Creating your own content

Want more content? Well, you can always shoot your own. With advanced in camera and sensor technology, many consumer devices such as Sony’s A7S full-frame camera will record movies in full 4K, as can Panasonic’s Lumix DMC- GH4 and the GoPro Hero 3+ ( albeit at a lower 15 frames/sec). In fact, even mobile phones are getting in on the act – Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3 will record video in 4K, as will Sony’s Xperia Z2 and the LG G Pro 2.

Otherwise, any standard 20-megapixel digital camera will give you a still image of over 5,000 pixels by 3,000 – certainly more than enough detail for your 4K television to render, so you can consider doing stopmotion video, a slide show, or to intersperse it with regular video footage.

Not the creative type, it’s ok. The beauty of 4K televisions is that all of them can actually upscale regular HD content so it looks close to 4K. Some of the more advanced algorithms, such as Samsung’s proprietary 4-step Upscaling is automatically applied to all content that comes in by analyzing the signal, applying noise reduction, upscaling the content, then finally making detail enhancements. The end result is sharper video with better color and contrast that certainly doesn’t seem out of place on a 4K television, despite not being natively shot in 4K.

Whichever way you look at it, one thing’s evident. 4K content is available right now. You can say that we’ve left physical media behind, and with the new generation of consumption, digital content owners like Sony, Netflix and Amazon are leading the way. And as the ecosystem grows, traditional broadcasting networks will be forced to keep up with infrastructure upgrades along the way or be totally eclipsed.