HDR on LED technology is what bothers me. Unless there’s 1:1 Pixel to LED ratio, you’re always going to struggle with abnormalities due to light bleed. Plasma was far better suited to HDR than LED, so it’s a shame to see it go. OLED seems promising but I’m hesitant to buy piggybacking new technologies.
My complaint with 4K Bluray (which was my complaint with Blu Ray in general) is that the push is resolution almost exclusively.
Most of the films being released on 4KBD were mastered in 2k. That means that all of that larger 100GB disc space and H265 compression efficiency is being wasted on an upscaled image. Blurays have consistently done that with older tv shows and especially anime - 1080p upscales of 480p material. I’d much rather see the bitrate that is being wasted on Pseudo Picture information piped into the best possible representation of the source.
Star Wars is going to be affected it a LOT due to image quality disparities between films -
Ep 1 was mastered at 2k, but has the potential to be remastered at higher quality if the original film sources are available.
Eps 2 and 3 are limited to their 2k masters, which themselves are upscales from 1080p digital sources.
Eps 4-6 have multiple masters, depending on which version is released. The original negatives have the potential to go even beyond 4k if they’re available in good enough condition - if not, Legacy has shown (well, hinted) that a 4k version is very attainable.
Sadly, we’re more likely to get Special Editions, which were scanned at 2k in the 90s, printed to a film negative, which were then rescanned at 4k in the early 2000’s.
Ep 7 (and presumably 8 and 9 will be) is already mastered at 4k.With that in mind… everyone knows we’re going to get a 9 film, 4k Bluray Set.
And despite everything above… all 9 will be 4k, H265 encodes. So much wasted space on imaginary “extra detail” at the expense of the actual source material. Your average viewer wouldn’t even know that the film on the disc is only encoded at 2k, but I think there’s a good chance they would notice when watching that it had double the bits per pixel.Source for the 2K and 4K scans info? AFAIK the original trilogy was scanned only in 1080p
The original trilogy can be rescanned (yay film), especially the OUT which has no “2k” digital imagery. The Special Editions are a little trickier. The 97 version would be a good candidate even if the new effects were done at 2k. If they wanted 4k masters of the bluray versions, that would be a bit difficult, but not impossible. They could rescan the 97 version and rebuild the changes by splicing in footage from the old masters or re-doing the effects.
As for the prequels: episode 1 is in the same situation at the 97 SE: shot on film in anamorphic widescreen and sfx done at 2k. Episodes 2 and 3 were filmed on 1st generation HD cinema cameras which shot at 1080p. To make the situation worse: in order to maintain the series’ habitual aspect ratio of 2.35, they simply hard cropped the image to 817p. So those two films are eternally stuck at those resolutions.