Netflix vs Ultra 4K disc quailty?

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budda

budda

SatelliteGuys Pro
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Mar 21, 2006
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Oconomowoc
I have a 55 inch JS7000 Samsung. I has Dish Network Hopper 3. I have Netflicks with the 4K subscription. For Fathers Day my son got me a Samsung Ultra 4k disc player.UBD-K8500. If I watch 4K netflicks looks good but nothing that says wow!! This would be on the LED app or the DVD app.Hopper does not play 4K yet with Netflicks. I also received the Ultra Disc Dead pool. That is the best picture I have ever seen in my Home. If I hit the info button. Netflcks is like 2500. The disc is 3500 res. I have the UHD color on. Tried the BD wise. Why is the such a difference? Or is that just the way it is? Internet connection is 60 D ,5 U. So I am pretty sure that is not an issue. Don't get me wrong 4K netflicks is nice. But just not what I would call WOW! I can post exact res if needed just asking for options. Thanks.
 
Did you upgrade your Netflix account to the 4K option, $11.99 a month?
 
UHD Blu-ray discs have about 4-5 times more bandwidth than Netflix. Streaming services look good, but nowhere near the quality of the physical discs.
 
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bruce said:
Did you upgrade your Netflix account to the 4K option, $11.99 a month?
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Good point! Also your internet download must be capable of 25Mbps sustained of better.

I also noted that the Samsung K8500 player is not listed on the Netflix approved players yet it does work for Ultra 4K. Some of the content on Netflix is truly stunning.

harshness- in order to use the UHD trademark the 4K content has to support BT2020 color gamut and HDR. I've looked at quite a few of the Netflix 4K selections now and the HDR is kicking in for all of them.

Budda- A 55" 4K TV is barely capable of showing a difference between 4K and 2K resolution. The best quality difference will be the expanded color gamut which can be observed on the smaller screens.
 
Don Landis said:
harshness- in order to use the UHD trademark the 4K content has to support BT2020 color gamut and HDR.
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Of course there's no rule that says that the content has to push the envelope of BT2020 and HDR; just that it must be encoded for it. I think it is pretty well established that some of the original material (in some cases, entire productions) from which the masters were made weren't shot entirely in 4K or UHD.
 
budda said:
I have a 55 inch JS7000 Samsung. I has Dish Network Hopper 3. I have Netflicks with the 4K subscription. For Fathers Day my son got me a Samsung Ultra 4k disc player.UBD-K8500. If I watch 4K netflicks looks good but nothing that says wow!! This would be on the LED app or the DVD app.Hopper does not play 4K yet with Netflicks. I also received the Ultra Disc Dead pool. That is the best picture I have ever seen in my Home. If I hit the info button. Netflcks is like 2500. The disc is 3500 res. I have the UHD color on. Tried the BD wise. Why is the such a difference? Or is that just the way it is? Internet connection is 60 D ,5 U. So I am pretty sure that is not an issue. Don't get me wrong 4K netflicks is nice. But just not what I would call WOW! I can post exact res if needed just asking for options. Thanks.
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If you are watching HDR content on the disc that is the reason why and I believe Dead Pool 4K is also UHD/HDR. There is no HDR content available on a Samsung JS TV from Netflix. In addition it is very much a crap shoot as to what 4K will look exceedingly better than 1080. Amazon has some that looks very good, but not that much so than 1080 but then there is a couple of shows that do show off 4K better. To date I do not think I have seen any Streaming 4K ,movies or shows that look as good as 4K Youtube clips or other downloaded clips that show off 4K.
 
harshness said:
Of course there's no rule that says that the content has to push the envelope of BT2020 and HDR; just that it must be encoded for it. I think it is pretty well established that some of the original material (in some cases, entire productions) from which the masters were made weren't shot entirely in 4K or UHD.
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Check out http://realorfake4k.com/ for a good resource on real 4K, nearly 4K, or fake 4K.

Many UHD productions were shot in 2K and upscaled for 4K distribution. Traditional 35mm film productions are mostly 2K digitized. Productions shot with all digital cameras such as RED are either 3.4K or higher. Some will be shot with 4K or higher but special effects done in 2K. Because Hollywood is all over the map on these movies, it pays to know the chain of a title you plan to buy. The realorfake4k also includes Netflix and Amazon 4K offerings.

Also, the color gamut BT2020 is a smaller color spectrum, than the American Digital Film projection standard which is DCI P3, and HDR based on 4000 nits. The consumer distribution is BT2020 HDR based on 1000 nits.

According to one Sony engineer I spoke with the Samsung K8500 is outputting some colors outside of the BT2020 spec causing some clipping of these colors when projected by a proper TV. Apparently Sony fixed this problem to keep peace with the owners by extending the spec BT2020 to match those colors because the latest firmware update no longer has problems with those colors. Either that, or they modified the red gamma curve of the HDR to accommodate the extreme bright colors in the red region.
 
My point was to be that Netflix doesn't always offer the best possible rendition of their titles. For example, some technically well done TV shows like ST:DS9 are available on DVD but the Netflix offering is comparable DIRECTV SD or VHS quality. They're probably all encoded with the same codecs but they aren't all the same quality.
 
harshness said:
My point was to be that Netflix doesn't always offer the best possible rendition of their titles. For example, some technically well done TV shows like ST:DS9 are available on DVD but the Netflix offering is comparable DIRECTV SD or VHS quality. They're probably all encoded with the same codecs but they aren't all the same quality.
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Netflix gets the masters ( encodes) from the studios so they are stuck as far as the resolution goes with certain shows and movies.

DS9 has not been upgraded to HD yet like TNG ( which is in HD on Netflix), another show that used to be in SD on Netflix was The X-Files but it is also in HD now, I assume when Paramount gets off their a$$ and upgrades DS9 and Voyager (ewww) they will be in HD on Netflix.

Also, just played part of a episode of DS9, I hit the * button on my Roku 3 and it says 480 and does look as good as my DVDs using a Sony 720P TV (I am at work), but 480 (SD) does look worse on my 4K set at home.
 
I don't think it is a fair comparison discussing image quality of UHD disks with Netflix 4K UHD and using examples of old shows that were analog mastered and then SD digitized. A better comparison is to look at the minimum required data stream bandwidth. Netflix claims 25 Mbps and I recall reading somewhere the Netflix HD 1080p is 6 Mbps. However the UHD Disks are indeed much higher at 50 Mbps. So there is more compression with the Netflix 4K UHD content than an equivalent Disk in UHD, but approaching the upper limit of consumer technology, can you see the difference in a double blind test? Maybe if your screen is 150" or more but with most smaller screens I believe we'd be splitting thinner and thinner hairs. Bottom line the Netflix UHD is very high quality and at $11.99 for the UHD service a bargain in my opinion. Actually if you have the equipment it is a no-brainer service.
 
Dirtydan said:
Has anybody seen any Dolby Vision on Netflix?
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Obviously this would be limited to the latest model and upper crust LG and Vizio UHD TVs. Netflix and VUDU are the only places you're likely to find DolbyVision at this time (since Amazon is currently supporting only HDR10, Sony's ULTRA is HDR10 only and the Samsung UBD-K8500 doesn't support DolbyVision).

Most probably don't know that there's another format war going on (HDR10 vs Dolby Vision) but it is raging nonetheless.
 
Don Landis said:
I don't think it is a fair comparison discussing image quality of UHD disks with Netflix 4K UHD and using examples of old shows that were analog mastered and then SD digitized.
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It probably isn't reasonable to assert that national broadcast video content done in the last 20 years was analog mastered. Maybe it wasn't spooled out of digital vaults as it is today, but I'm betting it was at least digital videotape of some sort.

As you've correctly pointed out, the jump from HD to UHD resolution isn't a big deal on all but the large displays but the jump to UHD with HDR/WCG absolutely is on most any size display.
 
Whenever video is displayed on a screen if you hit the info button. This is on my 55 LED 4K , or my 1080P Plasma. It will show you what is being displayed the actual resolution. So I know what is on the screen. Discs even with a 55 inch are out standing. Utube 4K, again outstanding. Netflicks 4K while very good. Is meh? Thanks for all the input.
 

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