BERLIN—Which came first, the player or the disc? The player, in this case. Samsung unveiled a prototype 4K UHD Blu-Ray player here at IFA, and I took a look.
The UBD-K8500 is a big, chunky black set-top box with a cantilevered top edge. There are touch buttons and an "Ultra HD Blu-Ray" logo along the top and a covered USB 3.0 port on the front face.
The K8500 was playing a homemade 4K disc with an H.265-compressed video on it, because, as Samsung explained, there are no commercial 4K Blu-ray discs yet. I also got to see the player's Smart TV functions; it basically turns any TV into a Samsung Smart TV, with the same set of apps you find on the latest high-end Samsung TVs. That will also include 4K streaming services, Samsung said. For more, check out ExtremeTech's explainer on the player's 10-bit color and high dynamic range support.
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The K8500 demo was pretty locked down, in large part because it was running that homemade disc. Samsung told me that the player will work with media from a hard drive attached to the USB 3 port, as well as movies copied onto memory sticks and over to mobile phones, as long as it's allowed by the content owners.
4K movies are currently about a gig a minute, according to Samsung. (Oy.) Standard dual-layer Blu-ray discs are about 50GB, so that's only 50 minutes of 4K content. So we'll need a new Blu-ray disc spec to handle the 4K content. Back at CES in January, the Blu-ray Disc Alliance announced a UHD Blu-ray spec involving 66GB dual-layer and 100GB triple-layer discs, with the rest of the storage gap being made up by switching to H.265 compression, which is twice as efficient as the H.264 AVC used in the current Blu-ray spec.
Fox will be the first movie studio to support the new disc format, Samsung said.
The UBD-K8500 will be out in early 2016 and will cost under $500. So far, it's the first 4K Blu-ray player with a launch date; Panasonic demoed one in January, but never attached a launch date to it.