Or you can wind up in a situation like this reader’s, where non-UHD, non-HDR material appears significantly worse than it did on a lesser set. Late-model UHD sets can display a wider range of colors using HDR, or “high dynamic range,” a newer addition to the technology, and that can look significantly better. When seen from an average couch, a 50-inch UHD set and a 50-inch HDTV will look just as sharp. The other is the invisibility of UHD’s extra pixels at many common viewing distances. Over-the-air UHD broadcasts are coming, but not current models include the required “ATSC 3.0” tuners.

DirecTV offers some live UHD TV, and that’s about it. After streaming services like Amazon and Netflix, you have a limited selection of UHD Blu-ray movies and not much else. One is the continued shortfall of stuff to watch in that resolution. This reader’s experience points to two lingering problems with UHD. (You’ll probably need to dust off the manual to see where in its settings screen you’d adjust such an option.) If you have one of the UHD-compatible Blu-ray players that began shipping early last year, you may be able to rely on that to do all the necessary upscaling.Ī DVD’s own production values can also shape how it looks after upscaling a lower-budget, 1980s-vintage flick may not look as sharp as a recent 'Star Wars' release. He advised turning off those image-enhancement options on the TV, then making sure that the Blu-ray player was set to upscale DVDs to HD quality.

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