The TV Industry Finally Concedes That the Future May Not be in 8K
upstart writes:
With virtually no content and limited benefits, 8K TVs were doomed:
Technology companies spent part of the 2010s trying to convince us that we would want an 8K display one day.
In 2012, Sharp brought the first 8K TV prototype to the CES trade show in Las Vegas. In 2015, the first 8K TVs started selling in Japan for 16 million yen (about $133,034 at the time), and in 2018, Samsung released the first 8K TVs in the US, starting at a more reasonable $3,500. By 2016, the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) had a specification for supporting 8K (Display Port1.4), and the HDMI Forum followed suit (with HDMI 2.1). By 2017, Dell had an 8K computer monitor. In 2019, LG released the first 8K OLED TV, further pushing the industry's claim that 8K TVs were"the future."
However, 8K never proved its necessity or practicality.
[...] LG Electronics was the first and only company to sell 8K OLED TVs, starting with the 88-inch Z9 in 2019. In 2022, it lowered the price of entry for an 8K OLED TV by $7,000 by charging $13,000 for a 76.7-inch TV.
[...] It wasn't hard to predict that 8K TVs wouldn't take off. In addition to being too expensive for many households, there has been virtually zero native 8K content available to make investing in an 8K display worthwhile. An ongoing lack of content was also easy to predict, given that there's still a dearth of 4K content, and many streaming, broadcasting, and gaming users still rely on 1920*1080 resolution.
[...] There's also the crucial question of whether people would even notice the difference between 4K and 8K. Science suggests that you could, but in limited situations.
The University of Cambridge's display resolution calculator, which is based on an study published in Nature in October from researchers at the university's Department of Computer Science and Technology and Meta, funded by Meta, suggests that your eyes can only make use of 8K resolution on a 50-inch screen if you're viewing it from a distance of 1 meter (3.3 feet) or less. Similarly, you would have to be sitting pretty close (2 to 3 meters/6.6 to 9.8 feet) to an 80-inch or 100-inch TV for 8K resolution to be beneficial. The findings are similar to those from RTINGs.com.
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