article took forever to get to the bottom line. content. 8k content essentially does not exist. TV manufacturers were putting the cart before the horse.
4k tvs existed before the content existed. I think the larger issue is that the difference between what is and what could be is not worth the additional expense, especially at a time when most people struggle to pay rent, food, and medicine. More people watch videos on their phones than watch broadcast television. 8k is a solution looking for a problem.
Hell I still don't own a 4k tv and don't plan to go out of my way to buy one unless the need arises. Which I don't see why I need that when a normal flat-screen looks fine to me.
I actually have some tube tvs and be thinking of just hooking my vcr back up and watching old tapes. I don't need fancy resolutions in my shows or movies.
Only time I even think of those things is with video games.
4K hardly even makes sense unless your tv is over 70" and your watching it from less than 4 feet away. I do think VR could benefit from ultra-high resolution, though.
Extensive write up on this whole issue, even includes a calculator tool.
But, basically:
Yeah, going by angular resolution, even leaving the 8K content drought aside....
8K might make sense for a computer monitor you sit about 2 feet / 0.6m away from, if the diagonal size is 35 inches / ~89cm, or greater.
Take your viewing distance up to 8 feet / 2.4m away?
Your screen diagonal now has to be about 125 inches / ~318cm, or larger, for you to be able to maybe notice a difference with a jump from 4K to 8K.
........
The largest 8K TV that I can see available for purchase anywhere near myself... that costs ~$5,000 USD... is 85 inches.
I see a single one of 98 inches that is listed for $35,000. That's the largest one I can see, but its... uh, wildly more expensive.
So with a $5,000, 85 inch TV, that works out to...
You would have to be sitting closer than about 5 feet / ~1.5 meters to notice a difference.
And that's assuming you have 20/20 vision.
........
So yeah, VR goggle displays... seem to me to be the only really possibly practical use case for 8K ... other than basically being the kind of person who owns a home with a dedicated theater room.
What this chart is missing is the impact of the quality of the screen and the source material being played on it.
A shit screen is a shit screen, just like a badly filmed TV show from the 80s will look like crap on anything other than an old CRT.
People buying a 4k screen from Wallmart for $200 then wondering why they cant tell its any better than their old 1080p screen.
The problem with pushing up resolution is the cost to get a good set right now is so much its a niche within a niche of people who actually want it. Even a good 4k set with proper HDR support and big enough to make a different is expensive. Even when 8k moves away from early adopter markups its still going to be expensive, especially when compared to the tat you can by at the supermarket.
It is totally true that things are even more complex than just resolution, but that is why I linked the much more exhaustive write up.
Its even more complicated in practice than all the things they bring up, they are focusing on mainly a movie watching experience, not a video game playing experience.
They do not go into LED vs QLED vs OLED vs other actual display techs, don't go into response latency times, refresh rates, as you say all the different kinds of HDR color gamut support... I am sure I am forgetting things...
Power consumption may be a significant thing for you, image quality at various viewing angles...
Oh right, FreeSync vs GSync, VRR... blargh there are so many fucking things that can be different about displays...
I think it’s NHK, or one of the Japanese broadcasters anyways, that has actually been pressing for 8K since the 1990s. They didn’t have content back then and I doubt they have much today, but that’s what they wanted HD to be.
Not familiar with NHK specifically (or, to be clear, I think I am but not with enough certainty), but it really makes a lot of sense for news networks to push for 8k or even 16k at this point.
Because it is a chicken and egg thing. Nobody is going to buy an 8k TV if all the things they watch are 1440p. But, similarly, there aren't going to be widespread 8k releases if everyone is watching on 1440p screens and so forth.
But what that ALSO means is that there is no reason to justify using 8k cameras if the best you can hope for is a premium 4k stream of a sporting event. And news outlets are fairly regularly the only source of video evidence of literally historic events.
From a much more banal perspective, it is why there is a gap in TV/film where you go from 1080p or even 4k re-releases to increasingly shady upscaling of 720 or even 480 content back to everything being natively 4k. Over simplifying, it is because we were using MUCH higher quality cameras than we really should have been for so long before switching to cheaper film and outright digital sensors because "there is no point". Obviously this ALSO is dependent on saving the high resolution originals but... yeah.
it’s not exactly “there is no point”. It’s more like “the incremental benefit of filming and broadcasting in 8k does jot justify the large cost difference”.
I’m sorry, but if we are talking about 8k viability in TVs, we are not talking about shooting in 8k for 4k delivery.
You should be pointing out that shooting in higher than 8k, so you have the freedom to crop in post, is part of the reason 8k is burdensome and expensive.
Which, for all intents and purposes, means there is no point. Because no news network is going to respond to "Hey boss, I want us to buy a bunch of really expensive cameras that our audience will never notice because it will make our tape library more valuable. Oh, not to sell, but to donate to museums." with anything other than laughter and MAYBE firing your ass.
Not only the content doesn't exist yet, it's just not practical. Even now 4k broadcasting is rare and 4k streaming is now a premium (and not always with a good bitstream, which matters a lot more) when once was offered as a cost-free future, imagine 8k that would roughly quadruple the amount of data required to transmit it (and transmit speee is not linear, 4x the speed would probably be at least 8x the cost).
And I seriously think noone except the nerdiest of nerds would notice a difference between 4k and 8k.
Not only does it not exist, it isn't wanted.
People are content watching videos on YouTube and Netflix. They don't care for 4k. Even if they pay extra for Netflix 4k (which I highly doubt they do) I still question if they are watching 4k with their bandwidth and other limiting factors, which means they're not watching 4k and are fine with it.
You can have a smart TV but never set up any of the smart features. I have two LG OLED TVs but rarely touch anything on the TV itself. I've got Nvidia Shields for streaming and turning it on or off also turns the TV on or off. Same with my Xbox.
I just need to figure out if I can use CEC with my SFF gaming PC (so that turning it on also turns the TV on, and turning it off turns the TV off), then I won't have to touch the TV's remote again.
Ethernet port or wifi are good for controlling the TV using something like Home Assistant. I have my TVs on a separate isolated VLAN with no internet access. I have a automation that runs when the TV turns on, to also turn on some LED lights behind the TV.
Some of these devices have even been known to look for other similar devices within WiFi range, and phone home that way (i.e., send analytics data via a neighbor’s connected TV as a proxy).
Ummm, wut? I'm going to need some quality sources to back this claim up.
Yea, this paragraph feels like fear mongering. I'm not saying OP didn't see that somewhere, but from a tech standpoint, the TV still has to authenticate with any device it's trying to piggy back off the wifi for. Perhaps if there were any open network in range it could theoretically happen, but I'm guessing that it's not.
I do remember reading that some smart TV was able to use the speakers as a mic to record in room audio and pass that out if connected. It may have been a theoretical thing but it might have been a zero day I read about. It's been some years now.
Actually, it's true. Amazon's sidewalk works in a similar way, where if the sensor is not connected to the internet, it will talk to local Echo devices like your speakers that are connected to the internet and pass the data to Amazon through your device's network.
TVs will look for open Wi-Fi networks. And failing that, they could very well do this exact same thing.
Edit: The way it works is that the echo devices contain a separate radio that works over the 868 to 915 megahertz industrial scientific and medical band, so the sensor communicates with your echo that way, and then your echo communicates it to the network as if it's coming from the echo itself, not another device. So the sensor gets connected to the network without your network realizing that it's actually a third-party device. To your network, the only thing it sees is the Echo, but to the Echo, it sees both your network, which it's connected to, and the sensor, so it's acting as a relay.
I forgot the Sidewalk is a thing. While that tech does kind of do what OP was saying, Sidewalk is limited to only Amazon Sidewalk compatible devices, like the echo line and ring. Just at a quick glance, there are no smart TVs that can connect to that network.
That said, it is an opt out service, which it awful. No smart TVs will connect, but I'd recommend disabling for anyone that uses Amazon devices.
I totally get where you're coming from. It's hard to find devices like that. I think the issue is that regular customers are demanding the smart features, and using them without caring about privacy aspects.
I know that sounds ridiculous, since I can “simply not use them,” but I want to spend my money on an appliance, not a consumer data collection tool.
For what it's worth you're actually spending the manufacturer's money (or at least some of their profit margin) on a data collection device that they won't get to use.
Smart devices are cheaper because the data collection subsidizes them.
They are called "Digital Signage Panels" and they cost an arm and a leg.
The data collection subsidises the cost of your TV, so that brings the cost down. Also, digital signage panels are rated for 24/7 use, which significantly increases their cost.
Some of these devices have even been known to look for other similar devices within WiFi range, and phone home that way (i.e., send analytics data via a neighbor’s connected TV as a proxy).
So people in rural areas without good internet, or places where the network is airgapped, can't use them at all? Seems like there's be a way around it.
I blacklist the TVs Ethernet and WiFi MAC addresses. I strongly encourage using a computer, Apple TV, or anything that can’t fingerprint everything you use your tv for.
I don't want 8K. I want my current 4K streaming to have less pixilation. I want my sound to be less compressed. Make them closer to Ultra BluRay disc quality before forcing 8K down our throats... unless doing that gives us better 4K overall.
Yeah 4K means jack if it’s compressed to hell, if you end up with pixels being repeated 4x to save on storage and bandwidth, you’ve effectively just recreated 1080p without upscaling.
Just like internet. I’d rather have guaranteed latency than 5Gbps.
Increasing resolution but keeping the same bitrate still improves the image quality, unless the bitrate was extremely low in the first place. Especially with modern codecs
20mbps 4k looks a lot better than 20mbps 1080p with AV1
Bingo, if I were still collecting DVDs/HD DVDs like I was in the 90's, it might be an issue. Streaming services and other online media routed through the TV can hardly buffer to keep up with play speed at 720, so what the fuck would I want with a TV that can show a higher quality of picture which it can also not display without stutter-buffering the whole of a 1:30:00 movie?
Here in Australia, they are almost gone. Disney doesn't release anymore and other studios only release the biggest of titles, smaller movies get less and less releases. Some TV shows only get DVD. Its got me importing discs for things I really want and importing a lot of stuff from the high seas
The 4k you find on streaming services can't really be compared to the 4k you find on Blu-ray. It's a different league. Turns out bitrate actually matters
I am a filmmaker and have shot in 6k+ resolution since 2018. The extra pixels are great for the filmmaking side. Pixel binning when stepping down resolutions allows for better noise, color reproduction, sharpened details, and great for re-framing/cropping. 99% of my clients want their stuff in 1080p still! I barely even feel the urge to jump up to 4k unless the quality of the project somehow justifies it. Images have gotten to a good place. Detail won’t provide much more for human enjoyment. I hope they continue to focus on dynamic range, HDR, color accuracy, motion clarity, efficiency, etc. I won’t say no when we step up to 8k as an industry but computing as a whole is not close yet.
Some Xiaomi TVs have root exploits, so you can manually disinfect the OS, but it's cumbersome to get done since you need to enter adb commands over the remote control to get there in the first place.
Easier to just use an external device and the TV as a screen only. Personally I'm using the Nvidia Shield for 5+ years now and regret nothing.
I just run mine without ever connecting it to the internet.
I run an Apple TV (shock, walled garden!), as it is the only device I've seen that consistently matches frame rates properly on the output.
I don't know if it changed, but when I started looking around to replace my set about 2 years ago, it was a nightmare of marketing "gotcha"s.
Some TVs were advertising 240fps, but only had 60fps panels with special tricks to double framerate twice or something silly. Other TVs offered 120fps, but only on one HDMI port. More TVs wouldn't work without internet. Even more had shoddy UIs that were confusing to navigate and did stuff like default to their own proprietary software showing Fox News on every boot (Samsung). I gave up when I found out that most of them had abysmal latency since they all had crappy software running that messed with color values for no reason. So I just went and bought the cheapest TV at a bargain overstock store. Days of shopping time wasted, and a customer lost.
If I were shown something that advertised with 8K at that point, I'd have laughed and said it was obviously a marketing lie like everything else I encountered.
I'll consider you lucky. I've had many experiences with their hardware across different segments (phones, tablets, laptops, mainboards, NICs, displays, GPUs).
They're an atrocious vendor with extremely poor customer support (and shitty SW practicies for UMA systems and motherboards).
I don't think many people have been as unfortunate as I have with them, the general consensus is they mark their products up considerably relative to competition (particularly mainboards & GPUs).
To be fair, their contemporaries arent much butter.
ASUS used to be the goat brand. They have since enshittified, and the biggest hit was their customer service. It's 100% ass now. The product itself is really hit or miss now too.
For what content? Video gaming (GPUs) has barely gotten to 4k. Movies? 4k streaming is a joke; better off with 1080 BD. If you care about quality go physical... UHD BD is hard to find and you have to wait and hunt to get them at reasonable prices... And these days there are only a couple UHD BD Player mfg left.
As someone who stupidly spent the last 20 or so years chasing the bleeding edge of TVs and A/V equipment, GOOD.
High end A/V is an absolute shitshow. No matter how much you spend on a TV, receiver, or projector, it will always have some stupid gotcha, terrible software, ad-laden interface, HDMI handshaking issue, HDR color problem, HFR sync problem or CEC fight. Every new standard (HDR10 vs HDR10+, Dolby Vision vs Dolby Vision 2) inherently comes with its own set of problems and issues and its own set of "time to get a new HDMI cable that looks exactly like the old one but works differently, if it works as advertised at all".
I miss the 90s when the answer was "buy big chonky square CRT, plug in with component cables, be happy".
Now you can buy a $15,000 4k VRR/HFR HDR TV, an $8,000 4k VRR/HFR/HDR receiver, and still somehow have them fight with each other all the fucking time and never work.
8K was a solution in search of a problem. Even when I was 20 and still had good eyesight, sitting 6 inches from a 90 inch TV I'm certain the difference between 4k and 8k would be barely noticeable.
I haven't seen this mentioned but apart from 8K being expensive, requiring new production pipelines, unweildley for storage and bandwidth, unneeded, and not fixing g existing problems with 4K, it requires MASSIVE screens to reap benefits.
There are several similar posts, but suffice to say, 8K content is only perceived by average eyesight at living room distances when screens are OVER 100 inches in diameter at the bare minimum. That's 7 feet wide.
Not sure where 1440p would land, but after using one for a while, I was going to upgrade my monitor to 4k but realized I'm not disappointed with my current resolution at all and instead opted for a 1440p ultrawide and haven't regretted it at all.
My TV is 4k, but I have no intention of even seriously looking at anything 8k.
Screen specs seem like a mostly solved problem. Would be great if focus could shift to efficiency improvements instead of adding more unnecessary power. Actually, boot time could be way better, too (ie get rid of the smart shit running on a weak processor, emphasis on the first part).
8K content is only perceived by average eyesight at living room distances when screens are OVER 100 inches in diameter at the bare minimum.
65-75" tv's are pretty much the standard these days. I've got a 75" and I'll want the next one I replace it with to be even bigger, so 100"-ish will be what I'll be after.
I like a big screen for gaming too, but just wanted to mention it also means you'll do worse at games. You can look it up, but a smaller screen gives you better performance, because your brain can properly see everything that's happening on screen at once.
Unless your screen is significantly far away that is.
Thats only if you’re sitting somewhere where you can’t see the whole screen at once. I can see everything that’s happening on my big tv. I’ve found I do worse on a smaller tv/monitor, moved my gaming pc from my 144hz 34” monitor to the 75” 120hz tv and my results are much better.
So many things have reached not only diminishing returns, but no returns whatsoever. I don't have a single problem that more technology will solve.
I just don't care about any of this technical shit anymore. I only have two eyes, and there's only 24 hours in a day. I already have enough entertainment in perfectly acceptable quality, with my nearly 15 year old setup.
I've hit that same wall. I'm perfectly happy with a $300 smartphone, because it does absolutely everything I need to do, fast enough to not make me want to throw it across the room, and well enough that I don't notice the difference between it and a high-end device.
Do I notice the difference after three or four years of having the device and finally upgrading it to a new device in that price range? Sure, I notice it. But day to day use, I don't notice it and that's what matters.
I don't understand most of the things I used to enjoy as a kid. I went from radio to cassette to CD to MiniDisc to MP3s. Now I'm supposed to endlessly change things around to keep up with media players and codecs and whatevers. No thanks.
I used to enjoy programming and tinkering with computers and microcontrollers.
Now I have to be an expert in 15 unrelated fields and softwares because even a simple job of turning a button press into a single output pulse is a weeks-long nightmare of IDEs and OSes and embedded Linuxes and 32 bit microcontrollers and environments, none of which are clear and straightforward, and all have subtle inter-dependencies.
So to turn on a LED with a switch now requires a multi-core 16GB main PC (so limited! You need more!) so I can open a multi-GB IDE (that can support every language ever invented) that requires an SSD just to be able to navigate the 35 windows it opens in less than an hour, so I can use AI to copy-paste hundreds of lines of boiler plate code I don't understand, so I can type a few lines of code?
And that's not counting all the new companies and architectures.
The difference between 1080 and 4K is pretty visible, but the difference between 4K and 8K, especially from across a room, is so negligible that it might as well be placebo.
Also the fact that 8K content takes up a fuckload more storage space. So, there's that, too.
Most Americans are out of money and can't find good jobs. We are clinging to our old TVs and cars and computers and etc. for dear life, as we hope for better days.
And what can you even watch in true 8K right now? Some YouTube videos?
But but but, don't you want better hardware so we can read your brain waves to automatically show you something you're in the mood to watch while we save that info and sell it to someone who wants to control your nervous system later?
If I were in the market for a new monitor and I could get an 8k monitor for under $1000 I'd consider it, but right now if one of my monitors broke I'd just be getting another 4k to replace it. The price isn't worth it for me to have high DPI.
For TV my only justification for my 4k TV is that it was free.
It creates more problems than it solves. You would need an order of magnitude more processing power to play a game on it. Personally I would prefer 4K at a higher framerate. Even 1080 if it improves response.
Video in 8K are massive. You need better codecs to handle them, and they aren't that widely supported. Storage is more expensive than it was a decade ago.
Also, there is no content. Nobody wants to store and transmit such massive amounts of data over the internet.
HDMI cables will fail sooner at higher resolutions. That 5 year old cable will begin dropping out when you try it at 8k.
A couple things - every jump like that in resolution is about a 10% increase in size at the source level. So 2K is ~250GB, 4K is ~275GB. Haven't had to deal with 8K myself, yet, but it would be at ~300GB. And then you compress all that for placea like netflix and the size goes down drastically. Add to that codec improvements over time (like x264 -> x265) and you might actually end up with an identical size compressed while carrying 4x more pixels.
HDMI is digital. It doesn't start failing because of increased bandwidth; there's nothing consumable. It either works or it doesn't.
Yeah, legitimate 8K use cases are ridiculously niche, and I mean... really only have value if you're talking about an utterly massive display, probably around 90 inches or larger, and even then in a pretty small room.
The best use cases I can think of are for games where you're already using DLSS, and can just upscale from the same source resolution to 8K rather than 4K? Maybe something like an advanced CRT filter that can better emulate a real CRT with more resolution to work with, where a pixel art game leaves you with lots of headroom for that effect? Maybe there's value in something like an emulated split screen game, to effectively give 4 players their own 4K TV in an N64 game or something?
But uh... yeah, all use cases that are far from the average consumer. Most people I talk to don't even really appreciate 1080p->4K, and 4X-ing your resolution again is a massive processing power ask in a world where you can't just... throw together multiple GPUs in SLI or something. Even if money is no object, 8K in mainline gaming will require some ugly tradeoffs for the next several years, and probably even forever if devs keep pushing visuals and targeting upscaled 4K 30/60 on the latest consoles.
4K for me as a developer means that I can have a couple of source files and a browser with the API documentation open at the same time. I reckon I could use legitimately use an 8K screen - get a terminal window or two open as well, keep an eye on builds and deployments while I'm working on a ticket.
Now yes - gaming and watching video at 8K. That's phenomenally niche, and very much a case of diminishing returns. But some of us have to work for a living as well, alas, and would like them pixels.
Good point, 4K text for programming is pretty fantastic, if you don't mind small text and use a big monitor, I could see 8K bringing some worthwhile clarity improvements to some productivity workflows. It's probably better for monitors than it is for TVs.
Even as a dev, I use a 32" QHD screen for programming. If I went 4K, I would need to use 150% scaling, and that breaks a LOT of stuff.
Everything is built for 100% scaling. Every time I've plugged my PC into a 4K display I've regretted it. It go to 30Hz (on HDMI) or glitch out or something. Even if it doesn't, it's never as smooth.
I have a 43" 4K and at that physical size display scaling at 100% is appropriate (despite windows trying to run it at 300% out of the box) and it is legitimately useful. Its effectively four 1080p screens in a grid with no bezel between.
What's the point? Even if you pay extra for "4K" streaming, it's compressed to hell and the quality is no better than 1080p. What are you going to even watch on an 8K TV?
If I was in the market for a new TV I'd probably go for an OLED assuming image burn-in is no longer an issue with them, but I'll happily use my 15 year old LED TV for as long as it lasts. I can tell the difference in contrast when side by side with LED/LCD but in normal daily use I don't pay any attention to it.
I also think that 1080 is fine for normal living room distance. In my case, though, I use a 42" 4K as a monitor, where I have the equivalent of 4 1080 monitors. No gaming, but for my use it's more practical than multiple monitors.
Fun fact; Here in Brazil, the cheaper tv models being sold are 720p, and a lot of people buy them and don't even know what video resolution is, neither they feel like missing something lol
In any developing country with low incomes but heavy social media presence and smartphone usage, most people care more about the content and how much they're actually getting entertained than bothering about quality and size.
I have 2 4K tvs, one used as a monitor. I'm now rewatching some 70's - 80's shows. When the intro starts, I'm acutely aware of the low res, but as soon as the show starts, I get into the content, and I really don't notice the resolution.
If you focus on the resolution instead of the content, maybe the content is not that engaging.
Not exactly surprising, considering the TV’s and monitors are outpacing the contemt creators and gaming development.
A lot of gamers don’t even have GPU’s that can crank out 4K at the frame rates most monitors are capable of. So 8K won’t do much for you. And movies and regular TV? Man, I’m happy there’s 4K available.
A 4K screen will be more than most folks need right now, so buying an 8K at the moment is just wasted money. Like buying a Ferrari and only ever driving 25 mph.
Also to add to this. 8k sounds 2x as large as 4k. But that isn't true. 8k is four times the pixels of 4k, so can you imagine what kind of GPU or content stream you will need to make sense...
Also I think the improvements in HDR and brightness recently are more substantial than the update to 8K. At normal viewing TV distance you’d be hard pressed to see the individual pixels, even on a 1080p screen.
Even for PCs there isn’t much reason to go about 2k screens (1440p).
I work in tech doing performance, memory management, and developer workflow tooling and automation for a large 3D Rendering/Creation tool.
Being able to throw a long setup doc, or a large class file on a 4k portrait monitor allows me to read things through with a ton of context and far less scrolling.
It's also useful for putting two window tiles that have related content, or one is a reference content.
I currently have a tie-fighter monitor setup (2x4k portrait on either side of a ultrawide) and will put comms and email/calendar on my left monitor, core work in the center, and overflow reference/research on the right.
It's less hectic for personal use, but I still use all the space.
It's just a race. Perhaps you don't need the biggest and newest available thing, but you also will subconsciously discard what's "less" than what you already have or what's normal as obsolete. This creates an engine for a race, where good faith players can't compete.
Like with web browsers, a hypertext networked system even with advanced formatting, executable content and sandboxing can be so simple, that there'd be hundreds of independent implementations. But if you always race the de-facto standards with the speed you the monopolist group can maintain, and good faith competitors can't, then you'll always be the "best".
The Matrix movie actually talks about that, with its "there's no spoon" moment. It's not a usual market game, it's a meta-market game. And most people don't understand the rules of the meta layer, being sitting ducks there.
Nobody can compete with the industry leaders on their field. And unlike with steel or gasoline or even embedded electronics production, there's no relativity in the field at all. But the new possible fields are endless. Everyone can discover new pastures here, because it's not discovery, it's conception. But since that's counterintuitive, and the network effects work on psychology too, most people are not trying.
It's a bit like military logic, there were Western "controlled escalation" doctrines, because slow gradual escalation works in favor of the side with most resources, thus the West, and the Soviet "scientific-technical revolution" doctrines, which despite sounding stupid is a correct name, when you're the second in the race, your best chance lies in being unpredictable, unreasonable and changing the rules. One of the reasons Soviet doctrines gained such a crappy reputation as compared to Western ones is that, well, they are kinda similar to preventively going all out guns-a-blazing before you are forced to fight by the enemy's rules, which requires willpower from those making the decisions (and also capability to, well, do anything scientific and technical, LOL), and which means you prepare for some sort of general battle (that be nuclear war, or short highly concentrated offensives, such stuff) at the expense of "aggressive negotiations" scenarios. So - in our time anyone trying to heal the Silicon Valley's effects is playing USSR and can only expect anything good from breaking rules.
The consumer has spoken and they don't care, not even for 4K. Same as happened with 3D and curved TVs, 8K is a solution looking for a problem so that more TVs get sold.
In terms of physical media - at stores in Australia the 4K section for Blurays takes up a single rack of shelves. Standard Blurays and DVDs take up about 20.
Even DVDs still sell well because many consumers don't see a big difference in quality, and certainly not enough to justify the added cost of Bluray, let alone 4K editions. A current example, Superman is $20 on DVD, $30 on Bluray (50% cost increase) or $40 on 4K (100%) cost increase. Streaming services have similar pricing curves for increased fidelity.
It sucks for fans of high res, but it's the reality of the market. 4K will be more popular in the future if and when it becomes cheaper, and until then nobody (figuratively) will give a hoot about 8K.
There was a while that I exclusively used apps where I could lower the bitrate of music I listened to. Because I'm not rocking crazy good headsets and such for when I needed it, and I really saw no reason to use up larger amounts of data when I was listening to music over the sound of a lawnmower walking around the yard for an hour. If I was going to leave music on and not have wifi, it just didn't seem worth it.
Also if you had poor bandwidth in an area, it plays better
Yup - not a solution for everyone but there are typically Quality Of Service (QOS) services on routers that will do something similar - where it will target a certain threshold.
Another possibility for why consumers don't seem to care about 8k is the common practice by content owners and streaming services charging more for access to 4k over 1080p.
Normalizing that practice invites the consumer to more closely scrutinize the probable cost of something better than 4k compared to the probable return.
I would be fine with an 8k TV if there was 8k content and they were affordable. I haven’t purchased a TV in over a decade however and my TVs all work fine so I’m not even in the market
I'm happy with 1080p content. I have a 4k TV and from the couch I can't see a difference. I would be perfectly happy with a bargain 4k TV, bigger the better.
My TV is also 4K but my amplifier which eats all the inputs can only do 1080p. 4k quality on that 65" is better, but not by that much that I'd throw 500+€ for a new amp since the current one works just fine and it fulfils all my needs on a TV/media set.
Man, I would. I am 100% the target demographic, jumped in the 3D TV rabbit hole and loved it. Totally knew it was a gimmick, but didn't care. Would have friends over for 3D movie parties.
But adding them to my Plex server sucked. TAB or SBS files were half-assed and the PlayStation I used took sooooooo damn long to freaking start the movie and skipping was an issue.
Yeah, very much looking forward to headsets with 8k panels. Most are up to 4k now, and it's getting pretty good. If it stays at 4k for a bit, that would be fine. But it's definitely an area where 8k will still be a very noticeable upgrade.
Even if the only short-term practical use for an 8k panel is how far away a 4k or 1080p screen would be clear to read in an augmented reality situation, that would be reason enough. But I personally will gladly lower quality settings to run VR games in 8k instead of 4k as well.
I like how the article immediately tries placing the blame on the consumer. When in reality it’s the companies putting the cart before the horse and then being shocked when it doesn’t work out.
Hopefully, just all 4K panels get replaced with 8K panels and it doesn't cost anything extra and in like 5 years when the rest of the technology catches up and especially video bitrates are increased then the transition can happen seamlessly but we're not going to pay for it's, it's just going to have to be a free upgrade. This is really the last doubling we need for the human vision system and it is already pretty far into the diminishing returns aspects. Since we are going to need 8K for VR that doesn't suck, might as well make that the standard for the next century and we won't ever have to bother with 16K panels
8K content is too storage hungry. My pirate ship is already bursting at the seams with some 4K but mostly 1080. I have 130TB of media, if it was in 8K I would need a water cooled server farm.
That's the REAL reason for lack of 8K interest, the pirates are not demanding it. Not until 100TB drives are available for a reasonable price.
Wait what? Are you implying that if there was demand for 8k content, then pirates would make it available? The content has to exist in order for pirates to release it.
I can download a remux of the 4K Lawrence of Arabia transfer because it was filmed in 70mm and the studio transferred it at 4K.
It’s 70mm film, so it’s ~8-12K equivalent, but to actually get that resolution they would have to scan that film at that resolution, then go through the whole video workflow, color correction, whatever tf idk I’m not a video engineer, at that resolution, and render out the final version at that resolution.
Pirates aren’t doing that, they’re ripping physical or digital releases. And there’s no point in downloading an 8K upscale of a 4K release, just let your TV or your Shield or Infuse handle the upscaling.
I am saying that the ability to store the content is needed before people will be able to make the demand for it. So take streaming platforms for instance. They won't want to build more server farms and instead just upgrade what they have. So once 100TB drives are readily available they will start upgrading and then influence the media companies to start scanning at 8k. The people scanning the damn movies will need to store it too. You know whoever is the first to start offering the content be it Netflix or Disney will start a chain reaction and then 8k will take off but I'm sure it will be a slower build up compared to 4k.
Ah ok I see what you were saying. Honestly I think we’ll see physical media first, like multilayer Blu-ray Discs or something, that drive the initial adoption, just like with 4K. One people get a taste of it, demand will force streamers to offer it at a premium tier, until it eventually just becomes normalized.
But yeah I think it’s gonna be way slower than the buildup to 4K also.
The real reason for lack of interest is streaming quality of 4k has been getting worse for years, and is still like 1/10th the quality of 4k BluRay, with enormous levels of compression and artifacts.
8k requires 4x the data. We all know that means every subscription would charge at least 2x more to maintain profit margins of unlimited growth for vulture capitalism, and they'd skimp on the extra data too; leaving users with nothing better than the current 4k.
That's true, and to add to that, most mobile phone and many land Internet based connections are not unlimited and have caps. Nobody wants to stream a few 8k movies and use up their entire monthly cap in one shot.
-speaking as a US user, many countries offer unlimited as standard but not the evil empire.
If your phone is 1080p you won't be being served 8K video on any streaming service. 8K phone screens aren't coming any time soon, as even 4K is overkill and rarely done - and even then, netflix etc still don't stream 4K to them.
Yeah, storage/bandwidth is the overall limiting factor regardless for 8k. Also, most peoples xp with 4k is streaming, so there would likely be 100x more of a market for increasing bitrate from the current "compressed as all fuck" up to 4k Bluray bitrate, before anyone cares about 8k... but of course, that isn't something that TV manufacturers can control or use to sell more products.
I hate the wording of the headline, because it makes it sound like the consumers' fault that the industry isn't delivering on something they promised. It's like marketing a fusion-powered sex robot that's missing the power core, and turning around and saying "nobody wants fusion-powered sex robots".
Side note, I'd like for people to stop insisting that 60fps looks "cheap", so that we can start getting good 60fps content. Heck, at this stage I'd be willing to compromise at 48fps if it gets more directors on board. We've got the camera sensor technology in 2025 for this to work in the same lighting that we used to need for 24fps, so that excuse has flown.
I think 8k has a use, just not in consumer televisions for things like Netflix or gaming. 8k's real use is most likely in the medical field where high high high high detail is extremely important.
Bro I honest to God can't see the difference between 1080 and 4k, you could put them both next to me and I'd struggle to point out which is which. We don't need 8k. Enough is enough
That and the motion smoothing that looks really good on the display videos in the shop where it's always splashing paint, or dripping honey, or tracking shots of trees, but it makes movies and TV shows look terrible, like the behind the scenes footage before they put all the effects in.
Not really, there isn't much of a point in viewing your images at native resolution while editing. In fact in lightroom when you're viewing the entire image you're always looking at downscaled version anyway for performance reasons and need to punch in to see actual pixel level detail.
It's been observed that the porn industry is often one of the first adapters of new media tech before they become commonplace, but I'm not sure some things need to be shown in that high a resolution.
It's not even really true; it's a salacious fact that was passed around and everyone agreed. For example, there's no real evidence that VHS won over Betamax because of porn. Everyone accepted that fact uncritically.
I still use a ten year old 1080p Sony TV, and I’ve yet to see a new <$1k TV with a nicer picture than what I have. Granted I don’t really consume any higher resolution content anyway 🤷♂️
How about uncompressed 4k before going to even more compression 8k. I have seen uncompressed 8k content on an 8k TV. I couldn't tell the difference between it and a good quality 4k picture, and I'm admittedly a quality snob. I can tell the difference in 1080 vs 4k pretty easily even on cheap tvs, it's just virtually non existent at 8k vs 4k in tv sizes up to 80 inch beyond viewing inches away from the screen.
Maybe that's the point I meant to make clearer. 8k, even compressed would take more bandwidth, or it's going to be compressed so much that it totally defeats the purpose of 8k content.
No, I wanted to make a different point: that uncompressed video would be unreasonably huge. Nobody uses it. Regardless of the resolution, a good compressed video looks basically the same but it is hundreds of times smaller.
You should ask for less compressed video. Uncompressed is just not worth it.
Even 4K the content is not yet easily available . I mean except from AppleTV plus that all content is 4K and it’s part of basic subscription, every other streaming charges much more for 4K content, most people don’t want to pay more every month for 4K
So 8K is just a distant reality that content makers are not really wanting to happen
I’d buy one if it came with every David Attenborough (or similar) nature documentary included. I don’t need 8k for games or movies or anything else but I’ll watch the shit out of whatever high budget nature documentaries are produced and put my nose against the screen to see the critter details.
Yet. The capitalist factories have to spin, they will find a reason/way to "encourage" another standard change, only it might take a few years. Lucas will re-release the original trilogy in a new cut he always envisioned, you'll be able to observe blackheads on your fav politicians nose, but it will happen, as it always did in the media buisnesses. Maybe it won't be screens, but laser projectors (id rather expect that), but 8k and then whatever-faptylion-k will come in into standard eventually because capitalism demands constant expansion.
I'll take one! Well, two really. One large one for TV/media viewing and one to replace my 43" 4k monitor. Quadrupling the resolution on that would be amazing.
The difference would be minimal on the media screen, TBH, but Ive seen them in person and can tell the difference. It's just not a big enough difference to warrant replacing what I have.
I use a VR headset as my PC display and i can choose whatever size or resolution and i've been using it in 8K for about a year for work to have many smaller windows that all look pretty clear. My bottleneck is probably the quest pro resolution so i'm looking forward to better headsets soon.
I chased high resolution for a while then realized my eyes are not so good. Now I just save money by using low-res displays. The same thing with my ears saved me from a creeping case of audiophilia.
Speaking as a developer; I've a 4K screen which is amazing for having loads of source files open at the same time, and also works for old or undemanding games. Glorious Eggroll's version of Proton has all the FSR patches in it, so you can 'upscale anything'. Almost any modern game, I'm going to be running at lower resolution, usually either 1440p or the slightly odd 2954 x 1662. Generally, highest-quality graphics and upscaling looks better than medium-quality native to me, for games where I have to compromise.
I would be interested in an 8K display for coding, as long as the price is reasonable. I'm not spending five grand, that would be crazy. But I'd still be upscaling for playing games, as basically no GPU could drive that many pixels.
I have a 3080 and have all frame gen tech turned off, and still, almost every game I play can hit 60+ fps and 2k resolution, a lot can do 144. I get your point, but it's greatly exaggerated.
I would love to have an 8K TV or monitor if I had an internet connection up to the task and enough content in 8K to make it worth it, or If I had a PC powerful enough to run games smoothly in that resolution.
I think it's silly to say 'nobody wants this' when the infrastructure for it isn't even close to adequate.
I will admit that there is diminishing returns now, going from 4K to 8K was less impressive than FHD to 4K and I imagine that 8K will probably be where it stops, at least for anything that can reasonably fit in a house.
I hear anything at or above 8k resolution negates the need for anti aliasing entirely... But I feel that my pc would would be running at or around 10-15 fps for most games I would care about anti aliasing on.
Nice in theory, definitely can't handle that many pixels in reality.
Half the games I play are 2D, the other half are not overly demanding either. Wonder what you would need to run deep rock galactic at 8k 144hz? Probably one of the more demanding games I have played lately. But if I was to spend money on better equipment for that game it would be sound equipment.
Uncompressed 1080 is already approaching the eyes resolution limit, when viewing it in a living room environment. 4K is close to the monitor usage limit.
The reason that 4K seems better is often down to bandwidth and colour depth.
There's zero benefit to an 8K TV. An 8K monitor might be useful, but is still well into the diminishing returns curve.
There's still some ground to be made up with colours and frame rates, but resolution is effectively maxed out already.
Also have you seen 720HD with 10 bit color? Looks better than 1080p when it was released. Seen 1080p 14 bit color? Looks better than 4k when it came out.
One thing, my current 4k TV/monitor does a pretty nice job upscaling 1080p. It, of course, doesn't look as good as native 4k, but it looks considerably better than 1080p not upscaled. So even without native 8k content, there is some value in being able to upscale 4k content to 8k.
article took forever to get to the bottom line. content. 8k content essentially does not exist. TV manufacturers were putting the cart before the horse.
4k tvs existed before the content existed. I think the larger issue is that the difference between what is and what could be is not worth the additional expense, especially at a time when most people struggle to pay rent, food, and medicine. More people watch videos on their phones than watch broadcast television. 8k is a solution looking for a problem.
Hell I still don't own a 4k tv and don't plan to go out of my way to buy one unless the need arises. Which I don't see why I need that when a normal flat-screen looks fine to me.
I actually have some tube tvs and be thinking of just hooking my vcr back up and watching old tapes. I don't need fancy resolutions in my shows or movies.
Only time I even think of those things is with video games.
4K hardly even makes sense unless your tv is over 70" and your watching it from less than 4 feet away. I do think VR could benefit from ultra-high resolution, though.
https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-relationship
Extensive write up on this whole issue, even includes a calculator tool.
But, basically:
Yeah, going by angular resolution, even leaving the 8K content drought aside....
8K might make sense for a computer monitor you sit about 2 feet / 0.6m away from, if the diagonal size is 35 inches / ~89cm, or greater.
Take your viewing distance up to 8 feet / 2.4m away?
Your screen diagonal now has to be about 125 inches / ~318cm, or larger, for you to be able to maybe notice a difference with a jump from 4K to 8K.
........
The largest 8K TV that I can see available for purchase anywhere near myself... that costs ~$5,000 USD... is 85 inches.
I see a single one of 98 inches that is listed for $35,000. That's the largest one I can see, but its... uh, wildly more expensive.
So with a $5,000, 85 inch TV, that works out to...
You would have to be sitting closer than about 5 feet / ~1.5 meters to notice a difference.
And that's assuming you have 20/20 vision.
........
So yeah, VR goggle displays... seem to me to be the only really possibly practical use case for 8K ... other than basically being the kind of person who owns a home with a dedicated theater room.
What this chart is missing is the impact of the quality of the screen and the source material being played on it.
A shit screen is a shit screen, just like a badly filmed TV show from the 80s will look like crap on anything other than an old CRT.
People buying a 4k screen from Wallmart for $200 then wondering why they cant tell its any better than their old 1080p screen.
The problem with pushing up resolution is the cost to get a good set right now is so much its a niche within a niche of people who actually want it. Even a good 4k set with proper HDR support and big enough to make a different is expensive. Even when 8k moves away from early adopter markups its still going to be expensive, especially when compared to the tat you can by at the supermarket.
It is totally true that things are even more complex than just resolution, but that is why I linked the much more exhaustive write up.
Its even more complicated in practice than all the things they bring up, they are focusing on mainly a movie watching experience, not a video game playing experience.
They do not go into LED vs QLED vs OLED vs other actual display techs, don't go into response latency times, refresh rates, as you say all the different kinds of HDR color gamut support... I am sure I am forgetting things...
Power consumption may be a significant thing for you, image quality at various viewing angles...
Oh right, FreeSync vs GSync, VRR... blargh there are so many fucking things that can be different about displays...
At 1.6 meter for the metric minded. If you really stretch out and can hit the tv with your toes it's about the right distance.
You’re describing my bedroom tv.
you're*
It's not hard, get it right.
Nobody likes a grammar-nazi. Due better mein fuhrer.
gidoombiigiz*
I think it’s NHK, or one of the Japanese broadcasters anyways, that has actually been pressing for 8K since the 1990s. They didn’t have content back then and I doubt they have much today, but that’s what they wanted HD to be.
Not familiar with NHK specifically (or, to be clear, I think I am but not with enough certainty), but it really makes a lot of sense for news networks to push for 8k or even 16k at this point.
Because it is a chicken and egg thing. Nobody is going to buy an 8k TV if all the things they watch are 1440p. But, similarly, there aren't going to be widespread 8k releases if everyone is watching on 1440p screens and so forth.
But what that ALSO means is that there is no reason to justify using 8k cameras if the best you can hope for is a premium 4k stream of a sporting event. And news outlets are fairly regularly the only source of video evidence of literally historic events.
From a much more banal perspective, it is why there is a gap in TV/film where you go from 1080p or even 4k re-releases to increasingly shady upscaling of 720 or even 480 content back to everything being natively 4k. Over simplifying, it is because we were using MUCH higher quality cameras than we really should have been for so long before switching to cheaper film and outright digital sensors because "there is no point". Obviously this ALSO is dependent on saving the high resolution originals but... yeah.
it’s not exactly “there is no point”. It’s more like “the incremental benefit of filming and broadcasting in 8k does jot justify the large cost difference”.
Filming in 8k does have advantages. You can crop without losing quality.
I’m sorry, but if we are talking about 8k viability in TVs, we are not talking about shooting in 8k for 4k delivery.
You should be pointing out that shooting in higher than 8k, so you have the freedom to crop in post, is part of the reason 8k is burdensome and expensive.
So correct the person above me, they wrote about shooting in 8k.
The RED V-Raptor is expensive for consumer grade but nothing compared to some film equipment. There are lenses more expensive than an 8k camera.
Which, for all intents and purposes, means there is no point. Because no news network is going to respond to "Hey boss, I want us to buy a bunch of really expensive cameras that our audience will never notice because it will make our tape library more valuable. Oh, not to sell, but to donate to museums." with anything other than laughter and MAYBE firing your ass.
the point is, the cost/benefit calculation will change over time as the price of everything goes down. It's not a forever "no point".
... Almost like it would be more viable to film in higher resolution if more consumers had higher resolution displays?
Not only the content doesn't exist yet, it's just not practical. Even now 4k broadcasting is rare and 4k streaming is now a premium (and not always with a good bitstream, which matters a lot more) when once was offered as a cost-free future, imagine 8k that would roughly quadruple the amount of data required to transmit it (and transmit speee is not linear, 4x the speed would probably be at least 8x the cost).
And I seriously think noone except the nerdiest of nerds would notice a difference between 4k and 8k.
That's usually the case
Not only does it not exist, it isn't wanted. People are content watching videos on YouTube and Netflix. They don't care for 4k. Even if they pay extra for Netflix 4k (which I highly doubt they do) I still question if they are watching 4k with their bandwidth and other limiting factors, which means they're not watching 4k and are fine with it.
TV manufacturers are idiots.
The settings app on my smart TV sometimes won't launch. I can't fucking believe it. It's a $1000 TV.
My $2500 TV doesn't have a power button if it makes you feel better.
This $8k tv has no bezel and no cables /s
tv absolutely peaked at this (serious)
You can have a smart TV but never set up any of the smart features. I have two LG OLED TVs but rarely touch anything on the TV itself. I've got Nvidia Shields for streaming and turning it on or off also turns the TV on or off. Same with my Xbox.
I just need to figure out if I can use CEC with my SFF gaming PC (so that turning it on also turns the TV on, and turning it off turns the TV off), then I won't have to touch the TV's remote again.
Ethernet port or wifi are good for controlling the TV using something like Home Assistant. I have my TVs on a separate isolated VLAN with no internet access. I have a automation that runs when the TV turns on, to also turn on some LED lights behind the TV.
Ummm, wut? I'm going to need some quality sources to back this claim up.
Yea, this paragraph feels like fear mongering. I'm not saying OP didn't see that somewhere, but from a tech standpoint, the TV still has to authenticate with any device it's trying to piggy back off the wifi for. Perhaps if there were any open network in range it could theoretically happen, but I'm guessing that it's not.
I do remember reading that some smart TV was able to use the speakers as a mic to record in room audio and pass that out if connected. It may have been a theoretical thing but it might have been a zero day I read about. It's been some years now.
Actually, it's true. Amazon's sidewalk works in a similar way, where if the sensor is not connected to the internet, it will talk to local Echo devices like your speakers that are connected to the internet and pass the data to Amazon through your device's network.
TVs will look for open Wi-Fi networks. And failing that, they could very well do this exact same thing.
Edit: The way it works is that the echo devices contain a separate radio that works over the 868 to 915 megahertz industrial scientific and medical band, so the sensor communicates with your echo that way, and then your echo communicates it to the network as if it's coming from the echo itself, not another device. So the sensor gets connected to the network without your network realizing that it's actually a third-party device. To your network, the only thing it sees is the Echo, but to the Echo, it sees both your network, which it's connected to, and the sensor, so it's acting as a relay.
I forgot the Sidewalk is a thing. While that tech does kind of do what OP was saying, Sidewalk is limited to only Amazon Sidewalk compatible devices, like the echo line and ring. Just at a quick glance, there are no smart TVs that can connect to that network.
That said, it is an opt out service, which it awful. No smart TVs will connect, but I'd recommend disabling for anyone that uses Amazon devices.
Yeah, I was just using Sidewalk as an example of something a smart TV could use something like that.
I totally get where you're coming from. It's hard to find devices like that. I think the issue is that regular customers are demanding the smart features, and using them without caring about privacy aspects.
For what it's worth you're actually spending the manufacturer's money (or at least some of their profit margin) on a data collection device that they won't get to use.
Smart devices are cheaper because the data collection subsidizes them.
They are called "Digital Signage Panels" and they cost an arm and a leg.
The data collection subsidises the cost of your TV, so that brings the cost down. Also, digital signage panels are rated for 24/7 use, which significantly increases their cost.
Honestly? Get a large monitor and a sound bar.
Your tv price is subsidized by the presence of those network connections. I recommend using universal remote.
Sometimes that doesn’t even matter anymore; they’ll refuse to work now without a network set up.
If it wants a network then stick it on an isolated VLAN with no internet access.
That's not what that means and you know it. It refuses to work unless it can successfully phone home over the Internet.
So people in rural areas without good internet, or places where the network is airgapped, can't use them at all? Seems like there's be a way around it.
I blacklist the TVs Ethernet and WiFi MAC addresses. I strongly encourage using a computer, Apple TV, or anything that can’t fingerprint everything you use your tv for.
This. I’ll happily buy an 8k TV only if it’s a dumb TV/monitor.
No, I want only one DP port and to have a separate box that selects sources. That way I have the ports I want
I don't want 8K. I want my current 4K streaming to have less pixilation. I want my sound to be less compressed. Make them closer to Ultra BluRay disc quality before forcing 8K down our throats... unless doing that gives us better 4K overall.
Yeah 4K means jack if it’s compressed to hell, if you end up with pixels being repeated 4x to save on storage and bandwidth, you’ve effectively just recreated 1080p without upscaling.
Just like internet. I’d rather have guaranteed latency than 5Gbps.
Yep, just imagine how bad the compression artefacts will be if they double the resolution but keep storage/network costs the same.
Doubling the dimensions make it 4x the data.
That's not true for compressed video. It doubles the bitrate for the same quality on modern codecs (265, av1, etc.)
Increasing resolution but keeping the same bitrate still improves the image quality, unless the bitrate was extremely low in the first place. Especially with modern codecs
20mbps 4k looks a lot better than 20mbps 1080p with AV1
Bingo, if I were still collecting DVDs/HD DVDs like I was in the 90's, it might be an issue. Streaming services and other online media routed through the TV can hardly buffer to keep up with play speed at 720, so what the fuck would I want with a TV that can show a higher quality of picture which it can also not display without stutter-buffering the whole of a 1:30:00 movie?
This is a problem with your internet/network, not the TV.
I would much rather have 1080p content at a high enough bitrate that compression artifacts are not noticeable.
Well then I've got great news for you!
Yeah, as long as they don't discontinue them.
Here in Australia, they are almost gone. Disney doesn't release anymore and other studios only release the biggest of titles, smaller movies get less and less releases. Some TV shows only get DVD. Its got me importing discs for things I really want and importing a lot of stuff from the high seas
It's not just Australia, it's worldwide. People don't care about physical media anymore because the benefits of digital far outweigh the drawbacks.
Even if they discontinue Bluray, 4k content isn't going anywhere or 4k TVs do too.
The 4k you find on streaming services can't really be compared to the 4k you find on Blu-ray. It's a different league. Turns out bitrate actually matters
I am a filmmaker and have shot in 6k+ resolution since 2018. The extra pixels are great for the filmmaking side. Pixel binning when stepping down resolutions allows for better noise, color reproduction, sharpened details, and great for re-framing/cropping. 99% of my clients want their stuff in 1080p still! I barely even feel the urge to jump up to 4k unless the quality of the project somehow justifies it. Images have gotten to a good place. Detail won’t provide much more for human enjoyment. I hope they continue to focus on dynamic range, HDR, color accuracy, motion clarity, efficiency, etc. I won’t say no when we step up to 8k as an industry but computing as a whole is not close yet.
I do want a dumb 8K TV. I do not want all the so called smart features of a TV. Small Linux device with kodi works way better.
Some Xiaomi TVs have root exploits, so you can manually disinfect the OS, but it's cumbersome to get done since you need to enter adb commands over the remote control to get there in the first place.
Easier to just use an external device and the TV as a screen only. Personally I'm using the Nvidia Shield for 5+ years now and regret nothing.
Not ideal, but you can air gap the TV from the network, and use some small sbc, or even a firestick or android box. That's what I do. Stremio?
As far as my TV is concerned I don't have an internet connection.
I do want a TV that can access Netflix etc without another box. I just don't want the surveillance that comes with it.
I personally hate Kodi UI. But I get your point
uh....there are hundreds of Kodi UIs.
I just run mine without ever connecting it to the internet.
I run an Apple TV (shock, walled garden!), as it is the only device I've seen that consistently matches frame rates properly on the output.
I don't know if it changed, but when I started looking around to replace my set about 2 years ago, it was a nightmare of marketing "gotcha"s.
Some TVs were advertising 240fps, but only had 60fps panels with special tricks to double framerate twice or something silly. Other TVs offered 120fps, but only on one HDMI port. More TVs wouldn't work without internet. Even more had shoddy UIs that were confusing to navigate and did stuff like default to their own proprietary software showing Fox News on every boot (Samsung). I gave up when I found out that most of them had abysmal latency since they all had crappy software running that messed with color values for no reason. So I just went and bought the cheapest TV at a bargain overstock store. Days of shopping time wasted, and a customer lost.
If I were shown something that advertised with 8K at that point, I'd have laughed and said it was obviously a marketing lie like everything else I encountered.
Asus makes their version of a 4k OLED LG panel with no shitty 'smart' software.
in that situation, Asus are the shitty part, though it is nice to see more TV-sized monitors. Fuck HDMI.
Did I miss something with Asus recently? I've only had good experiences with their hardware.
I'll consider you lucky. I've had many experiences with their hardware across different segments (phones, tablets, laptops, mainboards, NICs, displays, GPUs).
They're an atrocious vendor with extremely poor customer support (and shitty SW practicies for UMA systems and motherboards).
I don't think many people have been as unfortunate as I have with them, the general consensus is they mark their products up considerably relative to competition (particularly mainboards & GPUs).
To be fair, their contemporaries arent much butter.
Dang.
I switched to ASRock for my AMD build for specific feature sets and reading ASUS AM5 stuff it looks like that was a good idea.
But ASRock 800 series AM5 boards are killing granite ridge 3D CPUs en masse. Funny enough, it happened to me.
I begrudgingly switched to Asus after my CPU was RMA'd as that was the only other vendor to offer ECC compat on a consumer platform.
How about 7800X3D?
ASUS used to be the goat brand. They have since enshittified, and the biggest hit was their customer service. It's 100% ass now. The product itself is really hit or miss now too.
For what content? Video gaming (GPUs) has barely gotten to 4k. Movies? 4k streaming is a joke; better off with 1080 BD. If you care about quality go physical... UHD BD is hard to find and you have to wait and hunt to get them at reasonable prices... And these days there are only a couple UHD BD Player mfg left.
As someone who stupidly spent the last 20 or so years chasing the bleeding edge of TVs and A/V equipment, GOOD.
High end A/V is an absolute shitshow. No matter how much you spend on a TV, receiver, or projector, it will always have some stupid gotcha, terrible software, ad-laden interface, HDMI handshaking issue, HDR color problem, HFR sync problem or CEC fight. Every new standard (HDR10 vs HDR10+, Dolby Vision vs Dolby Vision 2) inherently comes with its own set of problems and issues and its own set of "time to get a new HDMI cable that looks exactly like the old one but works differently, if it works as advertised at all".
I miss the 90s when the answer was "buy big chonky square CRT, plug in with component cables, be happy".
Now you can buy a $15,000 4k VRR/HFR HDR TV, an $8,000 4k VRR/HFR/HDR receiver, and still somehow have them fight with each other all the fucking time and never work.
8K was a solution in search of a problem. Even when I was 20 and still had good eyesight, sitting 6 inches from a 90 inch TV I'm certain the difference between 4k and 8k would be barely noticeable.
I haven't seen this mentioned but apart from 8K being expensive, requiring new production pipelines, unweildley for storage and bandwidth, unneeded, and not fixing g existing problems with 4K, it requires MASSIVE screens to reap benefits.
There are several similar posts, but suffice to say, 8K content is only perceived by average eyesight at living room distances when screens are OVER 100 inches in diameter at the bare minimum. That's 7 feet wide.
Source: https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-relationship
Tell me Legolas, what do your elven eyes see?
Fucking pixels Aragorn, it makes me want to puke. And what the fuck is up with these compression artifacts? What tier of Netflix do you have?
Sorry Legolas, could we just enjoy the movie?
Maybe if the dwarf stops stinking up the place. And don't think I didn't see him take that last chicken wing, fucking dwarves.
Not sure where 1440p would land, but after using one for a while, I was going to upgrade my monitor to 4k but realized I'm not disappointed with my current resolution at all and instead opted for a 1440p ultrawide and haven't regretted it at all.
My TV is 4k, but I have no intention of even seriously looking at anything 8k.
Screen specs seem like a mostly solved problem. Would be great if focus could shift to efficiency improvements instead of adding more unnecessary power. Actually, boot time could be way better, too (ie get rid of the smart shit running on a weak processor, emphasis on the first part).
so if you're in the movie theatre sit as close to the screen as possible
8K would only work well in a movie theater type setting I guess.
4k 25" was worth it for me but I only spent about £140 on it so YMMV it's nice but not essential and after 1080p the extra pixels only add so much
65-75" tv's are pretty much the standard these days. I've got a 75" and I'll want the next one I replace it with to be even bigger, so 100"-ish will be what I'll be after.
My 36" TV is fine, you monster.
I’m sure it’s fine, but I much prefer my 75”. 36” would be way too small in my game room.
I like a big screen for gaming too, but just wanted to mention it also means you'll do worse at games. You can look it up, but a smaller screen gives you better performance, because your brain can properly see everything that's happening on screen at once.
Unless your screen is significantly far away that is.
Thats only if you’re sitting somewhere where you can’t see the whole screen at once. I can see everything that’s happening on my big tv. I’ve found I do worse on a smaller tv/monitor, moved my gaming pc from my 144hz 34” monitor to the 75” 120hz tv and my results are much better.
Yeah but do you also watch tv from about 1.8 meters away? Look at that chart again.
Yeh, pretty much. Those charts aren’t “fact” btw. They’re guides.
Well if you're watching it that close, sounds like what you want is total immersion. Have you considered an Apple headset? Or something similar
I’ve got a quest 2, but no I don’t want to wear a headset.
2m is a long way away from a tv.
So many things have reached not only diminishing returns, but no returns whatsoever. I don't have a single problem that more technology will solve.
I just don't care about any of this technical shit anymore. I only have two eyes, and there's only 24 hours in a day. I already have enough entertainment in perfectly acceptable quality, with my nearly 15 year old setup.
I've tapped out from the tech scene.
I've hit that same wall. I'm perfectly happy with a $300 smartphone, because it does absolutely everything I need to do, fast enough to not make me want to throw it across the room, and well enough that I don't notice the difference between it and a high-end device.
Do I notice the difference after three or four years of having the device and finally upgrading it to a new device in that price range? Sure, I notice it. But day to day use, I don't notice it and that's what matters.
I don't understand most of the things I used to enjoy as a kid. I went from radio to cassette to CD to MiniDisc to MP3s. Now I'm supposed to endlessly change things around to keep up with media players and codecs and whatevers. No thanks.
I used to enjoy programming and tinkering with computers and microcontrollers.
Now I have to be an expert in 15 unrelated fields and softwares because even a simple job of turning a button press into a single output pulse is a weeks-long nightmare of IDEs and OSes and embedded Linuxes and 32 bit microcontrollers and environments, none of which are clear and straightforward, and all have subtle inter-dependencies.
So to turn on a LED with a switch now requires a multi-core 16GB main PC (so limited! You need more!) so I can open a multi-GB IDE (that can support every language ever invented) that requires an SSD just to be able to navigate the 35 windows it opens in less than an hour, so I can use AI to copy-paste hundreds of lines of boiler plate code I don't understand, so I can type a few lines of code?
And that's not counting all the new companies and architectures.
The difference between 1080 and 4K is pretty visible, but the difference between 4K and 8K, especially from across a room, is so negligible that it might as well be placebo.
Also the fact that 8K content takes up a fuckload more storage space. So, there's that, too.
I watch torrented shows with VLC on my laptop. Why would I want a giant smarphone that spies on me?
Most Americans are out of money and can't find good jobs. We are clinging to our old TVs and cars and computers and etc. for dear life, as we hope for better days.
And what can you even watch in true 8K right now? Some YouTube videos?
But but but, don't you want better hardware so we can read your brain waves to automatically show you something you're in the mood to watch while we save that info and sell it to someone who wants to control your nervous system later?
Calm down there Edward Nigma.
If I were in the market for a new monitor and I could get an 8k monitor for under $1000 I'd consider it, but right now if one of my monitors broke I'd just be getting another 4k to replace it. The price isn't worth it for me to have high DPI.
For TV my only justification for my 4k TV is that it was free.
I'm so content with 1080p
Will it make the 480x720 videos I watch on my 4K tv look twice as good?
Four times worse, actually!
if id aint 8k worse i wont buy id
Will you buy superego, though?
how many superhorses does it have
It creates more problems than it solves. You would need an order of magnitude more processing power to play a game on it. Personally I would prefer 4K at a higher framerate. Even 1080 if it improves response.
Video in 8K are massive. You need better codecs to handle them, and they aren't that widely supported. Storage is more expensive than it was a decade ago.
Also, there is no content. Nobody wants to store and transmit such massive amounts of data over the internet.
HDMI cables will fail sooner at higher resolutions. That 5 year old cable will begin dropping out when you try it at 8k.
4K is barely worth the tradeoffs.
A couple things - every jump like that in resolution is about a 10% increase in size at the source level. So 2K is ~250GB, 4K is ~275GB. Haven't had to deal with 8K myself, yet, but it would be at ~300GB. And then you compress all that for placea like netflix and the size goes down drastically. Add to that codec improvements over time (like x264 -> x265) and you might actually end up with an identical size compressed while carrying 4x more pixels.
HDMI is digital. It doesn't start failing because of increased bandwidth; there's nothing consumable. It either works or it doesn't.
Yeah, legitimate 8K use cases are ridiculously niche, and I mean... really only have value if you're talking about an utterly massive display, probably around 90 inches or larger, and even then in a pretty small room.
The best use cases I can think of are for games where you're already using DLSS, and can just upscale from the same source resolution to 8K rather than 4K? Maybe something like an advanced CRT filter that can better emulate a real CRT with more resolution to work with, where a pixel art game leaves you with lots of headroom for that effect? Maybe there's value in something like an emulated split screen game, to effectively give 4 players their own 4K TV in an N64 game or something?
But uh... yeah, all use cases that are far from the average consumer. Most people I talk to don't even really appreciate 1080p->4K, and 4X-ing your resolution again is a massive processing power ask in a world where you can't just... throw together multiple GPUs in SLI or something. Even if money is no object, 8K in mainline gaming will require some ugly tradeoffs for the next several years, and probably even forever if devs keep pushing visuals and targeting upscaled 4K 30/60 on the latest consoles.
4K for me as a developer means that I can have a couple of source files and a browser with the API documentation open at the same time. I reckon I could use legitimately use an 8K screen - get a terminal window or two open as well, keep an eye on builds and deployments while I'm working on a ticket.
Now yes - gaming and watching video at 8K. That's phenomenally niche, and very much a case of diminishing returns. But some of us have to work for a living as well, alas, and would like them pixels.
Good point, 4K text for programming is pretty fantastic, if you don't mind small text and use a big monitor, I could see 8K bringing some worthwhile clarity improvements to some productivity workflows. It's probably better for monitors than it is for TVs.
Even as a dev, I use a 32" QHD screen for programming. If I went 4K, I would need to use 150% scaling, and that breaks a LOT of stuff.
Everything is built for 100% scaling. Every time I've plugged my PC into a 4K display I've regretted it. It go to 30Hz (on HDMI) or glitch out or something. Even if it doesn't, it's never as smooth.
I have a 43" 4K and at that physical size display scaling at 100% is appropriate (despite windows trying to run it at 300% out of the box) and it is legitimately useful. Its effectively four 1080p screens in a grid with no bezel between.
What's the point? Even if you pay extra for "4K" streaming, it's compressed to hell and the quality is no better than 1080p. What are you going to even watch on an 8K TV?
If memory serves, last year's summer Olympics were televised (to some degree, anyways) at 8K, even if it was just a technological flex or test.
I can't imagine the bitrate was high enough to make much difference in quality.. But I don't know what the technical details were.
Here's something, though it seems to have a heavy "look at how great Intel is" spin to it: https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/the-olympics-is-being-streamed-in-8k-but-its-kind-of-a-secret
Nothing with Bluray stagnant at 4K. Not that I care, my aging eyes are fine sticking with 4K forever.
I don't even want 4K. 1080p is more than good enough.
I also see no use, but I also stuck to 1024 far too long (also because that thing just kept working)
I've still got the last good plasma TV. Power usage is horrible but the picture is great.
You may not want 4K but I bet your ass wants a OLED TV because those are fucking amazing and I would be concerned if youdidn’t want one
Even my smartphone doesn't have OLED display.
If I was in the market for a new TV I'd probably go for an OLED assuming image burn-in is no longer an issue with them, but I'll happily use my 15 year old LED TV for as long as it lasts. I can tell the difference in contrast when side by side with LED/LCD but in normal daily use I don't pay any attention to it.
I also think that 1080 is fine for normal living room distance. In my case, though, I use a 42" 4K as a monitor, where I have the equivalent of 4 1080 monitors. No gaming, but for my use it's more practical than multiple monitors.
It's only the equivalent of you don't use any scaling, do you?
I wish my eyesight was so good that I could see obvious flaws in a 4k image.
Fun fact; Here in Brazil, the cheaper tv models being sold are 720p, and a lot of people buy them and don't even know what video resolution is, neither they feel like missing something lol
In any developing country with low incomes but heavy social media presence and smartphone usage, most people care more about the content and how much they're actually getting entertained than bothering about quality and size.
Is an adaptation of a timeless children’s novel not something that has been rehashed time and again?
I have 2 4K tvs, one used as a monitor. I'm now rewatching some 70's - 80's shows. When the intro starts, I'm acutely aware of the low res, but as soon as the show starts, I get into the content, and I really don't notice the resolution.
If you focus on the resolution instead of the content, maybe the content is not that engaging.
Not exactly surprising, considering the TV’s and monitors are outpacing the contemt creators and gaming development.
A lot of gamers don’t even have GPU’s that can crank out 4K at the frame rates most monitors are capable of. So 8K won’t do much for you. And movies and regular TV? Man, I’m happy there’s 4K available.
A 4K screen will be more than most folks need right now, so buying an 8K at the moment is just wasted money. Like buying a Ferrari and only ever driving 25 mph.
Also to add to this. 8k sounds 2x as large as 4k. But that isn't true. 8k is four times the pixels of 4k, so can you imagine what kind of GPU or content stream you will need to make sense...
Also I think the improvements in HDR and brightness recently are more substantial than the update to 8K. At normal viewing TV distance you’d be hard pressed to see the individual pixels, even on a 1080p screen.
Even for PCs there isn’t much reason to go about 2k screens (1440p).
This is why I often refer to 4K as UHD: The WCG and HDR being available to consumers is far more impactful than end users having a few more pixels.
(Also because I'm a snarky pedant, and consumer 4K UHD is only 3840 wide, while DCI4K is actually 4096)
But I need the surface brightness of the Sun in my living room! It adds so much depth to the characters and stories!
4k monitors in portrait orientation are amazing for productivity. It's a shame more people don't do this
What’s the benefit over 2k monitors in portrait?
Screen space.
I work in tech doing performance, memory management, and developer workflow tooling and automation for a large 3D Rendering/Creation tool.
Being able to throw a long setup doc, or a large class file on a 4k portrait monitor allows me to read things through with a ton of context and far less scrolling.
It's also useful for putting two window tiles that have related content, or one is a reference content.
I currently have a tie-fighter monitor setup (2x4k portrait on either side of a ultrawide) and will put comms and email/calendar on my left monitor, core work in the center, and overflow reference/research on the right.
It's less hectic for personal use, but I still use all the space.
It's just a race. Perhaps you don't need the biggest and newest available thing, but you also will subconsciously discard what's "less" than what you already have or what's normal as obsolete. This creates an engine for a race, where good faith players can't compete.
Like with web browsers, a hypertext networked system even with advanced formatting, executable content and sandboxing can be so simple, that there'd be hundreds of independent implementations. But if you always race the de-facto standards with the speed you the monopolist group can maintain, and good faith competitors can't, then you'll always be the "best".
The Matrix movie actually talks about that, with its "there's no spoon" moment. It's not a usual market game, it's a meta-market game. And most people don't understand the rules of the meta layer, being sitting ducks there.
Nobody can compete with the industry leaders on their field. And unlike with steel or gasoline or even embedded electronics production, there's no relativity in the field at all. But the new possible fields are endless. Everyone can discover new pastures here, because it's not discovery, it's conception. But since that's counterintuitive, and the network effects work on psychology too, most people are not trying.
It's a bit like military logic, there were Western "controlled escalation" doctrines, because slow gradual escalation works in favor of the side with most resources, thus the West, and the Soviet "scientific-technical revolution" doctrines, which despite sounding stupid is a correct name, when you're the second in the race, your best chance lies in being unpredictable, unreasonable and changing the rules. One of the reasons Soviet doctrines gained such a crappy reputation as compared to Western ones is that, well, they are kinda similar to preventively going all out guns-a-blazing before you are forced to fight by the enemy's rules, which requires willpower from those making the decisions (and also capability to, well, do anything scientific and technical, LOL), and which means you prepare for some sort of general battle (that be nuclear war, or short highly concentrated offensives, such stuff) at the expense of "aggressive negotiations" scenarios. So - in our time anyone trying to heal the Silicon Valley's effects is playing USSR and can only expect anything good from breaking rules.
Interesting post.
they will just use a shitty upscale algorithm.
You don't sell performance to people, you sell numbers.
Pretty sure my eyes max out at 4K. I can barely tell the difference between 4K and 1080P from my couch.
The consumer has spoken and they don't care, not even for 4K. Same as happened with 3D and curved TVs, 8K is a solution looking for a problem so that more TVs get sold.
In terms of physical media - at stores in Australia the 4K section for Blurays takes up a single rack of shelves. Standard Blurays and DVDs take up about 20.
Even DVDs still sell well because many consumers don't see a big difference in quality, and certainly not enough to justify the added cost of Bluray, let alone 4K editions. A current example, Superman is $20 on DVD, $30 on Bluray (50% cost increase) or $40 on 4K (100%) cost increase. Streaming services have similar pricing curves for increased fidelity.
It sucks for fans of high res, but it's the reality of the market. 4K will be more popular in the future if and when it becomes cheaper, and until then nobody (figuratively) will give a hoot about 8K.
I work off metered data. I’m happy with 360p.
There was a while that I exclusively used apps where I could lower the bitrate of music I listened to. Because I'm not rocking crazy good headsets and such for when I needed it, and I really saw no reason to use up larger amounts of data when I was listening to music over the sound of a lawnmower walking around the yard for an hour. If I was going to leave music on and not have wifi, it just didn't seem worth it.
Also if you had poor bandwidth in an area, it plays better
Yup - not a solution for everyone but there are typically Quality Of Service (QOS) services on routers that will do something similar - where it will target a certain threshold.
Nothing is released in 8k so why would someone want something nothing is in?
Another possibility for why consumers don't seem to care about 8k is the common practice by content owners and streaming services charging more for access to 4k over 1080p.
Normalizing that practice invites the consumer to more closely scrutinize the probable cost of something better than 4k compared to the probable return.
I would be fine with an 8k TV if there was 8k content and they were affordable. I haven’t purchased a TV in over a decade however and my TVs all work fine so I’m not even in the market
I still sometimes have hiccups with streaming 4k content. I'd rather save bandwidth than stream 8k.
Until the pipelines are bigger or compression algorithms improve, I'd rather pause at 4k.
That's... not how that works.
I think they meant the people making TVs aren't the ones handling healthcare..
5m is like two of my whole house
At a typical distance of 12-15ft, people cannot tell the difference between 720, 1080 and 4K because human eyes have a limited resolving power.
Surgeons already use cameras trough small holes instead of cutting you open wide. Screen technology finds a way.
I would want my surgeon to have 16k screen if that helps them do their job best
no one is doing sensitive surgery looking at a fucking TV.
I'm happy with 1080p content. I have a 4k TV and from the couch I can't see a difference. I would be perfectly happy with a bargain 4k TV, bigger the better.
it depends on how big your tv is in your field of view, so a function of size and distance. and obviously how good your vision is.
My TV is also 4K but my amplifier which eats all the inputs can only do 1080p. 4k quality on that 65" is better, but not by that much that I'd throw 500+€ for a new amp since the current one works just fine and it fulfils all my needs on a TV/media set.
Maybe if they add 3D, people will buy them!
/s
Forget 3D, I want smellovision!
Well they say all new tech is driven by the porn industry, so, um....
Yes.
Man, I would. I am 100% the target demographic, jumped in the 3D TV rabbit hole and loved it. Totally knew it was a gimmick, but didn't care. Would have friends over for 3D movie parties.
But adding them to my Plex server sucked. TAB or SBS files were half-assed and the PlayStation I used took sooooooo damn long to freaking start the movie and skipping was an issue.
Tbf one if the use cases for display technologies with high pixel density is vr headsets.
Yeah, very much looking forward to headsets with 8k panels. Most are up to 4k now, and it's getting pretty good. If it stays at 4k for a bit, that would be fine. But it's definitely an area where 8k will still be a very noticeable upgrade.
Even if the only short-term practical use for an 8k panel is how far away a 4k or 1080p screen would be clear to read in an augmented reality situation, that would be reason enough. But I personally will gladly lower quality settings to run VR games in 8k instead of 4k as well.
If we had the 90's economy there would be a bunch of folks looking to get 8k tvs.
I like how the article immediately tries placing the blame on the consumer. When in reality it’s the companies putting the cart before the horse and then being shocked when it doesn’t work out.
Hopefully, just all 4K panels get replaced with 8K panels and it doesn't cost anything extra and in like 5 years when the rest of the technology catches up and especially video bitrates are increased then the transition can happen seamlessly but we're not going to pay for it's, it's just going to have to be a free upgrade. This is really the last doubling we need for the human vision system and it is already pretty far into the diminishing returns aspects. Since we are going to need 8K for VR that doesn't suck, might as well make that the standard for the next century and we won't ever have to bother with 16K panels
"How come they don't fall for 'bigger number better' anymore?"
8K content is too storage hungry. My pirate ship is already bursting at the seams with some 4K but mostly 1080. I have 130TB of media, if it was in 8K I would need a water cooled server farm.
That's the REAL reason for lack of 8K interest, the pirates are not demanding it. Not until 100TB drives are available for a reasonable price.
Wait what? Are you implying that if there was demand for 8k content, then pirates would make it available? The content has to exist in order for pirates to release it.
I can download a remux of the 4K Lawrence of Arabia transfer because it was filmed in 70mm and the studio transferred it at 4K. It’s 70mm film, so it’s ~8-12K equivalent, but to actually get that resolution they would have to scan that film at that resolution, then go through the whole video workflow, color correction, whatever tf idk I’m not a video engineer, at that resolution, and render out the final version at that resolution.
Pirates aren’t doing that, they’re ripping physical or digital releases. And there’s no point in downloading an 8K upscale of a 4K release, just let your TV or your Shield or Infuse handle the upscaling.
I am saying that the ability to store the content is needed before people will be able to make the demand for it. So take streaming platforms for instance. They won't want to build more server farms and instead just upgrade what they have. So once 100TB drives are readily available they will start upgrading and then influence the media companies to start scanning at 8k. The people scanning the damn movies will need to store it too. You know whoever is the first to start offering the content be it Netflix or Disney will start a chain reaction and then 8k will take off but I'm sure it will be a slower build up compared to 4k.
Ah ok I see what you were saying. Honestly I think we’ll see physical media first, like multilayer Blu-ray Discs or something, that drive the initial adoption, just like with 4K. One people get a taste of it, demand will force streamers to offer it at a premium tier, until it eventually just becomes normalized.
But yeah I think it’s gonna be way slower than the buildup to 4K also.
The real reason for lack of interest is streaming quality of 4k has been getting worse for years, and is still like 1/10th the quality of 4k BluRay, with enormous levels of compression and artifacts.
8k requires 4x the data. We all know that means every subscription would charge at least 2x more to maintain profit margins of unlimited growth for vulture capitalism, and they'd skimp on the extra data too; leaving users with nothing better than the current 4k.
That's true, and to add to that, most mobile phone and many land Internet based connections are not unlimited and have caps. Nobody wants to stream a few 8k movies and use up their entire monthly cap in one shot.
-speaking as a US user, many countries offer unlimited as standard but not the evil empire.
If your phone is 1080p you won't be being served 8K video on any streaming service. 8K phone screens aren't coming any time soon, as even 4K is overkill and rarely done - and even then, netflix etc still don't stream 4K to them.
Yeah, storage/bandwidth is the overall limiting factor regardless for 8k. Also, most peoples xp with 4k is streaming, so there would likely be 100x more of a market for increasing bitrate from the current "compressed as all fuck" up to 4k Bluray bitrate, before anyone cares about 8k... but of course, that isn't something that TV manufacturers can control or use to sell more products.
How many homes have walls big enough for a screen big enough for 8k to matter
I hate the wording of the headline, because it makes it sound like the consumers' fault that the industry isn't delivering on something they promised. It's like marketing a fusion-powered sex robot that's missing the power core, and turning around and saying "nobody wants fusion-powered sex robots".
Side note, I'd like for people to stop insisting that 60fps looks "cheap", so that we can start getting good 60fps content. Heck, at this stage I'd be willing to compromise at 48fps if it gets more directors on board. We've got the camera sensor technology in 2025 for this to work in the same lighting that we used to need for 24fps, so that excuse has flown.
I think 8k has a use, just not in consumer televisions for things like Netflix or gaming. 8k's real use is most likely in the medical field where high high high high detail is extremely important.
Bro I honest to God can't see the difference between 1080 and 4k, you could put them both next to me and I'd struggle to point out which is which. We don't need 8k. Enough is enough
Who is out here filming at that resolution anyway? Cannot fathom the file sizes of anything made for these TVs
A lot of people are filming in 6K or 8K, but only because it gives them more editing leeway when the final video is delivered in 4K.
Higher res matters when filming, because you can reframe scenes in editing without losing resolution when downscaling the final result.
I think that resolution materially benefits the medical field rather than the entertainment business.
4k ought to be enough for anybody
Here I am still downloading the 720p versions of movies and not minding at all. If I want hyper resolution imagery I just go outside.
I download movies in 1080p but TV shows are almost always 720p unless its something visually stunning which could go up to 4k.
Watching 720p on anything bigger than a phone screen is crazy tho
Dude, everything used to be black and white and staticky. Resolution was in electron lines lol.
so? we used to live in the trees and eat raw meat.
Yeah, no shit. The only possible use is gaming, and even PC owners have been upscaling for some time now.
The only case where you might even notice a difference by going to 8K resolution is high end VR, but that's no reason to have 8K in a TV.
Even 4K is overkill for most movies. The HDR is the selling point there, which I'll admit looks nice.
Agree that it’s HDR, not actually resolution that makes that much difference.
That and the motion smoothing that looks really good on the display videos in the shop where it's always splashing paint, or dripping honey, or tracking shots of trees, but it makes movies and TV shows look terrible, like the behind the scenes footage before they put all the effects in.
First thing I do to a tv is flick it into a colour graded mode and flick all motion smoothing off.
It's useful in photography. 8K is 33 megapixels, which some modern cameras can exceed (whereas 4K is 8 megapixels which every camera exceeds).
Not really, there isn't much of a point in viewing your images at native resolution while editing. In fact in lightroom when you're viewing the entire image you're always looking at downscaled version anyway for performance reasons and need to punch in to see actual pixel level detail.
Not the case in darktable, and it's useful at least to see the noise/details trade-off.
You'd definitely want to zoom in for that anyway unless you're working on a huge screen and looking at it upclose. I'm literally a pro lol.
It's been observed that the porn industry is often one of the first adapters of new media tech before they become commonplace, but I'm not sure some things need to be shown in that high a resolution.
i read the same comment about 1080p and 4k porn but here we are.
Maybe people will be satisfied when they can put their TV under a microscope to determine the actor's sperm count...
It's not even really true; it's a salacious fact that was passed around and everyone agreed. For example, there's no real evidence that VHS won over Betamax because of porn. Everyone accepted that fact uncritically.
I got a 4k monitor, and I could barely tell the difference with 1080p
Do you play games? If so, do you really not see the jaggies?
Same. Now I've connected my Steam Deck to it, but set the resolution to 1080p. All I ever do on it is watch YouTube and Twitch anyways.
I still use a ten year old 1080p Sony TV, and I’ve yet to see a new <$1k TV with a nicer picture than what I have. Granted I don’t really consume any higher resolution content anyway 🤷♂️
How about uncompressed 4k before going to even more compression 8k. I have seen uncompressed 8k content on an 8k TV. I couldn't tell the difference between it and a good quality 4k picture, and I'm admittedly a quality snob. I can tell the difference in 1080 vs 4k pretty easily even on cheap tvs, it's just virtually non existent at 8k vs 4k in tv sizes up to 80 inch beyond viewing inches away from the screen.
That would be... (checks math)... about 5.972 Gbps of bandwidth, assuming just non-HDR content and 30 fps. Probably impossible for most people.
Less compression could make sense, but literally no compression would be a colossal waste of bandwidth and storage.
Maybe that's the point I meant to make clearer. 8k, even compressed would take more bandwidth, or it's going to be compressed so much that it totally defeats the purpose of 8k content.
No, I wanted to make a different point: that uncompressed video would be unreasonably huge. Nobody uses it. Regardless of the resolution, a good compressed video looks basically the same but it is hundreds of times smaller.
You should ask for less compressed video. Uncompressed is just not worth it.
Even 4K the content is not yet easily available . I mean except from AppleTV plus that all content is 4K and it’s part of basic subscription, every other streaming charges much more for 4K content, most people don’t want to pay more every month for 4K
So 8K is just a distant reality that content makers are not really wanting to happen
And of course the comment section with "16k around the coner, progress doesn't stop".
I can not tell the improvement since 1080P. Are these TVs letting us see into the future?
probably because i dont even care about 1080p tvs. they all look the same.
I’d buy one if it came with every David Attenborough (or similar) nature documentary included. I don’t need 8k for games or movies or anything else but I’ll watch the shit out of whatever high budget nature documentaries are produced and put my nose against the screen to see the critter details.
Yeah, and 640kb RAM Ought to be Enough for Anyone.
Except we're in the equivalent of the '70s/Z80 era, there's little to no need or content for 8K.
Yet. The capitalist factories have to spin, they will find a reason/way to "encourage" another standard change, only it might take a few years. Lucas will re-release the original trilogy in a new cut he always envisioned, you'll be able to observe blackheads on your fav politicians nose, but it will happen, as it always did in the media buisnesses. Maybe it won't be screens, but laser projectors (id rather expect that), but 8k and then whatever-faptylion-k will come in into standard eventually because capitalism demands constant expansion.
Oh but what if it was in 3D!
Remember that time?
Maybe if we curve the TV?
I can't even see the difference between 1080p and 4k.
I want 8K TVs, but only when there's abundant native 8K content to watch on it - otherwise there is no point.
I'll take one! Well, two really. One large one for TV/media viewing and one to replace my 43" 4k monitor. Quadrupling the resolution on that would be amazing.
The difference would be minimal on the media screen, TBH, but Ive seen them in person and can tell the difference. It's just not a big enough difference to warrant replacing what I have.
I use a VR headset as my PC display and i can choose whatever size or resolution and i've been using it in 8K for about a year for work to have many smaller windows that all look pretty clear. My bottleneck is probably the quest pro resolution so i'm looking forward to better headsets soon.
I chased high resolution for a while then realized my eyes are not so good. Now I just save money by using low-res displays. The same thing with my ears saved me from a creeping case of audiophilia.
Nobody will ever need an 8K TV, but 8K content would be nice on a (purely theoretical atm) pleasant to use head mounted display, one day
What's your opinion on using 8K TV as a monitor?
https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/y2023m12d15/
4k is nice but at 1440p the diminishing returns are pretty obvious doubt 8k is somehow going to change that
There aren't really any 1440p TVs out there. They're either 1080p or 4K.
But there are 1440p monitors.
We’re in a topic about TVs.
I want one but my GPU can't drive games at 8k and 100+ FPS. Also there's no media for it.
Speaking as a developer; I've a 4K screen which is amazing for having loads of source files open at the same time, and also works for old or undemanding games. Glorious Eggroll's version of Proton has all the FSR patches in it, so you can 'upscale anything'. Almost any modern game, I'm going to be running at lower resolution, usually either 1440p or the slightly odd 2954 x 1662. Generally, highest-quality graphics and upscaling looks better than medium-quality native to me, for games where I have to compromise.
I would be interested in an 8K display for coding, as long as the price is reasonable. I'm not spending five grand, that would be crazy. But I'd still be upscaling for playing games, as basically no GPU could drive that many pixels.
You will never be able to game at 8k. Modern games run with 720p and 60 fps on the best GPUs, then "AI enhanced" to a vaseline coated 4k
I have a 3080 and have all frame gen tech turned off, and still, almost every game I play can hit 60+ fps and 2k resolution, a lot can do 144. I get your point, but it's greatly exaggerated.
No they don't. On PC you can run games at native resolution with zero "AI enhanced" stuff.
I run DOOM eternal at 4k with a stable 120 fps (not the AI enhanced interpolation garbage) with a 3080...
I couldn't imagine going back to gaming at 60fps and is a big reason I hate console ports.
Doom is build different
The rest of my games run at 80-100 fps at 4k.
LASIK actually made a huge difference in being able to appreciate the sharpness of 4K, but I doubt 8K is as big a leap.
I would love to have an 8K TV or monitor if I had an internet connection up to the task and enough content in 8K to make it worth it, or If I had a PC powerful enough to run games smoothly in that resolution.
I think it's silly to say 'nobody wants this' when the infrastructure for it isn't even close to adequate.
I will admit that there is diminishing returns now, going from 4K to 8K was less impressive than FHD to 4K and I imagine that 8K will probably be where it stops, at least for anything that can reasonably fit in a house.
2tb drives aren't as cheap as I would hope
I hear anything at or above 8k resolution negates the need for anti aliasing entirely... But I feel that my pc would would be running at or around 10-15 fps for most games I would care about anti aliasing on.
Nice in theory, definitely can't handle that many pixels in reality.
DLSS Ultra Performance
Half the games I play are 2D, the other half are not overly demanding either. Wonder what you would need to run deep rock galactic at 8k 144hz? Probably one of the more demanding games I have played lately. But if I was to spend money on better equipment for that game it would be sound equipment.
yeah..."check out Stardew Valley at 8K!" or buy a 8K TV to watch Simpsons.
Gotta get people to replace their tvs somehow so dangle an "upgrade".
I want a new fucking 3D TV. I'm so mad every single manufacturer gave up on that.
Yes, a lot of 3D content was awful, headache-inducing, and bad... But tons of it was done very well and looks amazing.
Manufacturers did give up on that relatively quick. 3DS was a thing around that time too.
I'll take an 8k computer monitor though. In fact, send two. Kthnx.
My viewing position is about 330cm/11ft from the wall where my tv is mounted. That works out to roughly 80” television for 4K viewing pleasure. https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-relationship
8k would be ridiculous, and the compression would be a significant factor.
Remember when ISP companies went after people who used over 500GB in a month? I remember.
I think most phone nerds understand that 4K on a phone is not necessary.
I don’t think the other 98% of phone buyers even know what resolution their phone screen is, nor do they care.
Uncompressed 1080 is already approaching the eyes resolution limit, when viewing it in a living room environment. 4K is close to the monitor usage limit.
The reason that 4K seems better is often down to bandwidth and colour depth.
There's zero benefit to an 8K TV. An 8K monitor might be useful, but is still well into the diminishing returns curve.
There's still some ground to be made up with colours and frame rates, but resolution is effectively maxed out already.
I'd buy a 8k TV, provided that it has no smarts, no WiFi, no TV tuner and its price isn't over 5% than a 4k TV
lol but you can have FHD the same size as that tv lmao
Also have you seen 720HD with 10 bit color? Looks better than 1080p when it was released. Seen 1080p 14 bit color? Looks better than 4k when it came out.
Yeah until I can get a 8ki instead of 8kp I'll hold off /s
Fr though both sound similarly ridiculous
I want it, but at affordable prices
I found quite some 4k movies being more noisy than their 2k pendant. So whats the point?
maybe that was the remastering process issues. also maybe 4k movies are not actually 4ks and are AI upscalers from actual 2k masters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxOqWYytypg
I mostly use my TV for gaming and watching old movies and anime.
The former task will be unviable at 8k and make my GPU cry, and the latter one makes 8k unnecessary.
I really don’t see the point in 8k displays right now.
Makes sense:
No Media support.
And also on Monitors and Tvs i don't care if it's a. 1080p or 1440p of 4k give me 1080p
One thing, my current 4k TV/monitor does a pretty nice job upscaling 1080p. It, of course, doesn't look as good as native 4k, but it looks considerably better than 1080p not upscaled. So even without native 8k content, there is some value in being able to upscale 4k content to 8k.
Put them into Microsoft Windows as mandatory enabled or something.
Open Source 10K TV please
Honestly, at 3m (10 feet) I can't see the pixels at 1080p. My corrected vision is no longer 20/20
BR standards haven’t caught up, that’s probably the answer for most who can afford it.
You already need a 3080 to even approach modern 4k and unless some new media/disk format, it just ain't going to happen and isn't worth it.
3070 is enough for most stuff at 4k 60 medium. Not all the newer stuff though.
Even my rusty 1080TI works well with 4K on most titles from ca 2-3 years old.