Yikes. My rack isn’t on display, but I’m not wild about that lighting.
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NEWS: Strato K Movie Player with 8K capability and new "4K Cinematic" full-chroma & higher bitrate support
- Thread starter josh
- Start date
Yikes. My rack isn’t on display, but I’m not wild about that lighting.
Isnt there an option in the settings to turn it off? I thought there was... or maybe i imagined it...
I know I can turn off the displays and lights on my Storm Audio Gear and also my 4K UHD player.. if thats not a feature on the Strato players it definately should be a feature request.
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It is. Brightness can be set 1-10, or off.
Saubriz
Active member
I think you guys are asking the wrong questions….I would love to hear initial impressions of 4k cinema vs. “regular” 4k
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2024
- Messages
- 169
But how fantastic?
Edub
Active member
I guess just as long as the movies look good that’s all that really matters.
Okay, I've done a bit of A/B testing with Top Gun Maverick and Dune. I'm just a lay-person, a consumer, so I may not be as precise as others or know what to look for. But I do care about color and how clear the image looks. It's not night and day, but there is a subtle improvement. The colors of sunsets and skin tones are more lifelike, the image overall looks more dense and dimensional, blacks look slightly more black. When flipping back to the regular 4K HDR version it look slightly grayer and flatter. Not something I would have noticed before. But now I've seen it.But how fantastic?
Overall 4K Cinematic looks closer to an OLED picture, or at least closer to what a movie looks like when it's a quarter of the size of a projector screen. 4K Cinematic looks less
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Saubriz
Active member
Thanks for the info! If you don’t mind, what projector are you using? Is the K connected directly to it?
Thanks!
Wonkavision
Member
As a Strato E and Mini Terra owner, I wish the Strato K had followed the same design language. The E and Mini Terra are smaller and more modern looking. The K may be the better player, but aesthetically it feels like Kaleidescape is moving backward instead of forward.
Now I’m in the awkward position of wanting the new player while preferring the design of the gear I already own. To make matters worse, the rack-mount system is designed around two matching chassis, so now I’m looking at replacing not just my Strato E, but potentially my Mini Terra as well. And I just bought the darned things.
Apparently Kaleidescape has added a new subscription tier: Hardware of the Month Club.
The different designs are more of a "form follows function"-thing and not being "more modern" or "more backwards".
The E and Mini Terra´s form factor allow for mounting close to or behind a TV/display, whereas the rest of the lineup is supposed to be mounted into a rack (or standalone if you want to).
Sure thing! I’m using a JVC NZ7, with both a Denon AVR and a Lumagen Radiance Pro in between.
One thing I forgot to mention is that the wall looks amazing too. Very vibrant and non-washed out. I literally did a double-take when it powered on.
Oh, getting it set up was simple too. I just disconnected the Strato C, and plugged all the same cables into the Strato K, including the power cable. The web interface found it, and I added the Strato K. I had to change the aspect ratio and turn off the display brightness, and also select HDR-10 as my output. I was getting a scary weird red picture at first. But all is well again!
Most of my time was spent on swapping out the Strato C with the K in automations I set up on my UC3 and HA.
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There is no difference to this format that relates to your AVR. It is just the player isn’t chroma scaling as much as before. The players have always output either 422 or 444, they’ve just been scaling from 420 to start. Now they are likely going to be native 422 most of the time with rare content at 444. Just set the new player to 444 and you should be good to go. It will pass the occasional 444 title and upscale the 422 ones. There is zero new required for this from what people had before from an HDMI perspective.
You shouldn’t be losing any chroma. K has already said the majority of titles are in 422. I’ll bet it will be extremely rare to get a 444 title. There is zero difference in the color format itself, just the chroma resolution you are starting with.
Thank you for fact-checking that. I’ve corrected my earlier post.
Exactly. I did this right away. Default was Brightness 10! My gear is inside cabinets, but I still like keeping everything at a subtle glow for when I do open a door. Brightness 1.
Also I was busy loading The Odyssey 1-sheet and getting this flyer out to my kids and niece. Good thing 4K Cinematic arrived just in time for Speed Racer!
stanrozenfeld
Well-known member
Wonkavision
Member
I understand the intended-use argument, but the E and Mini Terra are already rack-mounted in my system, so I’m not sure that explains why the K needed to grow.
The E may be marketed as easier to take with you, but the K is still portable enough to carry to a friend’s house or pack for a trip. It’s just larger. Likewise, the K may be marketed more like a traditional rack component, but Kaleidescape also offers a behind-the-TV mounting option for it.
If the answer is thermal management, airflow, serviceability, or some other engineering requirement, that’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. But “one goes behind a TV and one goes in a rack” still doesn’t really explain why one chassis is deeper than the other.
Maybe I’m too influenced by modern technology, where every new generation tends to get smaller, faster, and more capable. When Apple releases a new Mac mini, my expectation isn’t that it’ll be twice the size of the previous model. And when that tiny box is capable of editing multiple streams of 8K video, it’s hard not to wonder what exactly requires all the extra space in a movie player.
Then again, the A/V industry has never entirely shaken the notion that premium gear should occupy a lot of rack space.