My review of UHD services - so I have some family in town, just got home from work, and put my niece on the project of signing up for this Ultraflix app on my new Samsung UN65JS9500 65" (a gift from Samsung for the business we do with them). Stunning TV. P.S. - we are on a 500Mpbs fiber line, one of the fastest I know of available in my area.
MGO - really breathtaking picture, particularly utilizing the MGO full HDR UHD for Life of Pi. I can certainly seeing people actually pay to either download or stream this kind of quality. Kind of wish Samsung sent me the 78", but I don't think it's out yet. Beautiful UHD interface and navigation. I know MGO is strongly supported by Fox and others, and I can see why. This kind of product would get me jazzed about 4K.
Amazon - watched an episode of Bosch, shot natively in UHD and it was great, but not quite as stunning at MGO's HDR - Bosch is dark whereas Life of Pi is bright, but my family would prefer the Bosch UHD to the HD, without a doubt. And we compared both. Great UI, easy to navigate.
Netflix - We all thought Marco Polo was outstanding and it streamed beautifully, and I also checked out the Sony title Smurfs 2, which looked fantastic. Beautiful full UHD interface. I know it's animation, but the Smurfs flick was stunning.
Ultraflix - after navigating through all the useless apps and finally finding Ultraflix (it's almost impossible to find - at least on these new TVs and the sign-in craziness my niece couldn't figure out, we finally got loaded. The interface (graphics, etc,) are not 4K. Very fuzzy. We tried some of the free nature content, obviously shot in digital UHD - and it looked decent, but we had buffer issues. Then we tried Rain Man. And I also have the DVD - not the Blu Ray - the DVD. Overwhelmingly the family voted for the DVD. The UF stream was pixelated, it buffered a few times, it was dark and not at all "UHD" in everyone's opinion. Then we tried Space Junk, which I know is a full IMAX 70MM print. Horrible. I have the Blu Ray of that title, and it blows away UF's "supposed" digital UHD conversion.
Despite whatever craziness is going on with NTEK and their dilution/jailed CEO/whatever - I can tell you that from my informal family poll, nobody would log into UF again, everyone loved MGO's product, and Amazon and Netflix (being household names) are two services they've check out again at my house.
