[Keoni Tyler]

Exactly.

While 4K -thru- 12K are all great from a production acquisition and archival point of view, recent shoppers at Sony retail stores watching a 4K screen from 10 feet away said “Mewww, it’s nice but not that much better than the Sony HD we have at home.”

History holds the lesson: When we went from LPs/vinyl to CDs, the quality difference to the average consumer were giant leaps forward, and the recording and retail industry forced it by slowly vanishing LPs in stores.

Newer technologies after the CD? DAT (Digital Audio Tape), Digital Compact Cassette (DCC), Sony MiniDisc (MD) and SuperCD (SACD) all failed. Audiophiles and perfect-pitched musicians aside – the average consumer could not hear a difference between newer formats and their freshly-renewed CD collection, and were not about to start over again as they just did with their vinyl collection. Further, there was no “force” at the record companies and record stores to replace CDs with the newer tech.

In 1992, High Def could be compressed into a Standard Def 6MHz ‘t.v. channel,’ making delivery to the home possible. But HD’s implementation also needed a force: it took the federal government’s mandate that all broadcasters transmit digitally (SD or HD) to usher HD into the home en masse, ala 2009. Chicken or egg.

The 2K or 4K compressed signal to the home is only slightly better than HD, not significantly better. With no FCC mandate this time around to force broadcasters into unilaterally sending 3D, 2K, 4K, the marketing hype may fall on deaf consumer ears.

-keoni tyler

K. Tyler