Interesting. I wonder if it is just the increase in data rates or less compression maybe?

I have everything ripped in 100% 1:1 copies of the movie and audio (strip out menus, extras, etc, but the movies are 100%) on my media server.

I just start switching some things to 4K discs. The movie file sizes are a bit larger, but I am planning for the future. I started doing this recently just with "movies that matter" (subjective movie choices for sure) when I discovered that the blu-ray drive in my former HTPC that I now use as a desktop computer happened to have a compatible drive for use ripping purchased 4K blu-rays.

Another benefit was more Atmos titles too, and my media server is plenty beefy enough to transcode 4K on-the-fly down to something smaller for transmitting over the internet to my daughters who don't live at home and don't care if it is max bit rates.

Honestly though, I have no real comparison to non-4K vs 4K for the same movie to see how things compare and doing non-identical movies is more of an apples to oranges comparison "scientifically" so I don't know if I would have a good test to use.

I should also note though that I do have a Darbee box that helps to improve the image quality a lot for 1080p content. They are kind of going belly-up as 4K hit the market a few years ago making their products less critical for image quality. With the Darbee in-line it really helps to crisp things up too. I was a very vocal skeptic of the original Darbee product several years ago until I tried one out. Now it just stays ON all of the time and I never think about it. I do notice when we have a (rare) power outage and it isn't turned on. I wonder if that is similar to the impact of 4K source on a 1080p display?

I might have to turn off the Darbee and try some video clips from the internet in 1080p and 4k of the same scene and see if I notice a difference, and then turn the Darbee on and see what is different...

You've inspired me.

Farewell - June 4, 2020