LAS VEGAS, NEVADA—Here at CES, every TV maker is showing off massive 4K "Ultra HD" TV sets. The high prices for this first wave of 4K TVs—Sony's 84-inch set is a cool $25,000, for instance—are going to make them strictly an early-adopter luxury for now. But digital cinema camera maker RED has the first consumer-ready solution for native 4K playback, perhaps solving the chicken-and-egg problem that threatened to plague adoption of 4K as a home entertainment standard.

Seeing is believing

The quality of image on a 4K Ultra HD TV is quite astounding in person. If you have ever noted the difference between a Retina and non-Retina display on an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook Pro, you can think of 4K as "Retina for TV." Images show a surprising level of detail—you can see every hair on the back of someone's neck, or every slat of the blinds in apartment building windows. Many of the demos on the CES show floor are jaw-dropping.

I can't help but want one.

But the massive Ultra HD resolution—which nearly matches the 4K digital cinema you might see at a newer, well-equipped movie theater—is a waste without native content. TV makers are hawking the quality of upscaling circuitry for existing 1080p content like Blu-ray. It's impressive enough, but certainly not what will drive adoption of the new standard.

Instead, owners are going to want full 3840×2160 resolution content to really make an Ultra HD TV shine. And RED says it can deliver that with its REDRAY 4K Cinema Player. The device was first announced in 2008, and we discussed how it could eventually bring 4K digital cinema technology to the home theater in 2009. In the meantime, RED's engineers have continually improved the product, building it around a 1TB hard drive instead of using discs.

"All those companies that make their bones making shiny plastic discs have realized it's the end of the road for shiny plastic discs," RED's top marketing honcho Ted Schilowitz told Ars.

Toshiba partnered with RED to use a REDRAY player with its Ultra HD TVs in its booth at CES, so we got to see a working one under glass. The $1,450 device is available for preorder now and will ship within a couple months, according to Shilowitz.

"All these companies with 4K panels are really interested in this, because most of them are driving their demos with these exotic server-like boxes," Shilowitz said. "There's no real consumer device to deliver native 4K content. But the REDRAY player is a very modern machine; it just connects using a single HDMI 1.4 cable and delivers full 4K resolution at data rates lower than Blu-ray."

Building a 4K world

Some observers have been skeptical that 4K technology would ever come to the home. "People keep writing that story over and over, how we didn't think 4K was coming. But at RED, we saw this coming seven years ago," Shilowitz said.

Part of the strategy involved building one of the first digital cinema cameras on the market—the RED One—and convincing filmmakers and TV producers to use them.

"We're not really scared of anything," Shilowitz said. "We built these cameras because we thought it was the right way to move to digital capture. We said HD wasn't good enough for capture, and it wasn't good enough for distribution. And a lot of big filmmakers weren't scared either, like Steven Soderberg, like David Fincher, like Peter Jackson."

Now many major motion pictures are shot on 4K equipment. And many TV shows have moved to digital capture as well. "The producers of ER moved to RED at the end of the last season," Shilowitz said. "Now they produce Southland exclusively with RED cameras." Criminal Minds and Justified are other examples that Shilowitz cited.

Even those movies and TV shows still shot on film are typically scanned in, with all post-production happening in the digital realm, and mastered and delivered in a digital format. So loads of native 4K content already exists, though some work may be required to remaster a final cut from the original post-production work files.

Consumer ready

Soon enough, consumers won't have to go to a theater to see 4K content in all its glory. "Every manufacturer that makes panels have 4K TVs here at CES," Shilowitz said. "And these aren't just prototypes—these are devices that are planned for sale soon, and some are already on sale now."

It's not an exaggeration—Ultra HD TVs were everywhere on the show floor. Panasonic, Sharp, LG, Samsung, Sony, and others all had ready-to-launch large, Ultra HD models on the show floor. Even HiSense, a Chinese brand that is perhaps best known for making the cheap HDTVs that line the shelves at your local Walmart, had dozens of Ultra HD TV models on display.

The only problem now is getting all the 4K content being produced to those Ultra HD TV that are already trickling out to consumers. And REDRAY is currently the only viable solution. On the hardware side is the REDRAY Player. On the software side, RED offers the RRENCODE plug-in, which uses wavelet-based compression to funnel massive 4K video files down to a relatively tiny .red file.

.red files have a data rate of 20Mbps, which is "totally doable for home Internet connections," according to Schilowitz, and the large 1TB drive in the REDRAY player can buffer and cache movies for later playback. The bigger concern might be overall file size; an average 100-minute movie will clock in at about 15GB. Watching a dozen or so 4K movies over your home broadband connection and you might bump up against your ISP's bandwidth limits. That's why the REDRAY player can play back 4K .red files from an SD card or attached USB drive as well.

RED is partnering with Odemax to create a Netflix-like 4K distribution channel, though details on the service are scarce. We don't know exactly how much 4K movies will cost to rent or buy, and neither does RED. However, the service is supposed to be up and running by the time the REDRAY player ships around March or April.

Still, Ultra HD TVs are new, and it will be some time before they start filling living rooms in great numbers. But Shilowitz thinks adoption will happen faster than the transition from standard-definition to high-definition TV. "4K is great for people that can afford it now, but you're going to see price reductions every 6-9 months," he said. "The road [to 4K] might be a bumpy one, but come along on this ride with us and you'll end up with this amazing payoff."