 Ignoring the abortion that was stereoscopic 3D Blu-ray, the entertainment industry pushes a revolutionary new media format down our throats with promises that it will completely change the way we enjoy our movies about once every ten years. But while DVD promised very mainstream benefits over VHS in addition to better image quality, more convenient storage, increased longevity, and no rewinding, Blu-ray's adoption has been challenged at every stage from HD DVD and the less obvious image quality benefits versus DVD on the average VRS TV in the early days, to the cost and convenience advantages of online streaming today. So does 4K Blu-ray offer up an obvious enough benefit to bring online streaming aficionados back to physical media? Or failing that, is it at least enough to prompt enthusiasts to upgrade? Let's talk about that. Music Massdrop is hosting a drop for the Hi-Fi Man ET350 headphones which you can get for $99.99 US dollars. Check it out at the link in the video description. Let's open up with the gear that you'll need to enjoy your shiny new 4K Blu-rays. 4K Blu-rays use the BDXL format which can hold up to 128 gigs on a triple layer disc. But it isn't backwards compatible, so you'll need a new player. We chose the Xbox One S since Atmos support isn't terribly important to anyone without a redonkulous speaker setup in a dedicated theater room, and it costs the same as the standalone players anyway while having much more functionality. Next, you'll need a 4K TV. HDR support strongly preferred as we'll get into in more depth later. I'll be using LG's signature G6 65 inch OLED since it's one of, if not the best, home HDR experiences at the moment and representative of what will be more widely available in the year or two to come. After that, you will need more expensive 4K Blu-ray discs. We chose these movies because we wanted to experience many of the different types of original formats that could be converted to 4K Blu-ray. And finally, you'll need the as yet uncracked HDCP 2.2 support at every link in your data chain which usually means a special port or two on the back of your receiver and TV, plus some faffing about since from my experience, it is buggy as heck at the moment. I actually ended up taking my receiver out of the mix halfway through our session because it just stopped handshaking with the Xbox One S. Now let's talk about the test. Our resident cinema dork Brandon and I shut the blinds and chained ourselves to my couch for the better part of a day doing everything from watching longer uninterrupted chunks of the films to pausing as close to the same frames as we could and pixel peeping. At least that's what we did once we finished bickering over what settings to use on the TV. For HDR, it was simple. Since all the normal picture profile modes are replaced with three HDR ones, we just turned off obvious nonsense like clear motion and edge enhancement and set it to HDR for a dark room. But for our standard Blu-ray comparison system, a PC playing lossless MKV rips over the network in MPCHC, we eventually settled on the ISF expert dark mode with neutral color temperature, all those enhancements off, and either standard or wide color gamut depending on the film. More on that later. First up, the Lego movie. The first Blu-ray HDR experience for either of us. Since this was our first crack at A-B evaluation, we ended up trying to tune the non-HDR image in TV quite a bit to get the most fair comparison. This was one movie where wide color gamut got Blu-ray close to the vibrancy of HDR without looking like Best Buy TV syndrome. But what our compensations lacked was subtlety. In this scene, the HDR version looks like a bluish shadow on a gray street. The Blu-ray looks like a blue street. As for the 4K upsampling, there is a difference in wide shots with distant text or objects, but from a normal viewing distance, I would describe it as not a huge deal. Next up, Sicario. We found our wide gamut setting was overpowering in this film and went back to normal. In this night scene, the higher bitrate and increased color depth give the sky a more natural, less banded appearance. And in this one, the parking lot of the bar's darkness and the brightness of the lights make the bar seem like a beacon or an oasis, more than just a building. HDR had a true emotional impact. Moving indoors again, the difference is there in the vibrancy of the sign on the character's right as she walks in and in the lighting on our character's face as she sits at the bar. In the Blu-ray version, it looks like there's a light shining on her face. In HDR, she is clearly lit in multiple colors from multiple different sources, just like she would be if she was sitting in a bar. The Revenant was a funny one for us. As a movie that was mostly shot in natural light at native 4K, we were expecting to be blown away. And we did get a difference. I mean, look at the difference in color in the burned church scene here between Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray. But we also observed that we could compensate for a lot of that difference by shifting the tint of the TV to minus 23. And in the bear scene, we saw the same thing again, leading us to agree on a couple of things. One, that 4K resolution on the disc itself had a negligible impact to the viewing experience, and that HDR didn't affect the appearance of the lighting nearly as much as we'd expected. It wasn't until a firelit scene that our tint hack was defeated, and the HDR version flexed its range muscles. But even then, while the teal cast of the first two scenes may have been closer to the director's vision, the more blue-like appearance, unlike in Socario, didn't affect the emotional impact of the scene. Though to be clear, this isn't so much a criticism of the HDR master as much as it is praise for the Blu-ray master. The 4K version of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is, simply put, a disappointment. In side-by-side comparisons, sure. The cop cars are a little whiter, and the shadows are a little deeper. But for a 35mm film to 4K digital scan, I was expecting more than just more accurate representation of the filmic look. We both were. Amazing Spider-Man 2 was easily the low point of our HDR day. Which is okay, because our last title, Life of Pi, made us immediately forget about it. Holy actual balls. This movie looks like the difference between a competent, if unexceptional, color grading job and turning the TV into a window into a completely different reality in my living room. The visual difference, once again, isn't in the increased resolution, which makes sense, since it's upsampled from a 2K master. But rather, from the incredible difference in the way the scene's lighting looks. Cloth, shadows, skin tones. This is the first movie that's made me sit up and go, Wow! Now that I've seen the HDR version, I have no desire whatsoever to settle for the Blu-ray. Words don't do it justice. It's absolutely beautiful. Which leads us pretty well into the conclusion, which is a little complicated. First, the good. While I'm still not sold on 4K from a normal viewing distance until home TVs are 100 inches or greater, HDR is not a gimmick. No amount of tooling around with your TV's menu can simulate its effects across an entire film. And we did try my TV's Faco simulated HDR mode. And done right, it dramatically improves the movie viewing experience. And I'll be surprised if streaming HDR can compete with 4K Blu-ray HDR, since traditional Blu-ray already blows streaming out of the water in terms of color depth. Though I'd love to be proven wrong here. Second up, some big problems. So first, the increased cost versus the benefit is the highest we've ever seen, with only AV nerds and movie buffs likely to be able to tell the difference without a side-by-side comparison. Sorry to all of you guys, but most of the world doesn't calibrate their TV and uses the built-in speakers. And second, if we're being honest, it's not actually here yet. There's always that transition period, every time, where we have a new standard, where the hardware is like, sort of there, and the standards are like, sort of there, but the content needs time to catch up. And in this case, even the content that does exist. Well frankly, most of it doesn't benefit from it in the way that content, a year or two from now, will. So for now then, I'd say the money is better spent on almost anything else. Calibrating your existing TV, buying literally twice as many movies, or even a comfier couch. I do plan to invest in it eventually, when more than, you know, one out of five discs that I buy, feel like I really got my money's worth. But, I will also be waiting for HDCP 2.2 to be cracked, so that I'm not paying extra for the privilege, of putting physical media into a slot, instead of streaming everything off of my NAS. TunnelBear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open internet. Whatever products it is that you want to buy on Amazon or anywhere else. Yes my friends, TunnelBear makes it, so the services and websites that you use, cannot see your IP address or where you're from. As soon as you turn TunnelBear on, it encrypts your connection, and lets you tunnel through a different country all together. TunnelBear has a top rated privacy policy and does not log your activity, and you can try it for free, with 500 megabytes of data, with no credit card required. Then, if you choose to get a year of unlimited data, you can save 10% by going to tunnelbear.com slash LTT. Alright, so thanks for watching guys, if this video sucked you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured at Amazon, in the video description. Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next, so click that little button and check out our latest video over on Channel Superfun.