4K: meh

           Those "expensive" (but coming down in price) televisions in Best Buy that look so damn good. You look at one and immediately notice the colors are rich, saturation is perfect, glare is minimal, the focus and image is crisp, and they're commonly so thin and premium looking. But they're overhyped, and for all the wrong reasons.
           Lets start with what 4K is. Its a display with a resolution of 3840 pixels × 2160 lines, adding up to a pretty large 8.3 million pixels. Each of these pixels must be updated each time the image changes, which takes stronger horsepower, or Graphics Prossessor Unit, to push all of these 8.3 Megapixels. So immediately, there are two more costly components to manufacture: a higher resolution panel, and a faster GPU. Alright, so these are the only differences between 4K T.V.s and 1080p ones? No, and that is where the blur between what truely makes 4K great, and what many people look over.
          The colors. They look so vibrant, so rich, so lucious. Watching the gazelle dash across a rich golden meadow has never looked nearly as good as it does when you look at it on that Sony 4K television. You take a gandering look over at the 1080p T.V. to the left and are immediately struck by how dull the colors look. Everything has a shade of white to it, and there is even a slight glimmer of the bright flourescent lights flashing on the screen, with no such case occuring on that fancy 4K T.V. What's the deal? Well, as I explained earlier, 4K just refers to the number of pixels on the screen, and has nothing to do with colors at all. So why are the colors better? Well, for two reasons mainly. When you buy a 4K T.V., the main reason it costs so much is because of three main reasons: you're paying for a new technology, so the cost upfront to manufacture runs higher. It also costs more for the increased resolution and processing unit. However, what makes those colors so good? Well, you know all of that extra cost you'd be paying? Well, a large part of that goes into a plastic front panel. On top of every display panel (the panel that contains the pixels), a plastic panel sits on top, but unfortunately, this panel, which is quite cheaply produced to keep costs down in 1080p T.V.s, can cause glare and a loss of color accuracy. However, since you're paying sooo much of a premium for a 4K T.V., manufacturers such as Sony and Samsung can afford to put a very expensive plastic piece inbetween you and the display panel, and this minimizes nearly all glare and color loss. So next time you are looking at 4K T.V.s, you, the educated reader, will know that its not the pixels that make it pretty looking, but that there is a nice, glare-free, expensive piece of plastic making everything gleam with bright colors.

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