Smart TV? Hmmm… Been there, done that: now just about every TV you
buy has some degree of smart functionality, to the extent that
manufacturers like Toshiba are pushing the 'even smarter' nature of their sets to set them apart

from the ones that merely let you watch catch-up TV, do a bit of browsing and send the odd tweet.

You know, the ones that merely do just about everything you'd ever really want or need your TV to do.

Where do we go now, then? Or rather, where do the big TV companies –
still struggling to make any money out of building and selling tellies –
go, now that just about every feature they've come up with in the quest
for what LG recently called 'premiumisation' (ugh!) has so far been
'commoditised' (only slightly less ugh)?

Or in other words, has 50% of no effect at all when it comes to keeping the price of a telly up in today's cut-throat market.

Thinner, OLED screens? Gonna be pricey; gonna be a while before
anyone can mass-produce them to a consistent standard without throwing
away a significant chunk of the output from the production.

More here

That is amazingly cheap for a 4K TV and it will certainly rock the big boys, but what sort of quality and component life can you expect?

The article is rubbish as it is attempting to address two issues, without much clarity in either of them.

There are two distinct issues at play here i) the '4K' standard ii) the TV displays that support the '4K' standard

Firstly, I doubt that a $1,500 4K TV has a 'decent enough' upscaler to convert 1080p (full HD) to 4K resolution, that could be considered '4K quality'.

Such snazzy upscaling/image processing tech, is still limited only to the big boys esp. Sony, and will stay that way for some time, until third-party scaling devices become readily available.

Secondly, the article fails to properly address the third important aspect, at this stage of 4K i.e. the content & services.

The consumer electronics industry is no longer a battlefield of hardware/devices anymore, it is a battle of 'ecosystems', that includes the hardware/displays and the movies/content/software supplied with it.

This is where I think Sony again, has the distinct advantage, as they will be able to supply native 4K content, from their expansive film library (Columbia/Sony Pictures) with their displays, along with access to additional downloadable content. These displays will integrate with their own A/V recievers/home theaters etc., and will form an interconnected 'ecosystem', together with it's userbase who will be able to interact/share their content with each other.

Likewise, the other big manufacturers, will also attempt to form their own ecosystems, which then customers can choose to buy into.

This is how the big manufacturers have been, and will continue to fight the budget manufacturers.

Lastly, 4K is just a display resolution standard, and will have a natural evolution process as it always has been:

from Standard Definition (480p) to HD (720p/1080p) to 4K(2160p)

Same as CD to DVD to HD-DVD/Blu-Ray

It's really not a big deal.

There's plenty of collaborative effort underway to create a common standard for UHD content, with several options - lead by a proposed UHD bluray disc format - being discussed and a quorum expected by Q4 this year.

UHD (4K) is absolutely destined to become mainstream.