14 DAY TRIAL // Many things are happening in Las Vegas, Nevada, right now, from CPU launches to investments into the Internet of Things. Panasonic has its fair share of products on display, but one of the most interesting ones is not a display or some new, strange gadget, but a Blu-ray player. A 4K Blu-ray player.
You'd think that it's no big deal, until you realize that while a lot of TVs and monitors have 4K resolution nowadays, devices capable of streaming films in that quality aren't nearly as prevalent.
While some media players can do it, Blu-ray players are still limited to 1080p quality. Kind of counterintuitive really.
Since the disparity between 4K TV support and media playback standards didn't sit well with anyone, the Blu-ray standard is being updated to 4K.
Panasonic decided that if it was going to secure a “world's first” type of announcement at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Bly-ray support would be as good an area as any.
The Panasonic UHD Blu-ray player
Unfortunately, it's still just a prototype, so it doesn't actually have a name, and Panasonic didn't bother disclosing any specs and other feature lists either.
However, it did bring one out for people to look at and take a few pictures of. So you can see the relatively normal design scheme, but a rectangular, flat shape and glossy black panels.
Since 4K video (3840 x 2160 pixels) needs quite a bit of bandwidth, you can be sure that the latest HDMI interface is implemented. Same for DisplayPort and/or DVI, if available.
Some media players, Blu-ray or otherwise, are content with HDMI alone, but that would be a waste in this case, to skip on the other two when this is supposed to be an expensive, high-end device to begin with.
Sadly, this is about as far as we can go with assumptions alone. Since the company didn't really disclose any hard data, speculate is all we can do.
Availability and pricing
No doubt it would be in Panasonic's best interest to launch a final iteration of the 4K-capable Blu-ray player as soon as possible. We may still not see it before the later parts of the quarter though (first quarter of 2014).
The price will probably be of over $100 - $120 / €70 – €90, seeing as how that's what the better normal Blu-ray disk players ship for at the moment. In the meantime, movie studios may as well start to release films in 4K quality discs.