4K BLU RAY ON THE CHEAP
THE ONE S HAS EMERGED JUST AS K BLU RAY IS KICKING OFF AND THAT MAKES IT AN APPEALING OPTION... IF YOU’VE GOT THE TV TO MATCH.
ESSENTIALLY, HDR VIDEO MAKES USE OF THE BROADER COLOUR AND HIGHER CONTRAST CAPABILITIES THAT HAVE BECOME AVAILABLE IN HIGHER-END 4K TVS. THIS MEANS THEY CAN PRODUCE IMAGES THAT DISPLAY A WIDER RANGE OF COLOURS THAT CAN, IN TURN, BE FURTHER ENHANCED BY MORE FINELY-GRADED CONTRAST CAPABILITIES.
Looking beyond the Xbox One S’s capacity as a games console, the timing of its launch and its comparatively a ordable price actually makes it a device well worth consideration as a standalone K K media player. For those who’ve upgraded their lounge room TV to a new Ultra HD (AKA K) this year, then you might even be able to utilise the device’s cutting-edge HDR capabilities, too.
You might be familiar with HDR (high dynamic range) from photography, but it works di erently when it comes to video. Essentially, HDR video makes use of the broader colour and higher contrast capabilities that have become available in higher-end K TVs. This means they can produce images that display a wider range of colours that can, in turn, be further enhanced by more nely-graded contrast capabilities. The greater colour range comes from an increase in bit-depth. Until now, colour for home video has largely been encoded in -bit, which matches the capability of most TV screens and computer monitors. Recent higher-end TVs and professional monitors have started o ering -bit capabilities, however. With the digitisation of images, what ‘bits’ really reflects is how many shades of grey between black and white can be displayed — with -bit, you get shades, while with -bit, you get . When combined with the red, green and blue colour channels, this means that -bit images have a palette of . billion colours to work with — that’s each of the red, green and blue channels’ , shades multiplied by each other ( , x , x , = . billion). By comparison, -bit only o ers . million colours.
There are two competing HDR formats, but the more broadly used one is HDR — it’s what the Xbox One S and Ultra-HD Blu-ray support. HDR is called as such because it utilises -bit encoding and can, therefore, make over billion di erent colours. Having access to that number of colours means that you can theoretically create pictures with notably more rich colour depth and discern subtle di erences in shades that would have once been indistinguishable.
In our testing, Ultra HD Blu-ray discs played quite smoothly on the new Xbox — something that we’d be reluctant to say for Samsung’s standalone UBD-K UHD Blu-ray player — and there was a clear and signi cant di erence between watching a K HDR Blu-ray and a regular SDR p Blu-ray through the One S. That said, we didn’t think the colour reproduction on the Xbox One S was as good as the UBD-K — and we would go so far as to say that the HDR colour output of the Xbox landed right in between a standard Blu-ray and the UBD-K . Detailed analysis of the same K Blu-ray found the One S to have less rich colours, overly accentuated contrasts and, on the whole, a more faded appearance than the picture produced by the UBD-K .
Apart from K Blu-ray discs, of which there were around only titles readily available at the time of writing, UHD availability is limited. The other major source for K content is Netflix — and the good news is that the Xbox One Netflix app has already been upgraded to be able to play back the K HDR content.
Furthermore digging into the settings, the One S also appears to be able to output -bit HDR colour, a standard that has been picked up by Dolby in Dolby Vision, though there is no o cial word on how it intends to use this yet.
The fact that the Xbox One S is $ less expensive than Samsung’s UBD-K and notably less expensive than the alternatives on the horizon makes it a pretty hard contender to beat. At present, it doesn’t perhaps o er the most vibrant colour in HDR images but that’s presumably something Microsoft can ddle with via patches — and for the price, it won’t disappoint.