LG joins the rest of the world, accepts that people don’t want 8K TVs
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Yeah no sh*t. To benefit from 8K you’ll either need to sit super close to conventional TV sizes or have gigantic screens at conventional viewing distances. Not to mention the bandwidth and processing power required for all those pixels. Just a solution looking for a problem no one has or wants.
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That may have been the straw. But there were tons of bricks added to that burden the 8K camel was trying to carry. Were it not for the straw, the death of 8K was still going to be soon.
I'd call it a mercy killing, myself.
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I’m still perfectly happy with my 1080p TV. Don’t get me wrong, I look forward to upgrading when we next move and I know what size makes most sense but getting HDR and those perfect OLED blacks seems like a bigger upgrade than 4K. Especially given that many games on PS5 don’t render in 4K and 4K streaming can be perceptually similar to 1080p (depending on the streaming service).
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I think of “8K” as pretty different from weird TV gags of the past like curved screens or 3D. Fundamentally, resolution just part of the spec sheet like other display quality hardware details.
If we start trending toward TVs with 4x the area, higher resolution for similar pixel density could make plenty of sense, even if the content always lags behind.
If we start trending toward TVs with 4x the area, higher resolution for similar pixel density could make plenty of sense, even if the content always lags behind.
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I wonder how many of the 4K purchase are due to being the only thing available in the mid to large sizes rather then some desire by the buyer to 'upgrade' to the full 4K experience?
Seems my 55" FHD TV is at the near perfect distance from the sofa. Plenty good enough for me but then I grew up when the 25" Color console TV was the high end standard. Think that TV in the Lovell household in the Apollo 13 movie.
Seems my 55" FHD TV is at the near perfect distance from the sofa. Plenty good enough for me but then I grew up when the 25" Color console TV was the high end standard. Think that TV in the Lovell household in the Apollo 13 movie.
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I own an 8K Samsung TV but use it exclusively as a monitor. It replaced 4 × 4K displays. It sits on top of a mobile server rack I house multiple 4U PCs in. While I sit at sit stand desk with wheels a good 6 feet away.
It's been a great upgrade and I managed to pay nearly 90% off it's MSRP due to it being "damaged box" and a 2023 model.
Was hoping that more adoption would bring prices down but the writing was on the wall. 8K really only makes sense over 75", mine is 85", over 90" and cost skyrockets. Totally niche. And my use case doesn't even register for these companies.
It's been a great upgrade and I managed to pay nearly 90% off it's MSRP due to it being "damaged box" and a 2023 model.
Was hoping that more adoption would bring prices down but the writing was on the wall. 8K really only makes sense over 75", mine is 85", over 90" and cost skyrockets. Totally niche. And my use case doesn't even register for these companies.
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local crank here, but i could live the rest of my life with my living room tv at 1080p and be perfectly fine
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Im not surprised. were even going backwards on 4k in live TV sports coverage. UEFA football dropped 4k coverage because it was deemed too costly for the TV stations to mix and deal in live 4k 50/60hz hdr content. some of the most watched sports event on the planet and they deemed 1080p to be acceptable after giving us 4k for years.
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Gnafu the Great
Ars Centurion
I will say that I can appreciate going from 1080p to 2160p at normal viewing distances on my 55" TV, but what I appreciate more is the move to 10-bit color and HDR. I am certain I would see no benefit to 4320p at normal viewing distances for any screen size. Well-mastered UHD Blu-rays look amazing, but I don't think 35mm film offers much more than 4K resolution in practice and few movies were filmed on larger formats. For home delivery, 8K is a joke.
EDIT: I enjoyed 720p and a 1080p projectors on a 100" screen for years, too.
EDIT: I enjoyed 720p and a 1080p projectors on a 100" screen for years, too.
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It's a great resolution for TVs over 90-inches.
Are home cinemas still popular?
And if you have the disposable income, a video wall is what you want over 100-inches. I think you need P1.2 and under for 8K.
Cheapy route is a projector.
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
Bah, you call that cranky? 640 x 480 ought to be enough for anybody.
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We’re kind of reaching the point where larger screens become impractical. Increases in screen size will likely become incremental from here on out.
In the early 2010s, I made the jump from a 32” TV to a 65” TV. For my next upgrade, I’ll consider moving up from 65” to 75”, but I can’t imagine any circumstance where I’d make another 2x jump. A 150” TV wouldn’t just be an expensive electronics purchase, it would require a renovation to accomodate it.
If anything, screens are going the other way. A lot of TV content is now being produced with the assumption that it is being consumed on a small, mobile device.
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We finally made the upgrade to 4K last year in anticipation of tariffs. It’s been a nice upgrade but it absolutely wasn’t as remarkable as the SD to HD change.
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Just a matter of diminishing returns. The difference between SD and HD was huge. I can see the difference between HD and 4K. But 8K? Only at an absurdly close viewpoint. It's just not worth the very marginal improvement.
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Reality check: almost no one needs or benefits from 4k over 1080p either.
2k is fine for ~98% of people.
Now give me good color depth, consistent frame rates, and fewer compression artifacts.
2k is fine for ~98% of people.
Now give me good color depth, consistent frame rates, and fewer compression artifacts.
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This.
Also, during the SD to HD transition, even if they were half blind, pretty much anybody could understand "My old TV is narrow, and my new TV is wide!"
C. 2005 or so, I remember going to an elderly friend of the family's house and he was showing off his brand new 42" plasma . I said, "Tom, see how it's all stretched out? Your cable box is still standard def and it's not widescreen. Do you want me to fix that?" I proceeded to pillar box it so that all the 4:3 images were correctly displayed and he said, "Oh, hell no. Put it back. I paid for that whole damn screen screen and I'm going to watch the whole damn screen!"
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I haven't kept up with computer display tech
since I haven't felt a need to buy a monitor in a long time but I'm noticing the manufacturers seem to be pushing those same weird curved screens onto workstation users these days. A sizable portion of these new monitors are already showing at my local Goodwill's as I assume people buy and tire of those quickly. Meanwhile older models are becoming harder to find there.
It feels like history repeating itself.
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Statistical
Ars Legatus Legionis
That is actually great news. So many other ways PQ can be improved (frame rate, motion blur, contrast ratios, brightness, color depth, color range, etc). Resolution is the one metric that is right at or in some case beyond visual discrimination. So now work on the everything else.
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I mean, apart from the HDR part (which is technically orthogonal, but in practice is bundled together), this is mostly true for 4K as well. A 55" 1080p TV is "retina" at a bit over 7 foot viewing distance. A 65" 1080p TV is "retina" at bit under 8.5 feet. Bigger TVs exist obviously, but I wouldn't say that >65" TVs are particularly common.
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fellow human
Ars Praefectus
But then you'll sit further back. Optimal distance for a 50" 4k for mixed viewing is around 7' whereas for a 100" home theater you'd want to be at about 10'.
Those numbers mean 132PPD for the 50" and 96PPD for the 100". 96 is maybe a touch low but bump up to 8k and you're looking at 192PPD which is overkill for video.
5 or 6K would be ideal at home theater sizes, a good mix between pixel density and file/streaming sizes. I wouldn't mind seeing something like that standardize. With upscaling we don't even necessarily need content to catch up.
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Although you didn’t think that this article is about the peak of Western civilisation, it in fact is. We’ve had real content in 4K a peak little while and it’s AI slop and downhill from now on. We’ve had it good, you could get a GPU for less than a car but that brief blip of civilisation has passed now and we are going back to totalitarianism and misery for most people
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As an owner of an 8K 65" TV and using it for desktop work and 8k gaming i can only say that with 8K size matters. For a TV you need 84" at the very least for 8K to make sense (when doing 4 player splitscreen with the kids, sitting on the floor fight in front of the tv), otherwise only above 100".
In reality it all comes down to viewing distance. In large american homes it's probably a bit more than in smaller european or asian homes. For instance, i'd love to get a 100", 115", 130" or 150" TV, but i won't unless it comes with 8K. Yet, so far, all the 8K TV's released are below 100"...
Also 8K 120Hz really is the requirement for smooth, sharp, bright (glasses-free) 3D.
These things will happen. But it will take time for costs to come down, first 4K has to become the low end for all displays and content production.
In reality it all comes down to viewing distance. In large american homes it's probably a bit more than in smaller european or asian homes. For instance, i'd love to get a 100", 115", 130" or 150" TV, but i won't unless it comes with 8K. Yet, so far, all the 8K TV's released are below 100"...
Also 8K 120Hz really is the requirement for smooth, sharp, bright (glasses-free) 3D.
These things will happen. But it will take time for costs to come down, first 4K has to become the low end for all displays and content production.
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OLED contrast is really good enough for me, whether the content is 4k/1080 or HDR.
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Are you sure you don't want a 2000" TV like Frank?
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I do think there is a place for 8k but not alone. As the article says you need larger screens. When 8k was first pushed the largest screens were 80" nowhere near large enough to justify the.. Now that we are getting 115" TVs it may actually be beneficial. I also think 8k actually would have gone well for 3D TVs. One of the biggest issues with 3D is that you basically lose half your resolution which was a big problem with 1080p. With 8k though it just would have cut it down to 4k and everyone would have been happy. People also complained about brightness which also is fixed with modern TVs being much brighter that the 3d TVs of yore. I also think that some of the issues people had around sickness could have been resolved as modern displays also have much lower pixel response times. I am not saying that any of this would have been a resounding success but it would have gone further than simply bumping the resolution.
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I'd like a ~42" 8K display. That would be perfect for 200%/Retina scaling. Although I think 8K video is overkill (except for use with VR) I still kind of wish that TVs had caught on so there be more 8K choices for computer monitors.
1080p is good enough for you, but 4K OLED is too blurry? 4K OLED displays usually use a non-standard subpixel layout, so they don't benefit from subpixel font rendering, but at twice the linear pixel density, they should still look better than a 1080P with subpixel font rendering.
GPU performance is plenty for desktop use. Until a few months ago, I was running four 4K monitors on a 10 year old GTX 950. Even for gaming, having an overkill resolution will mean less artifacts from non-integer scaling, and you can do things like rendering text overlays at higher resolution than the game world.
Curvature would benefit 8K displays. If you're close enough to take full advantage of the resolution benefits of an 8K display, the corners of the display will be too far away / too angled to make comfortable use of. And 3D halves the pixel density (in one direction), so a higher-than-necessary resolution for 2D becomes a just-right resolution for 3D.
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Sucks when marketing drives development of a technology that has zero utility other than show big number. I would rather development towards improving color rendition, dynamic range, latency etc..
But no everything now is driven by some stupid singular number. Intel fell to that when Marketing drove development of CPUs for big Mhz Numbers VS IPC etc..
But no everything now is driven by some stupid singular number. Intel fell to that when Marketing drove development of CPUs for big Mhz Numbers VS IPC etc..
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The 'content' situation is likely significantly worse than nominal resolutions would suggest.
It's still extremely common to run into streaming or broadcast sources whose bitrates are tight enough that nominal 1920x1080 or 4k look like garbage(or where choosing '4k' despite having a 1920x1080 display makes things look markedly better because the lowballed 4k bitrate is roughly what the 1920x1080 bitrate really ought to have been); and it's overwhelmingly the case that gaming cases are resorting to various sorts of upscaling and framegen to hit 4k at adequate frame rates.
Something like the playstation incident was embarrassing because it was a very specific spec sheet lie from a company whose party line was that 8k was the glorious future; but it's not like HDMI bandwidth is the real reason why an RDNA2 from 2020 that fits into a $500 retail price is not an 8k gaming option. Nothing in particular against RDNA2; but a 2025 blackwell that costs four times as much if you can find one at MSRP is also not really an 8k gaming option.
If there problem were a bunch of receivers with older HDMI versions and some nominal resolutions they probably could have fudged their way through it; but as it is cost sensitivity seems to be kicking in at or below 4k even for the comparatively cheap problem of high enough video bitrates, never mind the rather more costly one of GPU rendering or fully 8k+ video shooting and editing.
It's still extremely common to run into streaming or broadcast sources whose bitrates are tight enough that nominal 1920x1080 or 4k look like garbage(or where choosing '4k' despite having a 1920x1080 display makes things look markedly better because the lowballed 4k bitrate is roughly what the 1920x1080 bitrate really ought to have been); and it's overwhelmingly the case that gaming cases are resorting to various sorts of upscaling and framegen to hit 4k at adequate frame rates.
Something like the playstation incident was embarrassing because it was a very specific spec sheet lie from a company whose party line was that 8k was the glorious future; but it's not like HDMI bandwidth is the real reason why an RDNA2 from 2020 that fits into a $500 retail price is not an 8k gaming option. Nothing in particular against RDNA2; but a 2025 blackwell that costs four times as much if you can find one at MSRP is also not really an 8k gaming option.
If there problem were a bunch of receivers with older HDMI versions and some nominal resolutions they probably could have fudged their way through it; but as it is cost sensitivity seems to be kicking in at or below 4k even for the comparatively cheap problem of high enough video bitrates, never mind the rather more costly one of GPU rendering or fully 8k+ video shooting and editing.
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