The vast majority of people won't own a 4K television, and even the select few who did buy into the hype won't actually be able to tell the difference from a normal viewing distance (though that won't stop them from telling everyone how much better it looks to them). You'll need a really huge screen (think front projector) to notice the difference with 4K, and 4K front projectors will be insanely expensive for quite a while.
This is 3D all over again and it's going to meet the same fate (dead man walking). I have a 1080p front projector with a very large screen, and I certainly wouldn't mind swapping my projector for a 4K unit, but: a) Front projector owners like me are not the norm, and b) I won't pay top dollar for a 4K projector (My 1080p Epson 8350 set me back about $1300 a little over a year ago and it puts out a great picture).
Truth is, even overly compressed 720p/1080p content looks acceptable on my big screen. Back in the early days, my first exposure to a front projector was a Sony CRT unit. Huge. Three RGB lenses. And 480p (if memory serves). Even DVD hadn't been invented yet (about 430 lines of resolution for laserdisc was the best there was). And, believe it or not, a huge screen paired with that was still an impressive sight to behold.
When it comes to movie watching, I'm a big believer in getting a *bigger* screen and not worrying so much about the resolution. Bigger is better. Get yourself a nice 1080p projector and a big screen and enjoy. For the same money, you could get a much smaller 4K TV, and if you sit 6" away from it you may be impressed by all of that extra resolution, but sitting close to a small TV makes for a poor movie watching experience.
And let's not forget the convenience factor. The world willingly gave up LPs and higher-bitrate CDs for the convenience of MP3. I'd love to watch a 4K movie in my living room, but right now I enjoy having my entire movie collection ripped and stored on disk, so that I can stream my movies at will to whatever room in my house I want to. With 4K you can forget about that. The movies will be too huge to store. So you'd better like having to deal with discs and having to sit through 10 minutes of commercials before you can watch your movie.
My wife and I bought an Epson 8350 projector and a 120" screen last year for $1,500 combined on sale. We sit about 12" (the width of our living room) from the screen, so the picture takes up most of our field of view. Even though a good LED HDTV is brighter and sharper, the Epson produces an excellent picture for the price, and, in my opinion, nothing else equals the impact of sheer size. Something like
Lawrence of Arabia needs to be seen on the biggest screen possible. We rarely go to a movie theater anymore. A friend of ours, who has a bigger space, recently upgraded his 120" screen to a 150" screen, which is even more impressive.
As for picture quality, I'm surprised by how good even old home VHS tapes look on our big screen. I thought they'd be unwatchable when blown up to that size. DVDs look very good, and streaming HD content looks even better, but nothing matches the quality of a Blu-Ray disc. The difference between streaming HD and Blu-Ray isn't great, though -- it's noticeable mainly during low-light action scenes, where streaming HD shows artifacts.
Our approach is this: We usually watch things for the first time on Comcast or Netflix. There is very little that we like well enough that we want to own it, but for those few movies or shows that we do want to own, we want the best quality possible -- which means Blu-Ray, if it's available. We wait until it's been out for a while, though, and get it discounted or used on Amazon. We did buy the complete series
The Sopranos via iTunes, though, because that's the only place where you can buy it in HD. Only seasons 1 and 6 were released on Blu-Ray.
We've never bought a movie via iTunes. Do you get the extras that come with a DVD or Blu-Ray? If not, that's another reason to get the physical media. A discounted or used Blu-Ray usually is cheaper than the digital version, anyway.
I don't understand why some people are saying that the price per terabyte of storage hasn't come down since 2008. I bought a couple of 4 TB Seagate drives on sale at Costco for $159 each. The regular price is $179. This is from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte
In 1991, consumer grade, 1 gigabyte (1/1000 TB) disk drives were available for $2699 and up,[13] and two years later prices for this capacity had dropped to $1499.[14] By 1995, 1 GB drives could be purchased for $849.[15]
- 2007 1 terabyte hard disk $370 ($417 adjusted for inflation)
- 2010 2 terabyte hard disk $200 ($214 adjusted for inflation)
- 2012 4 terabyte hard disk $450 (Hitachi, largest available in consumer market), 1 terabyte hard disk $100
- 2013 4 terabyte hard disk $179, 3 terabyte hard disk $129, 2 terabyte HD $100, 1 terabyte HD $80
So in 2010, 1 TB cost about $105 (adjusted for inflation), and now 1 TB can be had for $45. They don't give a figure for 2008, but it would have been $300+. I've ripped some of our DVD collection to hard drive, but, honestly, that seems like more trouble that putting a DVD or Blu-Ray disc into the player.
Regardless, when I became a film buff in college circa 1980, I never dreamed that I'd someday be able to own a home theater and copies of the movies I loved. Blu-Rays at 1080P already look so good to me that I can't imagine how 4K could look significantly better, but I'll wait and see.
