigger brands simply aren't resorting to it so as not to have to sell the next gen at a loss.

You're really missing the point with this product though. You're treating it like an enthusiast. That's not the market.

Put yourself in the shoe of some redneck who has heard that 4K is coming and is going to cost at least a months wages. Now imagine him down at Home Depot, Best Buy or Costco when he sees a 50" 4K TV for little more than a weeks wages. That's your market for this, right there.

There's still a load of really cheap HD TVs that are rubbish right now. Each time a new lower price point is achieved then the quality seems to take a dip. Take most of the badge engineered products.

I don't think we can really call any of the cheap TV's available today with the cheap models available early on tha were over half the price of everyone else. These are devices that are fundemenatally flawed (For example the cheap HD TV's were often low quality obsolete panels designed for computer monitors which resulted in a streached image due to and these 4K's only being 30Hz panels so won't be able to show many sources of video in it native format)

And is there actually going to be many of these TV's on the market. They are panels that will soon be obsolete and not really fit for purpose. They won't keep making them and the newer panels aren't going to sold at cost like these are. And the people who do buy them aren't going to encourage others to buy 4K TV's as they won't have 4k sources compatible with the screen and their HD content won't look good going on the reviews.

And once again even if they have a 30Hz 4K source the problem arises in that the step upto 4k isn't the step up from VHS to DVD where everyone sees the benefit. Its DVD to Bluray (or maybe even less than that, perhaps the jump from 720p to 1980p) where people's screen sizes and viewing distances don't let them see or appreciate the difference

No matter what is out there and coming to a lounge near you soon, there is always a raft of reasons why it's not going to happen, that's just the nature of the beast.
Luckily the major manufacturers rarely listen to such pessimistic views.
The fact is that it is coming and coming fast. By next year prices will have fallen to acceptable levels and production will be at full throttle.
Content will continue to grow and will almost certainly grow faster than 3D has done.
I don't think anyone is pretending that the cheap sets available now are what would be desirable in ones home. The discussion was solely about if they existed now or not and they clearly do.
4K will eventually become the norm for larger screens as HD did. In the UK size and distance mattered little for the sale of HD so I'm guessing the same will apply to a lot of 4K sales.
Personally I won't buy a sub 60" 4K under any circumstances, but, by the time I am ready to buy, the prices will have tumbled from where they are now......That said, I nearly ordered the Sony Bravia KD65X9005 the other day...... I think they may have cracked the TV speaker problem with that one.....However, common sense (Wife) ruled and I'll wait a little bit longer for those lower prices.

We will have to agree to differ on the quality of cheap 1080p TVs. My experience is from seeing them in customer's homes and attempting to get something of a half reasonable result from them. Given the obvious caveats of a much larger picture, and also the change to all-digital broadcasting with evident MPEG, there are still issues with black detail, colour detail, uniformity and scaling that I would consider unacceptable compared to older "quality brand " LCD TVs.

Debate about the quality of these Seiki sets is, I think, largely academic for UK buyers. It's unlikely they'll make it over the pond to Blighty in their current form. 4K development means that if we do see similar budget sets then the panels could well be more up to date. However, the fact that there are such low cost 4K sets available is a signpost of things to come and a clear indication of the commercial will to make 4K very affordable very quickly.

I think we need to wait until hdmi v2.0 appears, and a suitable source.
Sky's 4k box (when it comes) will hopefully provide 4k @ 25p and hopefully 50p and the next version of blu-ray 4k @ 48p so we will need a tv capable of displaying those.

My worry is that if/when Sky start transmitting 4k pictures they'll do to HD what they did to SD and make HD look like crap to encourage uptake of 4K.

If any bradcaster emits UHD 1 .. The frame rate will need to be at,least 100 Hz .....
Plus the 12 bit depth etc .... For it to look just better than HD ...

HDMI 2 does not support this neither do flat panels....

The whole broadcast chain needs to be defined for UHD ...
And there are many aspects technical and economic which mean that uhd2 looks a more likely static resolution.
...... Which does look better than HD ..

Sorry, I would completely disagree - as long as you view from the correct (even closer) distance, then simply increasing the resolution would give you greatly increased detail, which is what HD is.

Mainly on static pictures though. The higher the spatial resolution at any given frame rate the worse will movement look in percentage terms. In many fast moving action situations, HD gives no better resolution than SD TV on similar scenes - and that's because the powers that be couldn't be arsed to raise the frame rates. Except of course on 720p but that, as we now know, has been ignored in favour of more impressive looking numbers and by using using screenshots of static images.

Raising the frame rate to at least 100fps will be essential if the same mistake is to be avoided on UHD TV - and that will make the studios' 48fps proposal look just as sad as today's pathetic 24 fps (not to mention a continuing lack of full compatibilty between film and TV, and the US and Europe. Faster shutter speeds on cameras will be preferable too, to reduce motion blur.

IMO all the above matters should be addressed and solved before UHD TV is let loose on public TV services, at whatever cost.