Although everything was blue at the Blu-ray introduction, including the martinis,no one was feeling blue when we were invited into a large theater and shown comparisons of standard definition video vs. high-definition on one of Sony's 4K SXRD digital cinema projectors.

Sony's Don Eklund walked us through a dramatic demonstration using Sony's upcoming Click starring Adam Sandler. This comedy was shot digitally on Sony's Panavision Genesis HD camera at 1920x1080.

Eklund showed a split screen with the uncompressed digital master playing back on one side of the screen at a whopping 400Mbps(!), and an MPEG2-encoded stream on the other side of the screen at typical DVD data rates.

On such a large screen, blown up to 4K the DVD stream was pretty pathetic. And I was just about to talk about what a loaded demo this was, but then Eklund showed us the point. The next clip was a split screen with an MPEG2 encoded clip at a Blu-rayish data rate on one side and the uncompressed master on the other.

Even on a movie theater sized screen, blown up to 4K the differences between the BD stream and the 400Mbps uncompressed master were startlingly minimal. The BD image stream was bursting with detail and clarity.

Although 4K isn't coming to the home anytime soon, 1080p is here and I'm betting the image quality I saw will still drop some jaws when we see them at home.