Sharp Introduces it's First Ultra HD TV's for the U.S.

I'll take 3! lol.

It seems only a 60" is mentioned, and priced at $31,000 bucks. Too small to matter and too expensive, no thanks.
Edited by fritzi93 - 1/8/13 at 12:42pm

I'll go ahead and take the 84" 4K Sony for $25K instead, thank you very much. I don't understand how they can put a $31K price tag on a 60" display.

but it's THX certified...

I'll be honest, upon clicking on this thread I was actually expecting Sharp- especially considering the price points of their gigantic 1080 sets- to try to get in a 4k set for ~5k to put people on the fence/in the middle in a spot to make a tough decision. I'm absolutely in disbelief over this.

$31,000.

Really? A 60" TV: $31,000?

simply unbelievable.

James

Precisely. I'm still lmao.


James

Agreed, this is DOA. Only people who would buy this set are those who love to throw away money...

I thought Sharp would make some better decisions this year to get back in the black, but looks like I was wrong!

That is a joke. I really wonder how much 4K will improve the picture on a 60" screen. With less than $5K you can have a very good projection system that will deliver something close to 4K, but on a 120"+ screen. I don't understand why you would invest $31,000 on a TV (even if you are extremely rich) when no 4K content is available yet and probably for a while...

At these prices, I bet they are just making them to order. If someone is nutty enough or rich enough to actually buy one, Sharp probably just puts in a special order to crank one out. It's probably more an advertising ploy at CES to show they are still in the game competing against other manufacturers. Let's forget the 5.6 billion dollars in debt they racked up last year lol. It's the same for the Sony 84". They don't sell but a handful of them but it makes for good hype at their Sony stores. It's more for show that they are on the cutting edge of technology than any hope that the average Joe is going to put his house up as collateral to buy their TV.

If you are a good haggler, I bet you could get them to come down to $29,999

You know what else is a joke? Sony trying to sell those "Mastered from 4K" Blu-Rays.

Basically, it's a 1080P resolution Blu-Ray which has been created from a 4K master that will supposedly look better upscaled from 1080P to 4K. I really don't understand the logic here. Even if it's mastered from a 4K, it's been downsampled to 1080P on the disc. That means all the extra data the 4K version would have had is already gone. You're still upsampling or interpolating it back to 4K, adding data that wasn't there on the disc to begin with... The image quality won't look any different than the current 1080P Blu-Ray discs upscaled to 4K *unless* they did something else besides simply downsample to 1080P.

^^^^^ b/c it's all about...



merchandising merchandising

no wonder they are in trouble...

I heard if you pre-order they will throw in a 5 passenger sedan.

hoorah...

I'm not sure if 4K up converting would be as good as 1:1 pixel mapping between a 1080p TV and a 1080p source. Would it?

What's that sound? Oh yes, it's UHD making a big belly flop at its U.S. inaugural.

$31,000??????

I've already heard that OLED may be scrapped again (or severely limited) in favor of cheaper (and lesser quality) UHD LCD panels for the foreseeable future. That should, at least, drop the price down to the under $10,000 mark right away.

I would imagine LCOS and LCD will be the chip technology of choice for UHD projectors too, unless Texas Instruments has a fairly cheap, high performance 4k DLP chip waiting in the wings.

That's probably what manufacturers should have added to their debut arsenal and trumpeted to the press at CES rather than outrageously priced and fairly small flat panels.

No UHD media either... and the BDA is spinning their wheels on developing a viable 4k product for consumers.

As others have mentioned already... no wonder these electronics companies are dying financially one right after the other.
Edited by Dan Hitchman - 1/8/13 at 9:44am

reserved for price reduction to $15,900

Will post my preorder# when it reaches that MSRP.

LMAO

I hope they have a lot of warehouse space where these WON'T ship from.

I bet it's still best to stick with 1080p for now. Wait a min, of course I will, it's like a fortune lol.

I've seen some amazing sets, I'm sure these will make alot of people faint and off to the hospital

THX Certification. PFFT. Who the heck actually cares about THX certification anymore ? I had a VT50 for a while and it's THX mode looked balls, my 7 year old Kuro LX608 did a better job uncalibrated.

1000

But Tiger Woods spent $10,000, and only got One Night of Entertainment! So what's $31,000, when you can enjoy for more than 3 nights?

Too bad there are no 4K masters... all 1080P at this point...

Of course there are. Many blu rays come from 4k scans (heck, I think baraka and lawrence of arabia were 8k). When the new 4k format comes out ( I presume it will be a new blu ray spec ala 3d blu ray) , there will be many movies that will be very easy to throw together for it. Whether or not they will look any better from 8 ft on a 55" 4k tv is another issue. I for one am happy to sit on the sidelines with my 65" gt50 (which looks great from my 9ft viewing distance) and wait for a 70"+ 4k oled to become somewhat affordable ($3k ish). Probably 5+ years.

What I also think is funny about the headline is this quote "the TV is capable of upconverting 1080p footage to 4K resolution, which would make the idea of owning a 4K set a little more attractive to customers, despite the dearth of 4K content" Seriously, you mean the tv is capable of doing what every other flat panel has done since their inception.... display lower rez content in the panels' native resolution? Thats what a lot of people don't get, that upscaling has to happen somewhere or the tv cannot display the content. What the quote really means is "good news, you can watch your blu rays, cable boxes and playstation3's without getting a blank screen". I just hope they have good scaling chips in them, or I fear that 1080p could look worse on a 4k set than on a nice 1080p set. I have,however, heard good things about upscaled content on these 4k tv's, but so far they are in pretty controlled enviroments. I imagine most of the demo material being played from 1080 sources are super high bitrate stuff (possibly higher bitrate than what is on blu ray now) in order to really wow you.Its when you start feeding it compressed cable content etc when it will really get interesting. It would be funny if someone took two identical 1080 sets (maybe 2 elites or vt50's for example), then played (as an example) the old blu ray of Patton on one and the new version on the other and told people the new one was a 4k set.. Everyone would look and say.. "Oh, I see what you mean, 4k really is better" lol. I think 4k is cool, but it is going to be a hard sell at anything close to these prices. I think it will have to be a very incremental cost over current sets (again, like 3d tv's and 3d blu ray) for people to really jump on. I also think the only way to market the media is (again) by making it uhdtv blu ray or 4k blu ray and not some completely new format. Basically, like they did with 3d blu ray. Someone at the store would likely buy it if it were, say $45 more for the 4k blu ray player than the regular 3d blu ray player. Anything more and its likely doa. If they did it right, it would likely add another 5 yrs or more to the lifespan of physical media, which I am good with.
Edited by chadsdsmith - 1/9/13 at 2:25pm

Unless you are made out of money you would have to be a fool to spend 31,000 on a tv. Like plasmas when they first came out the price was outrageous and look at how cheap they are now. I don't care how bad you want one it is not worth it especially because they are the new sets and with time they will be more reliable once they see were there are areas that need work like the plasmas burn in early tv sets plus they will be cheaper later on.

100% agree there. It's just the upscaling thing that doesn't do it for me. I feel that 1080p 1:1 pixel mapping may still look better, but of course, I could be wrong. And I wonder if the higher 4K upscaling will introduce yet more input lag for video games.