Partially in a desire to distract myself from well, everything, I just bought a Magnetar UDP 800 MkII 4k Bluray player and have started to upgrade my video collection a good bit. The Magnetar is probably overkill but it’s maybe one of the best built out there right now — I wanted something that had Dolby Vision and was going to last.
Here’s the interesting thing I wanted to share though - while I had thought 4k streaming was particularly good, it’s not nearly as good as I thought it was. Local hardware is so much better. And this is funny, because I did have hardware before, I just got out of habit of using it.
Things are really good now. So not only is there a lack of compression artifacts (or any), the colors basically glow. There’s no murk and textures are really good. Reflections are often amazing. I have a good sound system, so this is probably what I should have been doing for it also.
I think it also helps to sort of pull the plug as a collective on the streaming trend. In particular it seems Netflix is cynical about their customers with their second screen philosophy, formulaic genre rehashing, and low-quality Korean imports flooding search results. Do we want more of that when we could have better?
Disney+ is clearly a lot better (I still have an ad supported plan) but very sporadic with releasing new things I’m interested in. It can also be very hit and miss — I like only half of what they do with Star Wars (the first part of the Mandalorian was great, Andor was also great) but I think Marvel is a mindless disaster and they don’t really have quality control over most of Star Wars to the point where I don’t even pretend the other stuff exists. I don’t think the push towards Netflix owning Warner Brothers is good for film, but Warner Brothers was also in decline since the Discovery merger.
While streaming is in decline, it’s clear people aren’t going to hyper-expensive theaters a lot, and they are often too loud and have all of the obvious people problems. It seems like home theater with 4k and Bluray discs is exactly perfect. I hope all of this takes off more again in light of what streaming is doing lately. That would be great.
We had this stuff all along, but we were just distracted by this whole streaming trend. It’s really nice to look past it and it’s like you have a whole new system again.