4K movies, television shows, and video games promise the best quality media: stunning colors, crisp movement, and more detail than almost anything else.

But 4K isn’t always 4K. That is, there are differences between 4K streaming and 4K Blu-ray which means you’re not always viewing what you think, and there are some key areas to watch out for.

4K Blu-ray vs. 4K Streaming: 5 Differences Explained

Several factors distinguish 4K Blu-ray from 4K streaming: bitrate, color grading, audio quality, connectivity, and resolution. These five differences might not seem glaringly obvious when watching a movie on either disc or streaming, but when compared, the distinction becomes clear.

4K Blu-ray

4K Streaming

90-128Mbps

Color Reproduction

Audio Quality

High quality, lossless

Compressed, lossy

Connectivity

No internet connection required

Requires an internet connection

Resolution

Consistently 2160p

2160p with a tendency to drop with weak connections

“Bitrate” is a technical way of describing a video’s data transfer speed. Your average 4K Blu-ray—also known as a 4K UHD disc, presented in a black case over the traditional 1080p Blu-ray’s blue—has a bitrate anywhere from 90 to 130Mbps (and, in some cases, more). 4K streaming, by comparison, averages around 8 to 16Mbps. That’s more than a slight difference and shows that a 4K Blu-ray can transfer more data, which equals better video quality.

Thanks to the higher bitrate, 4K Blu-rays can deliver superior color reproduction and fidelity compared to 4K streaming. With streaming, you may notice color banding, crushed blacks, or washed-out colors due to the lower bitrate and compression. 4K Blu-rays, on the other hand, can preserve deeper black levels, richer colors, and finer color gradients, resulting in a more accurate and vibrant image.

We touched on bitrate above, but only in reference to picture quality. However, bitrate makes a difference in audio quality between 4K streaming and 4K Blu-ray. By and large, streaming services apply audio compression, which can reduce dynamic range by limiting very low and very high frequencies to level out the audio of movies and television shows. This isn’t the case with a physical disc, which typically gives you the audio as it was meant to be delivered.

Everyone hates buffering. Streaming services are designed to show your selections as soon as possible, even if 4K quality isn’t fully buffered yet. What’s more, slow internet speeds or Wi-Fi interruptions will stop your content in its tracks. You won’t find this with a 4K Blu-ray, which will consistently play in the highest quality from start to finish, with or without an internet connection.

Now, 4K resolution is four times that of 1080p HD (while8K is four times that of 4K). However, 2160p resolution looks pretty different on streaming services compared to a physical disc. When you account for the difference in bitrate, color reproduction, and internet connection, there’s a visible difference in how that 2160p resolution appears on a 4K Blu-ray (right) vs. 4K streaming (left) in the photo below.

Differences Between 4K Upscaling and True 4K

Beyond the five differences outlined above, another factor worth considering when weighing 4K Blu-rays vs. 4K streaming titles is4K upscaling and how it compares to true 4K. Also known as native 4K, true 2160p resolutions reign supreme over lower resolutions artificially enhanced (or “upscaled”) to 4K.

Physical disc players and streaming services are both guilty of 4K upscaling. This occurs when 1080p HD content is enhanced to 2160p using artificial intelligence or other means to add extra lines of pixels to create the illusion of 4K. True 4K, by comparison, is exactly that: content that was truly 2160p from the start.

Some 4K Blu-ray players and 4K smart TVs will automatically upscale 1080p HD content to 4K. In these instances, you may find that streaming true 4K content looks better than a 1080p Blu-ray upscaled to 4K—even with its reduced bitrate, poorer color grading, and flatter audio.

Is Blu-ray Better Than Streaming?

What about standard Blu-rays (the ones in the blue case)? How do these HD discs compare to a 4K stream? For one, resolution is drastically improved when watching a 4K title on streaming over a 1080p title on Blu-ray. On the contrary, bitrate is still better on physical media over streaming video, even when the former is HD and the latter is UHD. 1080p Blu-rays have bitrates as high as 40Mbps. The photo above highlights this difference, with the disc on the right side and streaming on the left.

In the end, the truth remains: 4K Blu-rays look better than any 4K streaming title you can find based solely on bitrate alone. But it becomes unarguable once you factor in color grading, audio quality, more dependable connectivity, and more consistent resolution. In terms of quality, physical media comes out ahead of streaming every single time. There’s hardly a scenario where a streaming service can beat a physical disc when it comes to 4K.