TV makers show off 4K and Ultra HD screens

Television has changed so fast. At the start of this century the idea of every home having a 40-inch widescreen, flat screen TV that gets online and shows high-definition detail was unthinkable. Such concepts were for the distant future, but little more than a decade later we already take HDTVs for granted. So what's next?

We can forget 3D. While it's set to continue as a default feature in most TVs, demonstrations of new-look 3D technology were missing at Berlin's Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA) last month, where the world's TV makers unveiled exactly what they're working on in the labs and, therefore, their visions for the future of TV.

The next few years are all about Ultra HD or 4k televisions, all of which boast a resolution panel four times as detailed as modern full HD TVs. That, of course, means bigger, slimmer and flatter TVs are needed - and why not add a curve, too?

Samsung has been churning out "gently contoured" TVs for most of 2014 in the hope that it'll spark a new demand, but its demo at IFA was something of a curve-ball. Its 105-inch TV wasn't just huge and hung from a giant easel, but it had a motor to switch it from flat to curved. The effect is astonishing, though largely pointless.

This is a show-off TV, and not much else, but it's the shape that's perhaps the most entrancing; its stretched screen allows for the watching of movies filmed in the CinemaScope format (as most movies on Blu-ray discs are presented) without the black bars above and below. It's truly enveloping, but since the non-bendable, non-motorised version of this TV - the Samsung UE105S9WAL - costs HK$930,000, we're not holding out much hope of securing a review sample.

The answer to what you should do with the extra screen real estate when you're not watching a CinemaScope movie came from Toshiba, which demonstrated a 105-inch TV that used the blank space either side when watching digital TV to show a Twitter feed and a panel of news headlines.