BLU-RAY VS 4K ULTRAHD: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? | SHOULD YOU UPGRADE YOUR COLLECTION?

[Music] hey guys what's going on jeff here from films at home and in today's video we're going to talk about a very simple topic but one that confuses a lot of new collectors especially and that is what is truly the difference between a 4k blu-ray disc and a 1080p standard blu-ray disc so i want this to stay sort of high level very straight to the point but i also want this to be another informative and easy to watch video for anybody who's new or even collectors out there who have been wondering this for a long time and maybe don't know all the benefits of 4k disc so hopefully this will be helpful for everybody if you already know this information many of you may please share it with friends share it with coworkers share with whoever you think could learn about this i think this would be a really useful video to try to convert more collectors to 4k if you are new to the channel and you're new to the world of 4k and blu-ray and physical media please consider subscribing i have a ton of content on this channel about these topics about 4k reviews and things like that which we'll talk about and i have plenty more coming so make sure you're subscribed if you have any interest in this world at all i'd really appreciate it and now let's jump right into it so being somebody who collects movies physical media i get this question a lot from friends from family from co-workers from people online and that is what is the difference between a standard blu-ray disc like this and a 4k blu-ray disc like this what is the difference between the two of those why would i buy 4k what benefits do i get is it just the resolution there's lots to talk about so the first thing is definitely of course the expanded resolution when you go from a blu-ray to a 4k blu-ray you're getting more detail it's a higher resolution picture it's called 1080p because it's 1920 by 1080 pixels that's what your tv screen would be with the standard 1080p tv and that's what a blu-ray gives you now with 4k that doubles it goes to 38.40 by 2160. so that's why sometimes you'll see 2160p tvs that's 4k content so it's not four times 1080 it's double the width it's double the height for four times the total resolution so you can sort of see here in this screenshot if you're looking at a blu-ray image in a 4k image hd versus 4k you can see how many more pixels there are and that leads to finer details that means the edges are sharper that means little details like hairs and the edge of people's faces and the edge of a sword or the point of a blade and things like that are sharper and more to a point they're a little more realistic so that's like the first immediate benefit you get that from a 4k tv you get that from a 4k blu-ray disc that's very straightforward now the one thing that people miss when it comes to 4k is that there are also other benefits which make this for a better viewing experience in a better picture outside of just getting more detail the biggest one is probably hdr now hdr stands for high dynamic range and what that is is it's an expanded color base it gives the picture more colors to work with a larger color palette the picture is also often brighter it's a little more vibrant and the contrast in the blacks and grays things that often can struggle with poor contrast those look much better you get much closer to a pure black a pure white there's just a wider color wheel think of it like that if you go into microsoft paint or you're working in photoshop and you have your color wheel things that you can choose different colors to paint with different colors to select for your fonts think of it like you've got your standard colors that's your sdr standard dynamic range that's say your basic 64 colors right and you can choose from those or you can go more advanced and choose from that color wheel and play with all the different red green blue levels that's the sort of think of that like hdr you get more color space to work with so it gives the people who are creating these discs and making the 4k discs and the directors and the cinematographers and the people who do the video transfers from the raw files over to the disk it gives them more to work with and it oftentimes results in a more life like picture a more realistic picture skin tones often look better you can see here in a few screenshots that i've taken from the movie saving private ryan a movie which i'm sure everybody knows i have some blu-ray screenshots and some 4k screenshots and the reason i took these is because you can really start to see that the colors are dramatically different between the two you may not notice a huge leap in the detail although it's certainly there but you'll notice that things like tom hanks face it is much more life like the skin tone is more lifelike on the 4k picture with hdr than it is on the 1080p with sdr standard dynamic range so those are the type of things that you get with 4k that's the benefit outside of just the resolution you get that massive leap in color space so you're going to want to look for 4k discs that do have hdr some of them don't it's pretty rare nowadays but they'll often say it either on the front cover or on the back cover you'll look for things like hdr 10 hdr 10 plus dolby vision hdr which is dolby's version of this technology there's a few different things it's called but that's something to look for when you're buying a 4k disk now the other thing is the disk size so on a typical movie like this say an avengers movie the disc size is probably going to be 50 gigabytes right it's a pretty long movie it has a lot of special features on it and the blu-ray discs were either 25 gigabyte or 50 gigabyte now on 4k it's a larger file size and so we needed to get a larger disk storage and 4k disks now are typically 100 gigabytes but they can also be 66 or even 50 gigabytes something like this avengers i'm sure is probably on a 100 gigabyte disk i could double check but many of the ones that i review are on a larger disk and you may be asking well why does that matter and that's what we're going to talk about here the first reason this matters is because it allows for advanced sound tracks so one thing i noticed going back to saving private iron on 4k is if you buy the blu-ray you get a 5.1 dts hd soundtrack that's a very good soundtrack the audio sounds good but what it's doing is it's using five channels in a subwoofer and it's been pretty standard for say the last 10 years that's what most blu-rays get 5.1 and that's what most homes have but if you've invested in your home theater and you've added you know seven speakers you've added at most dolby atmos capable speakers which is something that's being more common uh seen in music there's dolby atmos recordings now there's dolby atmos on tv and there's dolby atmos on disk so if you've spent the money to upgrade you'll also tend to see that most 4k discs have dolby atmos but it's not necessarily true that all blu-rays do saving private ryan was a great example that's a very long movie it's a very quality movie it probably is a large file size they only had room for the atmos track on the 4k disc because of the larger disk size on the blu-ray disc they do not have an atmos track it's a 5.1 dts hd so that larger disk size could mean that on some blu-rays you don't get atmos or advanced sound but on 4k you do get the advanced surround sound so it's something to look out for not to say that blu-ray discs can't have atmos some of them do there's a fair amount of them that do have that but you'll see that on longer movies that take up some more space on the disc and the fact that disney tends to do this with all of their 4k discs you'll see the blu-rays missing that advanced surround sound while the 4k has it so that is a benefit of disk size and simply having more space to put that expanded soundtrack on the other thing that 4k offers that blu-ray doesn't offer is better compression so blu-ray uses h.264 compression which was standard for a very long time and is still widely used if you do anything with mp4s that's typically h.264 compression what it stands for i don't really know the h264 the numbers i don't get into that just know that's what it's called and then you go to h.265 for 4k so it's it's the next step it's better compression and it results in about 60 to 70 percent better quality at the same file size than h.264 and now you're probably asking why does compression matter these are on disks this is not streaming these aren't compressed but every movie is compressed so for example a lot of hollywood movies are terabytes large meaning over 1 000 gigabytes a typical 4k movie a two hour movie could be two three four terabytes an 8k movie shot with something higher level cameras or imacs could be 10 could be 15 terabytes obviously we can't fit that on a disk so that original file size has to be compressed and it's first compressed to deliver a final cut usually to movie theaters for example i found out online doing some research that the hobbit was actually 635 gigabytes that's what was delivered to movie theaters so if you start in movie theaters you're seeing a compressed file that's maybe you know compressed two or three times maybe even more less than the raw now 635 gigabytes that's still too big for a 4k disk so we have to go from 635 down to something like 70 or 80 to fit it on a 4k disk so now you're coming down eight seven eight times more compression in h265 which 4k handles does a better job of that so the 4k disc will not only give you more detail and better color but they'll be able to fit a better picture on the disc size than you could fit on blu-ray which doesn't support h.265 so when you're taking a 600 700 gigabyte file and you're pushing that down to 25 or 50 gigabytes and you're using older compression methods you're losing a lot of quality now we're still losing quality going to 4k but we're losing a lot less quality this is what streaming services like netflix or apple tv amazon hulu disney plus hbo max you name it they're going to be using h.265 compression to give you a 4k stream now not everyone does it perfectly you can have issues and not all of these discs are perfect and that's why people watch 4k reviews like my channel and they read many website reviews and watch other channels because not every 4k disc is created equal that's the last thing you really need to know is just because you buy 4k doesn't mean you're getting the greatest and latest thing you really need to pay attention and make some of your own judgments as well because you may not like the new color range you may not like hdr you may like the old blu-ray you may not like that the director made some changes on the 4k sometimes they do things like digital noise reduction where they re remove some of the film grain and smooth out the image for 4k and you may not like that so the blu-ray may be the better choice those are all things you have to watch for and that's why you should typically you know do some research before spending 20 25 to buy a 4k disc there are variables everybody does it differently you may not have the best quality they may not have done the best compression they may not have done the best color grading with hdr there's lots of things to look at but that's why channels like mine exist hopefully this gives you some solid information that you know there's more than just resolution there's potentially sound upgrades there's color upgrades there's better compression a better quality image outside of just the fact that you're getting more pixels and more detail there's a lot that goes into 4k which is what makes it a really cool format and why it's my favorite and why i tend to upgrade to 4k over blu-ray discs because i appreciate all those benefits and i can notice them some people can't some people may never notice them but this gives you the knowledge you need to go ahead and make informed 4k purchases and then like i said by watching reviews reading reviews and learning about how these movies are made that will give you an idea on which ones are worth buying and which ones aren't worth buying as with anything there's going to be some good and some bad so keep an eye on reviews and make sure you keep watching those so you don't make a bad decision but for the most part i would say based on all the reviews i've done 90 percent of the time the 4k disc is better and then it's that odd one out of every 10 that's really not good that i don't like so you definitely have a higher success rate moving to 4k but you should be careful every now and then there's a really poor disk and that's what i and other channels and other websites hope to let you know about so thank you for watching again i hope this was informative maybe you learned something even if you've been collecting 4k maybe this helped you think about getting into 4k and if you already knew all this stuff and you've already been a 4k collector again this is the type of video share it with friends share it with family if they have questions this could help convince them and then we have more 4k collectors which means we'll be getting more 4k disks more 4k content and that's good for everybody in physical media so i appreciate you all watching make sure you subscribe and have notifications on follow me on instagram and i'm also now doing some short form stuff on tick tock no dancing none of that crap i just post really short form 15 second little clips about movie collecting i'm trying to grow the physical media community over there as well and maybe inspire the the new generation the younger generation to collect movies so you can find that link down in the description and follow me there as well as on instagram but other than that i hope you guys have a great rest of your day and i'll talk to you soon thank you for watching

Channel: Films At Home

Views: 92,040

Rating: 4.8979654 out of 5

Keywords: Bluray vs 4K, 1080p vs 4K, HD vs 4K, What’s the difference between Bluray and 4K, Bluray collection, Bluray collector, Movie collection, Movie collector, Should I upgrade to 4K, 4K movies, Is 4K better than Bluray, Is 4K Worth it?, 4K UltraHD Blu-ray, 4K Bluray, Home theater, 4K TV, Films at home

Id: AWKA1n8smZs

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021