Sony’s 4K UltraHD TVs plummet in price, but content still scarce Fancy LCDs drop in price equivalence from "nice new car" to "crappy new car."

We saw plenty of UltraHD "4K" TVs at CES—that is, TVs with a vertical resolution of 2160 pixels and a horizontal resolution that varies a bit depending on manufacturer or format—but they all had one thing in common: a price tag about equivalent with a mid-size car. This isn't totally without precedent, as when plasma TVs were first entering the consumer space 15-ish years ago they too were priced ludicrously high. However, according to CNET, Sony announced this morning much lower pricing on two LED-powered Ultra HD TVs: $4,999 for its 55-inch XBR-55X900A model, and $6,999 for its 65-inch XBR-65X900A model.

New high-resolution TVs make demo content look very sharp.

The TVs will be available to order starting on April 21, but they are actually on display now at Sony stores in cities across the country, including New York, Las Vegas, Houston, and several places in California. According to Sony Electronics Home Division Vice President Mike Lucas, the TVs will be delivered to customers "just before the summer."

The general consensus among the Ars staff at CES was that while Ultra HD TVs certainly looked nice—especially the ones shown off in closed booths with carefully controlled lighting and viewing distances and content—they weren't jaw-droppingly overwhelming. The jump from standard-definition to HD content was very noticeable, but the jump from 1080p to 2160p doesn't appear to carry nearly the same visual wallop.

That leads to one of UltraHD's current biggest failings. Once you've got this great high-resolution TV—what are you supposed to watch on it? "Standard" over-the-air HD or HD satellite and cable will look fine, of course, as will Blu-rays (or upscaled DVDs), but they're only going to be delivering a quarter of the pixels you could be seeing in native 2160p resolution. Where's the 4K content?

There are a number of methods to get 4K video playing on your new 4K TV, but Sony is hoping that you'll spend $699 on its FMP-X1 4K media player, which provides content specifically mastered to for UltraHD's 2160p resolution. Currently the player comes preloaded with a collection of films that could best be called eclectic: Bad Teacher, Battle: Los Angeles, The Bridge over the River Kwai, The Karate Kid (the crappy new one, not the good one I grew up with), Salt, Taxi Driver, That's My Boy, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Other Guys, and Total Recall (again, the crappy new one and not the hilariously bad 1990s one). Out of those, I'd certainly love to see Bridge over the River Kwai in UltraHD—and without looking it up I'd bet it's one of the few films on the list filmed with actual for-real film—and most of the others promise to be at least, well, loud.

Additional content will be available in fall 2013, via "a fee-based video distribution service offering a library of 4K titles from Sony Pictures Entertainment and other notable production houses." Note that this is going to be Sony's fee-based video distribution service; at least for now, Netflix and other streaming services appear to be shut out of the 4K game.

There are some competitors, like high-end digital cinema company RED, which has for years been planning on selling a competing UltraHD movie player under the name of REDRay. REDRay sounds impressive; it would use an advanced compression scheme to cram a full-length UltraHD movie down to a 15GB file with a data rate of about 20Mbps, which would make it streamable over many consumers' high-speed Internet connections. The only problem with REDRay right now is that although it's been "coming soon" since at least 2008, the $1,450 player still isn't available.

The REDRay home media player promises to deliver 2160p content to your UltraHD TV... when you can eventually buy it.

So be careful if you ride that early adopter wave and bring 2160p into your living room. As with each new TV and movie technology that's been introduced over the past couple of decades, you won't have much to watch on it other than fancy demo content for the foreseeable future.