Is 4K the future of television or is it just another CES pipe dream? A three-part debate is taking place on ZDNet between proponent Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who suggests the future of broadcasting involves 4K, and opponent Jason Perlow, who believes the technology will be gone before it really gets started. As of Wednesday morning, 39 percent of voting readers support Vaughan-Nichols, while 61 percent back Perlow.

According to Vaughan-Nichols, the future of TV is 4K. “Don’t get me wrong I love my 1080p HDTV,” he writes, “but 4K’s 3,840×2,160 pixels, aka Quad Full High Definition (QFHD), blows it out of the water.”

He also sees “4K TV becoming a blockbuster because it will be bundled with organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technologies with their exceptional color reproduction.”

He notes that the sets are expensive right now, but as video codec technologies and Internet speeds rise in the coming years, prices will go down, making the sets more practical for consumers.

On the other side of the argument is Jason Perlow. He writes that while he does believe consumers will buy 4K sets, especially as prices go down, “it’s how the content that will be delivered to the displays will be achieved” that concerns him.

“Right now, if you examine the state of consumer broadband in the United States, most households are barely able to stream 720p movies reliably, let alone 1080p, which is Blu-ray quality,” he notes.

“To move 4K movies across the Internet, we’re going to need to move bureaucratic mountains at the state and municipal government level to get gigabit connectivity to the last mile in every major metropolitan area, unless we are prepared to distribute content on 128GB high-speed flash drives at Wal-Mart or figure out how to free up broadcast spectrum that doesn’t exist,” he concludes.

Visit ZDNet for rebuttals, public response and closing statements as they are published in the coming days.