It was September, 2012. Seems like a million years ago. I was at the CEDIA Expo in Indianapolis. Back then it was still a show for installers of high-end audio and video systems. More to the point, that was when the CEDIA show was really “the place to be” for premium home video. Back then, a lot of people still used A/V installers to make the systems of their dreams come true. Sadly today, most people just buy TVs at a club store and set them up themselves.
The show had an actual 4K TV on display. I had seen 4K projectors before, but this was the first time I’d actually seen a real actual 4K TV. The technology really was that new.
The theoretical 4K TV
For a price slightly over $20,000 you got an 84″ TV. Or you would, since this was a prototype at that time. The real 4K TVs would come out about 18 months later, and they wouldn’t be that big for quite a while to come.
What did I think? Read for yourself.
Bottom line? I wasn’t really impressed back then, and it set the stage for 11 years, and counting, of waiting for a flood of 4K content that has yet to come. DIRECTV’s four live channels are great, but no other content provider has stepped up in the traditional pay-TV space. Yes, it’s true that streaming companies have stepped in with a lot of what they call 4K content. But the compression algorithms they use are so aggressive that it takes a lot of the quality away. Ultra HD Blu-ray is still the best way to experience 4K, but few people have a system like that.
Too small for 4K?
Back then I said 84″ was too small for 4K, and that’s still mostly true. Most people sit so far from their TVs that their eyes can’t tell the difference between HD and 4K. Only gamers sit close enough to really be able to get the benefit.
The one thing I’ll say now that I didn’t say then is that regular HD does look kind of horsey when you scale it up to that size so you almost need a 4K panel just to make the HD stuff look ok. The scalers built into today’s TVs are very good, but there are limits to what you can do with the signal you have. With 720p and SD signals, it’s downright painful to look at a large TV. I think most folks would admit that.
Since 2012, 4K TVs have gotten thinner, cheaper, and added HDR features that make them look better. No one has implemented the 2×2 matrix option of that early TV — if it had worked it would have let you connect 4 HD sources and watch them all in virtual 42″ screens. That would have been the ultimate picture-in-picture, but it seems like no one would have bought that option anyway. It’s probably for the best that it never materialized.
