The Blu-ray Disc Association is an industry consortium consisting of 20 companies from the TV and movie industry, as well as playback device makers such as Sony and Samsung, and even Microsoft. The group has recently completed the new Ultra HD Blu-ray specification, and unveiled the new logo that will be seen on Ultra HD Blu-ray products.
The new specification comes at a time when physical media faces competition from streaming services that offer convenience and are generally platform-agnostic. However easy it may be to access streamed content, the issues of bandwidth throttling and poor quality compression still makes physical media an attractive option for an optimal experience on devices such as 4K TVs and projectors.
The most obvious thing about the new specification is revealed by its name, which means it will support the 3840x2160 (4K) resolution, but what's probably more important is the support for the Rec. 2020 color gamut, which allows for higher color bit depth, and support for high frame rate, among other things.
Rec. 2020 allows for more saturated color reproduction and higher number of colors (1.07 billion - to be exact). Then, the increased color bit depth of 10bit per channel also prevents the banding effect that can be observed even in high quality 8bit video found in traditional Blu-ray releases.
The Ultra HD Blu-ray specification will still support the current 50GB disks, but for higher bitrate content there will be disks in 66GB and 100GB capacities, and the content will use HEVC video encoding, to be able to fit on them.
Do you prefer physical media, or streaming services? Let us know in the comments.
Via: Anandtech
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