Don't Waste Your Hard Earned QR on a 4K TV Here in Qatar Yet
For the moment anyone buying a 4K TV here in Qatar is going to be very disappointed. You see your lovely new expensive TV may be capable of displaying 4K (also referred to as UHD by some manufacturers), but unfortunately in the year 2015, there is quite simply nothing for you to watch on it.
Would I buy a 4K (UHD) TV right now? No way! Save your money.
Is 4K coming soon to Qatar? Well we are still waiting for the likes of Ooredoo and OSN to announce anything for 2016. And Netflix / Amazon Prime can only be watched here via a VPN, and that would be way to slow for 4K content. Both Netflix and Amazon Prime say you need at least 25Mbps for 4K to be viewable and I don’t know of any VPN service offering that kind of speed.
However there is one glimmer of hope. Next year will see the launch of the world’s first ‘4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Player’. Manufactured by Samsung the UBD-K8500 should be available early in 2016. And then for somewhere around QR 160 you can buy 4K Ultra discs to play on it. Now here is the bad news; although Samsung have not mentioned how much they are going to be charging for the UBD-K8500, but the Panasonic player due out shortly afterwards is going to cost a whopping circa QR 11,000.
Obviously in time 4K Ultra Blu-ray players will come down in price, and then we can all go out and buy one. But it’s going to be a year or two before that happens. So you see for the moment there is no point in spending the extra to buy a 4K TV now. Wait until 2017 or maybe later. They will cost less by then, and 4K content should be more affordably available.
Now a 4K projector on a 200 inch screen. That would be something else. I have just installed a 200 inch screen into a home theater for a customer, and it is absolutely awesome. And I can only imagine what 4K would look like on that.
To be honest I still find HD more than adequate. Of course 4K will one day become normal for everyone, but at the moment I have no issues watching HD, and see no advantage in 4K. Yet.
The human eye has an average resolution of 576 Megapixel. There is hardly any digital camera around that has this resolution! Trust your eyes and not the TV!
I'll buy one when they have 128k!
Surely the 8k is aimed more at the commercial market
@ yacine.h yup my life is soooo.... boring. Blank Stare :|
8k is already around. Sharp will begin selling the world's first 8K television just in time for Halloween.
Interested? You'd better be prepared to pay up. The 85-inch "LV-85001" ultra-high definition TV set will cost you ¥16 million ($133,000) when it goes on sale October 30.
Bandit, nice post, what you are saying is correct. Unless "source" is not widely available, display is useless. TV industry is growing faster and manufacturer wants new name/technology as selling point, from Plasma, LCD then LED, then 3D then smart... now they don't have anything else to show. With each advanced technology the TV price remained same, just the older tech TV dropped in price and then discontinued. So TV manufacturere smartly has maintained the high price of TV's , its only after LED cames the TV prices are dropping as no further tech came that attracted us. now they bring curved TV and Ultra... but they are failures.
What manufacturer should consider is that the major quantity of users wants bigger TV in good price. Though TV prices falls every year, but huge TVs are way too expensive still, hence some people opt for home theater projectors as i did.
I think its more than 2 years for 4K content to be available, by "available" I means, if i want to see anything for eg: Mission Impossible, I should be able to get it. Not just few 4K demo items.
Nevertheless, 4K is beautiful and would like to fast forward life to 2 years :-)
You must have a very boring life to care about these things...
But I want one NOW :0(
Well said Bandit.
Even if we got 25 Mp speed, the difference between 4K and normal HD resolution you notify only if you sit and watch at 1 metre distance.