I have not seen a lot in the field. the ones I have seen were "eh" with 1080 feeds. and customers have been less than impressed because at the store they have the 4k demo and then when they plug in the cable box it does not look the same.

is this common across all brands? its almost like when you see 480p on a 1080 set. the processing does a decent job but way less than true 1080.

I don't sell TV's so I've told customers to wait until more 4k material is out and prices come down further. are there any sets out there that do a really good job with 1080 conversion I should steer them to?

i think the 1080 picture on the 4k sets we have messed with look as good if not better (sony xbr70x850) than their 1080p counterparts.

I don't see what the wait is for at this point. There will be an ass-load (technical term) of streaming content by late next year, not to mention discs, supposedly. Netflix is already working it, Amazon flipped the switch this week, and DirecTV just launched a bird for content as well.

Going forward I wouldn't worry about what 1080 TV up-converts better than another, I would just say explore the new content. My understanding is any 4K TV with apps will do the 4K shows... bandwidth allowing!

That is "as designed." Upsamping does not increase resolution. Some vendors cheat by turning up the sharpness as they upsample but this creates haloes and distortion. Correct 1080p upsamping to 4K then will show an image with identical resolution to a 1080p set.

The only reason to get a 4K display for a 1080p source is if you sit close enough to see the pixel structure. I sit 7-8 feet away from our 65 inch 4K set and it makes a bit of difference there.

Your customers should get 4K because they think they will keep the display until 4K content becomes more popular.

The price, particularly after Black Friday, is already so low that our customers now have no objection to the price, so we sell them on being future proofed. The cost increase is minimal (particularly for those who would have purchased a higher-end 1080p set anyway) so why not be an early adopter?

Ones I have done look like total ass. LG in particular.

I'm still telling my clients to go 1080 until content delivery and the hdmis have been finalized

The X850B mentioned earlier does a pretty good job on 1080 upscaling. I have heard BAD things about LG's processing.

Don't you guys remember the days of DVDs, when running one though a high-quality line doubler for projection looked a whole lot better than merely outputting at the native NTSC?

Granted, you can't create detail where there wasn't any, but with some skillful manipulation of the image I do think good 4K displays looks better than 1080p displays showing the same image, if only because of an increase in pixel density and reduction of overall pixel size making up the same detail.

I appreciate the feedback. I'm not against the future proof concepts but I don't want to do it at the expense of NOW picture quality. The reality is customers watch 90% of their daily content off of cable or sat NOW. I know better is coming but unless it can look as good as a current GOOD 1080p set - I don't see the benefit yet.... especially when I can steer that extra cash into better speakers or other audio bits..

In general you are not going to see a difference between a 4K and 1080 displays with 1080 material if the displays have the same other picture qualities. At first 4K was only done on the higher end models of a given brand and it had the best picture whether it was 4K or 1080. Now 4K displays are starting to make it to the lower models and might not perform as good as a high end 1080 display. It is tough to find a high end display that isn't 4K now though. But because something is 4K does not mean it is going to give the best picture.

Also, many tests done with 4K streaming has not given as good of picture quality as the same material on Bluray due to the amount of compression they are using to stream 4K. So not all 4K material is going to give the best picture available even when it is more readily available.

A friendly word of warning - if the 4K TV does not have HDCP 2.2 capability, the customer (especially residential) is going to be very disappointed in the not so distant future.

I saw an ~80" Sony 4K with an HD DirecTV feed to it and the color banding was horrible. A person's face looked like it had two-tone paint slapped on it.

In my experience the Samsung (8550 series) and Sharp (70UD27U - the brand new one) look as good as their 1080p counterparts when fed by a DTV box. In the case of the Sharp, it is the best looking Sharp I have seen...for what little that says.

I just installed a Sammy 8550 last week.

This one did not appear to have any 2.2 inputs.

After quite a bit of PQ tweaking (which, thankfully, the 8550 has many nice menu options for), I think a well mastered BluRay maybe looks a little better than a 1080p set. 1080i Cable, might look a little worse, depending on the channel, maybe due to the higher rez set more dutifully revealing the nasty cable box compression artifacts.

I have noticed that the LG sets do have 2.2 inputs....not sure why the Samsung 8550 does not, unless it was an earlier production model?

As previously mentioned, if you seriously want to future proof your installs, you REALLY need to do your homework and make sure the 4K TV's you're installing are HDCP 2.2 enabled.

Going forward, any source delivering HDCP content at native 4K resolutions is mandated to carry the new 2.2 chipset. These sources will NOT work with equipment unless they're also enabled with HDCP 2.2. In other words, everything in the chain after the source also needs to be HDCP 2.2 enabled (AVR's, matrix switches, extenders, displays, etc), or you won't get a picture.

That means if your client goes out and buys Sony's new 4K UltraHD media player on Amazon and hooks it up to the non-2.2 compliant 4K TV you installed last month, they won't be able to watch it. Who do you think they're going to blame when that happens?

It's also important to understand that HDCP 2.2 is a physical chipset, which means it requires a hardware upgrade, not a software upgrade to become compatible. That makes it even more important that you do your research now, because in most cases, if you want to upgrade a product to HDCP 2.2, it's going to require a whole new purchase.

This paragraph is somewhat self serving, but I feel compelled to mention that as a company, LEAF saw this coming a year ago and thus rearranged all of its engineering efforts to accommodate for it. Our new LU Series (LEAF UltraHD) shipping in January is 100% HDCP 2.2 compliant.

At this point, given what we now know, it doesn't make any sense to install 4K products into a residential environment that don't take 2.2 into consideration. You're simply setting yourself up for some serious headaches down the road. I know, because we're already experiencing calls on the matter from dealers who are finding this out the hard way.

That 8550 may have a port that works; not sure if it is labeled as such. From the manual: "HDCP 2.2 is supported only by the TV's HDMI (MHL) port."