I find that Sony’s 1000ES 4K projector produces the best looking 1080p images I’ve ever seen. There is NO softness whatsoever. In fact, edges are cleaner and clearer than I’ve seen with any 1080p display. There is no more visible detail, but the detail present in the HD images is just about perfection. I haven’t seen a 4K panel yet. There is certainly room for poor quality upconversion of HD to UHD. Sony’s projector uses anti-aliasing to reduce aliasing you didn’t even realize was there until you see images without it. That is going to be one of, if not THE, key to making HD images look great on UHD displays. Lumagen’s new 204X processors employ their No-Ring patented upconversion technology to convert HD to UHD to make images cleaner. People are mistaking the ringing you get from more careless upconversion (like that in the current Oppo disc players, surprisingly) for sharper images. Upon getting comments from customers, that their Oppo disc players produce sharper-looking images than their Radiance 204X processor, Lumagen investigated and as it turned out, the Oppo images contain ringing that acts a lot like a Sharpness control that’s turned up too high and produces edges that are not present in the images. The Radiance 204X images had no ringing along edges, so looked less sharp to the Oppo owner.
If you think about it, HD images CAN’T HELP look better on a 4K display that is doing a good job of upconversion. Consider a 45 degree edge or line. The HD pixels form a staircase… unavoidably. If you move the HD image to a UHD display, the display can remove the “tip” of each stair-step, and also fill-in the inside corner of each stair step making that diagonal line MUCH smoother than it could be displayed on the same size HD display. That, of course, assumes that there’s some intelligence in the upconversion. If the upconversion simply makes 4 pixels out of each individual pixel, the UHD version of the HD images should look essentially identical since making 4 pixels out of each 1 pixel in the HD image means the pixels in the 4K display will be the same size as the pixels in the HD display so there should be essentially no difference between HD images on an HD display vs very simple upconversion to UHD. The more complex upconversion Sony is doing (and presumably at least as complex as Sony’s, if not more-so, Lumagen’s No-Ring upconversion) really makes HD images look fantastic. I was lucky enough to live with a 1000ES for about 3 months and was still amazed at the end of the 3 months about how great HD images looked.
xvYCC is fully defined… completely and totally defined and identified. But the only xvYCC sources are a few digital video cameras that have to be placed in that expanded color space mode in order to create images with the larger gamut of xvYCC. But xvYCC is a kludge that has no place in a new video standard that can be accomplished WITHOUT all the strangeness (like negative coordinate values) required to make xvYCC’s larger gamut work. You can turn xvYCC on in any video display but NOTHING will happen because you aren’t likely to be feeding that video display anything but Rec 709 video. The video stream itself has to be xvYCC in order for the video display to use the larger gamut. If the video stream is simply conventional HD video, you only see conventional Rec 709 color space.
Current 4K displays get past the limitations of HDMI 1.3/1.4 by limiting their 4K-ability to 24p or 30p. To do 60p at 4K, you need a whole new transmission standard that will require new cables, new HDMI senders and new HDMI receivers. So far HDMI 2.0 is looking like a lame duck even before it gets adopted because “they” want something compatible with existing “high speed” HDMI cables and that’s not looking like it will be possible with 4k60p especially with 10 or 12 bits. And some would argue that you want even more bandwidth for 4K 3D so you can get the refresh rate up to 144 Hz where it seems possible to enjoy 3D with zero eyestrain and zero flicker.
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