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Playing catchup to LG, Sony has unveiled its own 4k LCD TV with a whopping 82 inch diagonal screen length – two inches shorter than the rival LG offering.
However, while the new Bravia might come up a couple of inches short in one dimension, it maintains the same huge 4k resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 pixels, offering a massive jump in detail over traditional High Definition sources like Blu-Ray.
Of course the real problem with a set like this is providing it with sources that are able to conform to its standard. High Definition channels on regular TV are becoming more common place, but the majority still operate at standard definitions and we're way off having multiple 4k resolution channels. Still, in a chicken and egg scenario, one has to come first and as these sorts of televisions come down in price and become more common place, it's likely we'll see services providing the UDTV streams that this sort of display was built for.
That said, it's unlikely to come from a disc or broadcast format for some time, so we'll likely see the first regularly available content for TVs like the new Bravia KD-84×9005 (a catchy name if ever we heard one) come from streaming sources like Netflix, Sky and Lovefilm. Of course it will be bandwidth dependent. Considering 1080p movies are often more than 10GB in size, to stream footage of something with four times the resolution – and therefore presumably at least four times the file size – fibre connections are going to be a must have.
Still, when you're able to shell out nearly £20,000 on a TV, having up to date broadband shouldn't be too much of a concern.
The new Bravia TV is set for release in the fourth quarter of this year.
KitGuru Says: It's going to be a while before this sort of set is embraced by the public. At least another half decade – HD sets have only recently become the norm. By then people might even be fully enamoured with 3D, though it's not 100 per cent. We've had that technology for a while now and most people just aren't' that fussed.
