‘First Blu-ray players with 4K support will arrive at the end of 2015’

The first Blu-ray players with support for 4k content will hit the market at the end of 2015, says the Blu Ray Disc Association. By that time, discs with 4k video material should also be released that users can play on the players. The standard should be ready soon.

With the step to 4k content, a wider color palette and more ‘bit depth’ per pixel should also become available, the association tells Cnet. As a result, films should also look nicer in addition to being sharper. The bitrate is around 50 or 60Mbit/s, while the peak can be around 100Mbit/s. Because of that throughput and better compression of the H.265/HEVC standard, movies must fit on 50GB discs; however, the intention is that the discs will appear in capacities of 66GB and 100GB.

The first Blu-ray players and the discs with 4k support, which can play movies at a resolution of 3840×2160 pixels, should be released by the end of 2015. Streaming video services are also slowly starting to support 4k, although the higher resolution is not yet available with all content.

The Blu-ray equipment with 4k support has been on the way for a while. According to an earlier schedule, the standard was supposed to be ready by the end of this year, while it had been known for some time that the discs would not be released until next year at the earliest. There are already many TV models with UHD resolution, but it is unknown how many people have such a TV at home.