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Despite having literally nothing to watch on them, 4K TVs are popping up all over the place, with Britain’s favourite telly maker Samsung the latest to bring its Ultra HD efforts to the UK.
The Korean company’s 55- and 65-inch F9000 TVs will set you back £4,000 and £6,000 respectively. They’ll both be lighting up specialist retailers and rich people’s drawing rooms across the country later this month.
Like the Korean company’s current top-notch tellies — the pricey F8000 series — the F9000s will run on beefy quad-core processors and feature all of its latest picture-enhancing gubbins and high-quality smart TV system.
Samsung wasn’t able to share any more specs, but rest assured we’ll be all over these monster screens as soon as we get them in for review.
£4,000 for a TV might sound expensive, but it’s peanuts compared to the first crop of Ultra HD TVs, which appeared in Britain earlier this year for nearly 10 times as much.
Samsung’s not the first to knock down the price to relatively sensible levels, with Sony recently flogging its own £4k 4K gogglebox. The Bravia X9 series come in the same sizes as Samsung’s and have some pretty odd-looking speakers built into the sides. British women’s tennis star Anne Keothavong had Sony do her nails during Wimbledon as a way of showing off the detail these super-tellies can display.
Ultra HD TVs all upscale 1080p footage, meaning it artificially adds in pixels to make it look (in theory) a little better than it would on a normal Full HD TV. But Blu-ray discs and all current TV transmission systems are restricted to that resolution, so unless you’re really keen on future-proofing your home cinema setup (and we’re talking way in the future) there’s not a great deal of point in splashing out on one of these.
If, indeed, your eyes would even be able to tell the difference. Just don’t get suckered into paying extra for a special 4K HDMI cable — not that money will be much of an issue.
Are you looking forward to 4K becoming mainstream? Which services would have to support it before you invest? Is it an innovation too far? Let me know what you make of 4K in the comments below, or on our Ultra HD Facebook page.
This article was updated on 18 July to remove a confusing paragraph about the 4K spec
