Kaleidescape movie players are a mainstay of pricey high-end home theaters where they serve as a replacement for the best 4K Blu-ray players and best streaming devices. I’d known about Kaleidescape for many years, but never had an opportunity to personally try one of its systems out.
That is, until the company contacted me last summer and asked if I was interested in an exclusive review of the new Kaleidescape Terra Prime Solid-State 8TB movie server and Strato C movie player. Talk about Christmas in July!
To give some background on Kaleidescape, the company started out making systems that let users rip their DVD and Blu-ray collections to a hard disc server and then access them via a proprietary onscreen interface.
Of course, plenty of people had been ripping movie discs on their home theater PCs prior to Kaleidescape’s arrival on the scene, but the company’s products were different in two ways. First, a Kaleidescape system required that the physical disc be present in a ‘disc vault’ for it to be played back – a step meant to placate Hollywood studios concerned about piracy.
Second, the Kaleidescape interface used for browsing a movie collection was a breathtaking sight to behold, with crisp high-definition graphics and a unique, tiled movie cover art configuration that shuffled automatically as you browsed your collection.
With the arrival of 4K, Kaleidescape made a transition from disc to digital, with 4K movies and TV show collections available for download directly to its systems from an online Kaleidescape Store. Similar to disc versions of movies, Kaleidescape downloads come with bonus features, commentary tracks, and other extras that make owning a copy of a movie a worthwhile investment.
Downloading movies from the store to a Kaleidescape server previously was a fairly time-consuming process, with a 4K title typically taking around an hour to fully download. With the arrival of the new Terra Prime server family, which is available in 88TB, 44TB, 22TB, and 8TB configurations, download speeds for that same 4K movie have been reduced to four minutes or even less.
The need for speed
Hitting such high download speeds requires an ultra-fast 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet network connection, which the new Kaleidescape servers support. My own connection maxes out at 1 Gigabit – a limitation of my service provider. Even so, I was able to download a three-hour 4K movie in 14 minutes and a one-hour and 40 minute one in nine minutes. That’s plenty fast for most people, and it also gives you time to make popcorn before settling in.
Why Kaleidescape?
The total cost for the 8TB SSD Terra Prime movie Server and Strato C movie player system I tested is $13,990 (around £11,075 / AU$21,935). Reading this, you might be wondering why anyone would spend that hefty amount when you can simply buy or rent movies and stream them using an Apple TV 4K at a significantly lower cost.
The answer comes down to quality: Movies downloaded from the Kaleidescape store will have a 10 times higher bitrate than ones accessed from a typical streaming service, and that means lower video compression and higher levels of picture detail. Soundtracks of movies purchased or rented from the Kaleidescape store are also in the same lossless Dolby Atmos and DTS:X formats found on Blu-ray disc, while streamed versions use the lossy and highly compressed Dolby Digital Plus audio format. During my time with the system, I could clearly see and hear the video and audio quality advantage that the Kaleidescape downloads provided.
Kaleidescape products are pretty much unique in the market, and even more so now that one of the company’s main competitors, Zappiti, closed operations. (Kaleidescape was offering hundreds of dollars in movie store credits to former Zappiti customers who made the switch to a Kaleidescape system, though that program ended on December 31.)
Does Kaleidescape, ultimately, beat a 4K Blu-ray disc? As far as picture and sound quality goes, they are equivalent. But where a Kaleidescape system provides a clear home theater advantage is in its elegant, innovative design and ease of use. Not having to deal with storing physical discs and loading them up into a player is the reason why so many viewers migrated to video streaming in the first place. But, as mentioned above, streaming in its current form entails quality compromises. The Kaleidescape store also offers around 700 titles in 4K HDR that are not available on disc, which is another big bonus.
With a Kaleidescape system such as the Terra Prime movie Server and Strato C movie player configuration I tested, you get the quality benefits of 4K Blu-ray without having to deal with discs, and it's combined with a next-level onscreen interface for browsing your movie collection. Yes, a Kaleidescape system is pricey, but it’s also an interactive thrill ride that makes watching movies at home more fun and engaging than ever. In that key way, it does beat 4K Blu-ray, and does so by a wide margin.
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