Microsoft unveils the Xbox One X console at E3

[Smudger]

I think we're getting to the stage where 4k is the norm, at least in terms of tellies. You can get a 4k telly for under £500 now, and whilst it may not have all the bells and whistles, and the HDR implementation may not be much good, they're at a price where most can stretch to it. Getting a telly which properly shows off the benefits of 4k and HDR is still going to be expensive, however. It's not a 'must buy now' thing, but a 'when I upgrade, it'll be 4k' thing. But for me, decent HDR is far more important than the resolution, it's just at the moment, there are no 1080p tellies that do HDR.

[shaithis]

I'm sure that the X-ready game patches will also deploy new options for sub-4k X owners to have more eye candy and 60fps. The marketing will obviously be 4k heavy though as that's been a hot topic since the PS4 and the XBO were released.

[Saracen]

I think we're getting to the stage where 4k is the norm, at least in terms of tellies. You can get a 4k telly for under £500 now, and whilst it may not have all the bells and ......

Completely agree. It is "getting to be" the norm, for much the same reason (true, proper) HD did. Which is, prices dropped to the point where there was effectively no difference, and tpat that point, hunting out anything anything less than HD became an exercise as frustrating as locating rocking horse droppings, presumably because all the SD telly's were in the shop at the end of the rainbow, on the shelf next to the pot of gold.

I.e. market forces, and producer power.

I fully expect 4K to be the next thing. For instance, a friend bought a new (large-ish) TV and it was 4K. However, he bought it despite it being 4K not because it was.

Personally, I rather expect my next TV (hopefully years off yet) will be 4K (or better) because by then I doubt anything less will be available.

But there are a couple of reservations. The first you've mentioned .... take-up rate. What percentage of people will upgrade a perfectly good HD TV in order to get 4K? My bet is that the proportion wanting 4K badly enough to upgrade for that alone is small, and even those wanting to, not all can justify the cost.

The second reservation is the risk of 4K ending up as a dubious marketing tag. I hope they don't go down the route of HD-Ready, HD, Pseudo-HD, "Full" HD, etc, because all it does is devalue the term and confuse buyers. And it sounds like it's already started.

[Smudger]

My boss at my old work (a major film distributor) went and bought a £4000 4K telly, and was then made to sit through a presentation on HDR, about why 4k on its own wasn't the thing, HDR was the thing. His telly didn't have HDR.

Gutted is putting it mildly...

[Ozaron]

But there are a couple of reservations. The first you've mentioned .... take-up rate. What percentage of people will upgrade a perfectly good HD TV in order to get 4K? My bet is that the proportion wanting 4K badly enough to upgrade for that alone is small, and even those wanting to, not all can justify the cost.

The second reservation is the risk of 4K ending up as a dubious marketing tag. I hope they don't go down the route of HD-Ready, HD, Pseudo-HD, "Full" HD, etc, because all it does is devalue the term and confuse buyers. And it sounds like it's already started.

What about the bit where 4K TV shows are kind of niche right now and even if a console can push 4K it might not be as smooth or enjoyable as HD on a marginally smaller screen? Granted I don't have cable or other Virgin / Sky type products in our house (they don't supply cave hermits in rural areas like they do everyone else) but I can't imagine the amount of 4K content available is very much unless you can just source whatever you want to watch from your PC or something.

I'm still struggling to get my family to remember they have HD versions of normal channels. They record SD with a PVR, etc.

[Saracen]

....

I'm still struggling to get my family to remember they have HD versions of normal channels. They record SD with a PVR, etc.

As do I, despite having cable HD and Freeview PVRs, but it isn't for lack of remembering. My Freeview box, a Humax, defaults to HD and I have to keep over-riding it to fet the SD version.

Why? Because neither I nor the wife care about the difference in image quality, and in SD we get about 4x the hours of recording, which we consider to be MUCH more useful.

Of course, YMMV.

[Ozaron]

Because neither I nor the wife care about the difference in image quality, and in SD we get about 4x the hours of recording, which we considsr to be MUCH more useful.

Of course, YMMV.

We also have a near identical Humax, except ours understands only SD. I'd pay you to take it, if it were indeed mine. Constantly changing the UI scaling for no reason other than to suit itself, so that it doesn't fit the TV aspect ratio. Tried changing settings on both endlessly but whatever I do seems to end up being wrong. Not a huge deal but it frustrates me to no end. Occasionally has a few "signal" blips and (to be fair, rarely) stops working entirely and has to be hard rebooted.

Anyway, getting a bit off topic. If it stops being a useful item in our house I'll get back to you, I suppose.

[daddacool]

One of the things that gets overlooked in console upgrading is the profile of a lot of console purchasers. A lot of us are parents- When I bought my PS4 Pro, the kids got my launch PS4, their own profiles and through the magic of digital purchasing, access to my library of games (I can play against them at Overwatch for example, with just the one purchase of the game digitally).

Likewise when I get the Xbox One X, the Xbox One S will go in the kids room and they'll get access to the whole Xbox library of games.

I know a lot of parents who take this approach/justification for upgrading their consoles

[Saracen]

We also have a near identical Humax, except ours understands only SD. I'd pay you to take it, if it were indeed mine. Constantly changing the UI scaling for no reason other than to suit itself, so that it doesn't fit the TV aspect ratio. Tried changing settings on both endlessly but whatever I do seems to end up being wrong. Not a huge deal but it frustrates me to no end. Occasionally has a few "signal" blips and (to be fair, rarely) stops working entirely and has to be hard rebooted.

Anyway, getting a bit off topic. If it stops being a useful item in our house I'll get back to you, I suppose.

Hmmm. Later model, presumably. Humax HDR-Fox-T2 here.

Mostly, I'm very happy with it.

A couple of niggles :-

1) It defaults to HD, with no ability (I can find) to change default.
2) It INSISTS on checking for Firmware updates at about 4am, even if recording, and aborts recording in the process.
3) It INSISTS on "recommending" other "similar" (Hah, joke) programs with no ability (can find) to get it to cease, desist and knock it hell off.
4) If you retune, it deletes all scheduled recordings, without warning it will. Grrrr.

Otherwise, I like it a lot.

And yeah, a bit off topic. I'll desist, having vented that.

[Gerrard]

Hmmm. Later model, presumably. Humax HDR-Fox-T2 here.

Mostly, I'm very happy with it.

A couple of niggles :-

1) It defaults to HD, with no ability (I can find) to change default.
2) It INSISTS on checking for Firmware updates at about 4am, even if recording, and aborts recording in the process.
3) It INSISTS on "recommending" other "similar" (Hah, joke) programs with no ability (can find) to get it to cease, desist and knock it hell off.
4) If you retune, it deletes all scheduled recordings, without warning it will. Grrrr.

Otherwise, I like it a lot.

And yeah, a bit off topic. I'll desist, having vented that.

I have the same device.

1) Mine defaults to the last channel it was on.
2) I haven't noticed that, but what I have noticed since I got a new Samsung TV is that it does something at 2040 and again at 2140 as the TV switches the source. Incredibly annoying, but the blame is with Samsung and the fact they didn't think anyone would want to turn off this "feature". However, loads of people are complaining due to the Switch doing something similar, so I can look forward to a firmware update at some point.
3) Annoying.
4) Definately very annoying and took me a while to realise why it was happening. However, I can sort of understand why it does it.

Anyway, but to the original topic. Whilst the X doesn't suit me personally due to being a PC user, as always with console upgrades, I expect to see some benefit as the bar is raised for developers.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

[Saracen]

I have the same device.

1) Mine defaults to the last channel it was on.
2) I haven't noticed that, but what I have noticed since I got a new Samsung TV is that it does something at 2040 and again at 2140 as the TV switches the source. Incredibly annoying, but the blame is with Samsung and the fact they didn't think anyone would want to turn off this "feature". However, loads of people are complaining due to the Switch doing something similar, so I can look forward to a firmware update at some point.
3) Annoying.
4) Definately very annoying and took me a while to realise why it was happening. However, I can sort of understand why it does it.

Anyway, but to the original topic. Whilst the X doesn't suit me personally due to being a PC user, as always with console upgrades, I expect to see some benefit as the bar is raised for developers.

By 1) defaulting to HD, I mean when you schedule a recording. If there's an HD channel, it defaulrs to it even if the program I told it to record was on the SD version of the channel.

Re: 2. Inreresting. Samsung TV here, too, and it doesn't do that.

Re: 4) I can sort-of understand why they do it, too, though a more intelligent approach shouldn't be hard to implement. What I cannot forgive is not warning users scheduling data will be lost.

[Smudger]

2) might be to do with HDMI-CEC - Anynet+ in Samsung-speak. This is supposed to switch the input on the telly when you switch on the source. Can get annoying if you don't actually want to switch the source. Could mean your tellybox is resetting itself, and the telly is receiving a signal to say 'I'm here, I'm on', so it's switching to it. If you don't use the CEC function, you can switch it off on the telly. There should be a setting for it on the tellybox as well. Might be under 'HDMI control'

[DanceswithUnix]

My boss at my old work (a major film distributor) went and bought a £4000 4K telly, and was then made to sit through a presentation on HDR, about why 4k on its own wasn't the thing, HDR was the thing. His telly didn't have HDR.

Gutted is putting it mildly...

That is always the early adopter risk though. At work I have a 40" 4K TV on my desk I think because as the new boy here I got the screen no-one else wanted. It has an old HDMI standard so can only do 30Hz at full resolution and the HDCP is too out of date for anything to trust it with UHD content. So it ends up as 1080p and the scaler turns video into a smudgy mess. I managed to mess with the picture settings so it doesn't look like an oil painting at least. Oh, and trying to use it as a monitor I think the processing lag is bad as well as even at 30Hz I wouldn't expect a screen to feel this laggy.

So yes you can get very cheap 4K TVs, but be careful.

In case anyone is wondering, I don't think you can get this old Cello model any more, I would expect new models to be a lot more usable judging by their specs.

On the other end of the scale, some of the 4K sets I see in the shops have blacks so dark it just seems to suck me in. Can't justify the cost though. I think Saracen is right though that next time I need to buy a screen I will look for decent quality, and quality screens will be 4K.

The question then is, if buying a console is 4K worth double the price of a straight One-S. Will have to wait until I see one in action before I can really judge.