House of Cards Season 2 Available in Ultra HD Thanks to Netflix’s Upgraded 4K Streaming Quality

House of Cards Season 2 Available in Ultra HD Thanks to Netflix’s Upgraded 4K Streaming Quality
(Netflix)
Kristina Skorbach
4/10/2014
Updated:
7/18/2015

Netflix is rolling out its original series “House of Cards: Season 2” in 4K streaming quality in ultra HD (UHD) TV.

A 4K streaming quality is the upgraded resolution of the picture quality. The new resolution is 4096 by 2160 pixels, which is about two time more than the current standard of 1920 by 1080 pixels.

The political drama was the first show to get the upgrade, reports International Digital Times. Following in the footsteps of “House of Cards” will be some nature documentaries.

HDTVtest, which reviewed the season through the Netflix app on a new Samsung HU8500 UHDTV, said that there were pros and cons to the new quality.  For example, there’s a testing sequence with lots of gradients and camera noise, as well as posterization during the fade in and around street lamps.

The 4K version did, however, make a splash during brighter and more colorful scenes, where “on-screen images were rendered with greater sharpness and smoother gradients, receiving a very slight boost in intra-scene gamma and contrast in the process too,” the website wrote.

“House of Cards: Season 2” in 4K is available for streaming on Netflix given that you have a compatible 4K display with a built-in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) decoder.