8K – To Be Fair…
While 8K TVs are already part of the CE landscape, we have not been big fans. Not because we don’t like the idea of higher resolution TV but because the average consumer is buying something that will cost more but have relatively little incremental value. 8K set producers will explain how your 8K TV will have 33.18m pixels while your 4K set has a mere 8.29m but they don’t mention that you will not see much of an advantage with an 8K unless you are sitting relatively close to the screen, which in most cases is uncomfortably close. There is ‘upscaling’, the process by which your TV takes lower resolution content and scales it to utilize those extra pixels., so, according to salesmen, your ‘up-scaled’ content will look better on your 8K TV. Unfortunately this is not true, as it is impossible to increase the resolution of content to a point higher than what it was shot in, so up-scalers find ways to take the content and just spread it out among more pixels, and as above, those extra pixels are only going to make a difference if you are close to the TV, so the idea that upscaling low resolution content to 8K is going to make it look better is technically incorrect.
So what are 8K TV sets really good for? Displaying 8K content. Any 8K content will look sharper on an 8K TV set, although much of the difference will be lost if you sit a normal distance from the TV, but when it comes to native 8K content, there will be nothing better than an 8K TV. That said, the gist of our view on 8K TVs is that 8K content is still quite rare, with the few sources, primarily OTT streaming services, with only one broadcast network, the BS8K system in Japan, which is run by NHK (state) and shares its channel with the channels 4K service. The 8K service is available in Japan and will be the source for 8K programming from the upcoming Olympics, but is relatively limited in its offerings, which tend to be travelogues and a few movies (West Side Story just added) that were shot in native 8K. Other than that, the rest are OTT services with YouTube (GOOG) being the biggest, offering a variety of travel and exploration 8K content and a few movies, NASA’s 8K channel, France’s The Explorers Channel (VSAT), and an 8K channel from Rakuten (4755.JP), and while some game consoles sort of offer 8K resolution output, there are only a handful of games that support 8K rendering.
All in, things are only slightly different for 8K than last year, and that is mostly the fact that some smartphones can actually record in 8K, but in most cases those are able to record relatively short (3min – 5min) clips and there is little 8K editing software that would allow you to make any changes, but what about Blu-ray? If we are talking about raw 8K footage, meaning uncompressed, it takes 121.5 Gb/minute of capacity, so a 1 hour movie would take up 7.3 terabytes of disc space, and since a Blu-ray 3.0 disc only has the capacity for 100Gb, raw 8K is currently impossible. This means that some form of compression would be needed, and likely quite a bit to fit into that space requirement, so you are then losing the high resolution of 8K even before it gets to your TV set. The good news is that many movies are shot in 8K even though the release is at best 4K, which allows the producer and editor the option of blowing up a portion of a scene without losing too much detail, so when 8K storage and streaming issues are finally resolved, many films will be able to be released in 8K format, but by then 8K TV technology will have also improved, so the issue is why buy one today? The answer is the same as it was the last time we reviewed the status of 8K…wait.
So what are 8K TV sets really good for? Displaying 8K content. Any 8K content will look sharper on an 8K TV set, although much of the difference will be lost if you sit a normal distance from the TV, but when it comes to native 8K content, there will be nothing better than an 8K TV. That said, the gist of our view on 8K TVs is that 8K content is still quite rare, with the few sources, primarily OTT streaming services, with only one broadcast network, the BS8K system in Japan, which is run by NHK (state) and shares its channel with the channels 4K service. The 8K service is available in Japan and will be the source for 8K programming from the upcoming Olympics, but is relatively limited in its offerings, which tend to be travelogues and a few movies (West Side Story just added) that were shot in native 8K. Other than that, the rest are OTT services with YouTube (GOOG) being the biggest, offering a variety of travel and exploration 8K content and a few movies, NASA’s 8K channel, France’s The Explorers Channel (VSAT), and an 8K channel from Rakuten (4755.JP), and while some game consoles sort of offer 8K resolution output, there are only a handful of games that support 8K rendering.
All in, things are only slightly different for 8K than last year, and that is mostly the fact that some smartphones can actually record in 8K, but in most cases those are able to record relatively short (3min – 5min) clips and there is little 8K editing software that would allow you to make any changes, but what about Blu-ray? If we are talking about raw 8K footage, meaning uncompressed, it takes 121.5 Gb/minute of capacity, so a 1 hour movie would take up 7.3 terabytes of disc space, and since a Blu-ray 3.0 disc only has the capacity for 100Gb, raw 8K is currently impossible. This means that some form of compression would be needed, and likely quite a bit to fit into that space requirement, so you are then losing the high resolution of 8K even before it gets to your TV set. The good news is that many movies are shot in 8K even though the release is at best 4K, which allows the producer and editor the option of blowing up a portion of a scene without losing too much detail, so when 8K storage and streaming issues are finally resolved, many films will be able to be released in 8K format, but by then 8K TV technology will have also improved, so the issue is why buy one today? The answer is the same as it was the last time we reviewed the status of 8K…wait.
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