Think 3D. It’s what the manufacturers try to make people THINK they need. A lot of hype to sell more TVs, audio equipment, etc. turns out no one really wanted 3D and it flopped. All just to sell more equipment without listening to their customers. Now things are more ‘disposable’ and just replaced more often or held onto forever if possible to keep it working that long.
I used to chase the latest and greatest but when the 3D debacle ran into the ground, I decided to wait on being an early adopter.
I just upgraded everything in the house to 4K though and that has been pretty awesome. Would hardly say that’s early adoption though
Up until recently, most viewing that wasn’t 4K looked bad on 4K TV (like sports for example). Now the processing is much better but there are still handshake issues, poor signals being sent by the content provides (like AMC on DirecTV - TERRIBLE transmission quality to save space and allow more poorly transmitted crap to be sent to our TVs).
8k - still way too early for me. Atmos - tough to set up correctly without the ‘right’ room setup so 2 story family rooms aren’t great candidates without ugly workarounds.
My sweet spot has been 4K and 5.1 surround. I don’t even mind the compressed streaming content as the convenience is worth a bit of a barely noticeable quality reduction. I wish they would offer a streaming purchase with the option to ship the HD Blu-ray so you get the best of both without having to find the physical medium.
If I had a dedicated theater room (which I don’t even think I would do any longer, would probably set up a cool ‘viewing area’ as part of a larger congregating area for when COVID is over) I would probably look to put higher end equipment in there but we went with mid level TVs everywhere except our 2 main watched TVs where we went higher quality. You can see the difference.
Cheers!