That's what they said when we upgraded from 405 to 625 !

Higher resolution capture makes sense, you're able to zoom in 'after the event' on something in the corner of the image, and still maintain good resolution. For instance something that happened away from the action in a football match. Applications for CCTV and medical work are obvious of course

It's not so much that it's a waste of time, it's just that it can be exploited by broadcasters & manufacturers.
In the UK I reckon the average TV size for living rooms is somewhere between 37-45" and gradually getting bigger but this is slowing down as physical size is the dominating factor & no longer price.
At this screen size with, normal viewing distances FullHD 1080 resolution is absolutely fine, even pushing on towards 50" it can still be a great picture. This is the important bit though, HD broadcasts do not provide any of our TVs with a signal to show off how good they can be. The transmissions for HD are compressed and adjusted to lowest quality the broadcasters think they can get away with. Doing this lets them broadcast less data per channel, allowing them pay for less broadcasting space.

Should we not be waiting until HD is standard before worrying about UHD and 4k? Most channels are still in SD.

The TV industry has backed itself into a corner over 4k. Adding more pixels to an LCD display is easy, hence the proliferation of full HD (or greater) phones. Even with newer codecs, though, there's no getting away from the fact that there are 4 times the number of pixels to compress. Add HDR and HFR (which few people have seen yet) and the bit rate jumps sky high. Are all three deliverable in the long term?

I have an LG 4K with HDR but cannot access it either.

Well, there's 8K to come before that. And 8K is about the same quality as the human eye, so what do they try to sell us beyond that?

And why bother with 4K on Iplayer when they can't even get DD5.1 sound from TV shows on there?

LG demo'd the system in May this year on one of their OLED screens

http://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php...&id=1467719709

So the 2016 LG tvs are capable of HLG yet according article I read it seems they won't get the update until next year. That seems a change decision to me.

IMO the broadcasters have jumped the gun a bit in getting 4K broadcasts/sports out in order to compete, and not bothering with HDR at the same time (probably because the technology wasn't mature enough yet).

It's just going to cause more confusion for the average consumer who won't know the difference and will likely think they can get both HDR and 4K when they may not.

At least the gaming industry has jumped properly - introducing 4K HDR gaming at the same time.