- Kaleidescape Strato E launches today, for $2,995 (about £2,200 / AU$4,650)
- 4K Blu-ray image quality, with Dolby Atmos and DTS:X
- 480GB of on-board storage, and you can buy more
If you’re looking for a serious movie player that delivers far better quality than streaming but doesn’t require the disc collection of the best 4K Blu-ray players, Kaleidescape offer some excellent models such as the five star Strato V Movie Player. At just under $4K, though, the Strato V is beyond many viewers’ budgets – so the arrival of a new sub-$3K player with serious specs is very welcome indeed.
The new player is called the Strato E and it bears a strong resemblance to the rest of the Strato family. It’s designed to work as a standalone device with on-board storage to download movies to, but you can also team it up with Terra Prime servers for large movie collections, and you can use multiple Strato devices across multiple rooms.
Kaleidescape Strato E: key features and pricing
The Strato E is designed for home theater enthusiasts, marine installations and commercial setups. It’s a 4K player with SDR, HDR10 and Dolby Vision, it has BT.2020 color space and 4:4:4 chroma, and it displays at up to 2160p at 60fps.
The key thing about Kaleidescape’s products is that you get the same high bitrate version of the movies as you get on 4K Blu-rays, which is many times the data you get when streaming, even in 4K.
This means you get more detail, more natural color reproduction, and clearer motion in movies.
The Strato E also supports lossless multi-channel and spatial audio including DTS:X and Dolby Atmos, with additional support for Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio, and Linear PCM up to 7.1ch, 96kHz/24-bit. Everything is output via HDMI 2.1 with HDCP 2.3.
The Strato E is designed to work seamlessly with Kaleidescape’s high-quality movie store, and its 480GB internal storage is large enough for six full-quality 4K movies. Watched movies are automatically removed after 48 hours to free up space, but of course you can re-download them at any time. A full movie download is said to take around 10 minutes over gigabit ethernet, which Kaleidescape strong recommends in our experience.
It’s worth noting that in our Strato V review we praised the movie store for offering 4K movies often long before their physical disc release, but we did feel that while “in the US the choice is huge… elsewhere the choice isn’t as impressive, and films take longer to be added.”
The Strato E sits in the Kaleidescape range above the entry-level reference 2K player, the Strato M, and below the Strato V. And it’s priced accordingly, with a US price of $2,995 making it Kaleidescape’s most affordable 4K player.
International pricing hasn’t been announced just yet but it’s likely to cost more outside the US: the $3,995 Strato V is currently retailing at £5,380 (about $7,200) in the UK.
The Strato E is available in US now.
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