Movies The Way The One Percent Can See Them

John Higgins / The Verge: Kaleidescape gets movie files directly from the studios, encodes them at reference quality, and makes them available for download to its high-end media players and servers. They offer 4K Blu-ray quality, or better, without a disc, and the ease of streaming without the quality loss. But they’ve always been expensive — so expensive that even in my 20 years of reviewing AV systems I’ve never had the chance to use one. They’ve been the purview of pricey, custom-installed home theater spaces. But now, Kaleidescape has released its most affordable 4K movie player yet. Although, at $2,995, the term affordable is extremely relative. I’d always heard about these devices, but never heard what it was actually like to own one of them. You know that, “If I won the lottery, I wouldn’t tell anyone, but there’d be signs” meme? Yeah, if I say I own a Kaleidescape…my bank account suddenly gained a bunch of commas.