Is the TV Industry Finally Conceding That the Future May Not Be 8K? (arstechnica.com)
- Reference: 0180718108
- News link: https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/26/02/02/0152250/is-the-tv-industry-finally-conceding-that-the-future-may-not-be-8k
- Source link: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/01/lg-joins-the-rest-of-the-world-accepts-that-people-dont-want-8k-tvs/
"However, 8K never proved its necessity or practicality."
> LG Display is no longer making 8K LCD or OLED panels, FlatpanelsHD [2]reported today ... LG Electronics was the first and only company to sell 8K OLED TVs, starting with the 88-inch Z9 in 2019. In 2022, it [3]lowered the price-of-entry for an 8K OLED TV by $7,000 by charging $13,000 for a 76.7-inch TV. FlatpanelsHD cited anonymous sources who said that LG Electronics would no longer restock the [4]2024 QNED99T , which is the last LCD 8K TV that it released.
>
> LG's 8K abandonment follows other brands distancing themselves from 8K. TCL, which released its last 8K TV in 2021, [5]said in 2023 that it wasn't making more 8K TVs due to low demand. Sony [6]discontinued its last 8K TVs in April and is unlikely to return to the market, as it plans to sell the majority [7]ownership of its Bravia TVs to TCL .
>
> The tech industry tried to convince people that the 8K living room was coming soon. But since the 2010s, people have mostly adopted 4K. In September 2024, research firm Omdia reported that there were "nearly 1 billion 4K TVs currently in use." In comparison, 1.6 million 8K TVs had been sold since 2015, Paul Gray, Omdia's TV and video technology analyst, [8]said , noting that 8K TV sales peaked in 2022. That helps explain why membership at the 8K Association, launched by stakeholders Samsung, TCL, Hisense, and panel maker AU Optronics in 2019, is dwindling. As of this writing, the group's membership page lists 16 companies, including just two TV manufacturers (Samsung and Panasonic). Membership no longer includes any major TV panel suppliers. At the end of 2022, the 8K Association had 33 members, per an archived version of the nonprofit's online membership page via the Internet Archive's [9]Wayback Machine .
"It wasn't hard to predict that 8K TVs wouldn't take off," the article concludes. "In addition to being too expensive for many households, there's been virtually zero native 8K content available to make investing in an 8K display worthwhile..."
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/01/lg-joins-the-rest-of-the-world-accepts-that-people-dont-want-8k-tvs/
[2] https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1672937087
[3] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/lgs-lowers-the-price-on-its-new-8k-oled-tv-to-13000/
[4] https://www.lg.com/us/tvs/lg-75qned99tua-qned-4k-tv
[5] https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1672937087
[6] https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1744127101
[7] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/01/tcl-to-gain-majority-ownership-over-sonys-bravia-tvs/
[8] https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1726486660
[9] https://web.archive.org/web/20221206032747/https:/8kassociation.com/about-us/members/
It should be 8K (Score:2)
For an immersive cinematic experience, TV has to take up 50 degrees field of view (a fist held out length-wise at arm's distance is 10 degrees). You would make out the pixels in a 4K TV at that distance if your vision is 20/20. For normal TV .. 40 degrees is fine. In my case, even with a 4K TV taking up 30 to 40 degrees of my field of view I can easily make out the pixels .. BUT my vision is better than 20/10.
Remember for a while people were saying we didn't need 4K, and that HD was good enough. And before
Re: It should be 8K (Score:2)
Are you also planning on getting theater releases of films? Cause otherwise you're not going to get 8k. There's literally zero "cinematic" quality content available in 8k for the consumer market.
No one wants this shit. Absolutely no one. It's not going to take off and you're smoking some good drugs if you think it is.
Re: (Score:3)
Hey was this you back in 2014? [1]https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
Or this? [2]https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
[1] https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5221641&cid=47131077
[2] https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5221641&cid=47128885
Re: (Score:3)
You're an outlier. Top 0.1% vision. Or better.
I've got very good vision. Diopt 0.0 in both eyes. Due to my age I will be needing reading glasses within a couple of years but for now I can still read fine without them.
For me, the difference between HD and 4K is visible but small. I can't resolve individual pixels on 4K at any reasonable distance.
Since most people will have worse vision than us, 4K will be beyond their limit. 8K is only adding cost without adding quality.
See the pixels? Um... (Score:3)
You can make out the pixels... I mean, sure, if you have a black field with a white pixel on it, you will see the white pixel. But put a normal picture on the screen, and tell me that you can see the individual pixels in the picture? You have a great imagination, or maybe the actual picture isn't 4k.
I am sitting pretty close (50cm) to a display with a horizontal resolution of 2560 (so, a lot less than 4k). Probably 45-50 degrees in my field of view. The text I'm writing, sure, I can pretend that I see the
Don't believe you (Score:3)
" In my case, even with a 4K TV taking up 30 to 40 degrees of my field of view I can easily make out the pixels"
Unless you have vision better than that of a bird of prey or you're sitting a foot away from the screen with a magnifying glass then you're talking BS.
Re: (Score:2)
It's down to the availability of panels. They will make a panel with a certain pixel density, and it can be cut to various sizes which results in various resolutions. Of course, the larger you cut it, the more expensive it will be, due both to the amount of material involved but also because the chance of there being defects increases.
Hopefully 8k monitors are not too far off. 4k is good but not perfect. The 6k ones are similar pixel density to smaller 4k monitors, just larger.
Quadraphonic all over again (Score:2)
Technically impressive, but other than a few early adopters, the public saw no need for it. 8K might do better, but few people can tell the difference with 4K, so they'll need a better hook than just imperceptible resolution.
I wonder if AI game players could benefit. Their fake vision is as good as they want.
Re: (Score:2)
> but few people can tell the difference [when comparing 8K] with 4K,
I can well believe this. For a very long time I really struggled with sub-pixel rendering because it (to me) left visible colour fringes on the edge of letters. It was "bizarre" when the word "well" at the start of this sentence might have one red and one blue 'l' for example.
Since switching to 4K I've not had a problem. While writing this I double checked and the colour edging is still there but I can't really see it at all. Now I've looked
Re: (Score:3)
And I can't even read your post from a foot away because it has weird shit in it.
Tests have shown the vast (Score:1)
majority of people don't need that much resolution. It's marketing shit.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps, but I'd like to have 8k. 4k on a 48" has noticeable text quality issues at 3-4' and deserves 4k. 1080p on a 13.3" has the same issue at ~1.5', and deserves 4k.
Re: Tests have shown the vast (Score:3)
I'm sure these companies love it when people like you beg them to take more of your money.
Re: (Score:2)
> majority of people don't need that much resolution. It's marketing shit.
Right, but we (the computer/software/developer/CAD/graphic design type people) care. 8k is completely lost in motion blur and almost useless for watching films on anything but a full home cinema. On the other hand, it's really useful if you want to have static text or compare detailed photo images. We want cheap 8k monitors because it's much more convenient to have three 8k monitors than six 4k monitors. We have failed to fool the TV manufacturers into delivering what we want. If we can work out a way of fo
Skirting (Score:2)
> "It wasn't hard to predict that 8K TVs wouldn't take off," the article concludes. "In addition to being too expensive for many households, there's been virtually zero native 8K content available to make investing in an 8K display worthwhile..."
Completely skirts that nobody will be able to see any difference between 4K and 8K on any living-room sized TV viewed from a normal distance. Most people can't even see a difference between 2K and 4K in motion video.
Re: (Score:2)
People will get bigger TVs .. also AI upscaling from 4K to 8K can make it look good.
Re: (Score:2)
> "People will get bigger TVs"
I don't think it matters. It could be a 150" TV. If viewed at the typical 10 to 15 feet away, I still suspect 99+% of the public would not be able to tell which is 4K and which is 8K when we are talking about motion video. A small number might be able to tell with a static photo. 4K hit a hugely diminishing-return point.
And if you start getting insanely big TV's, then normal distance from it will be annoying. So you would need to sit much further away, and at that point
No content, DRM, so why bother? (Score:2)
It turns out that without ANY content the 8k support is not needed. And there is little content because the HDMI Forum is refusing to pull its head out of its ass and allow HDMI 2.1 to be licensed without heavy DRM and NDA requirements.
Well, the industry shot itself in the foot with 3D, by making it hard to create 3D content. The only supported way was H.264 MVC, with barely any tools that can output it. Meanwhile, saner side-by-side 3D was not consistently supported.
Re: (Score:2)
Closed standards are a sure way to stifle innovation and kill market penetration. More effectively than any pirating ever could.
Minidisk? Zune? Betamax? I haven't had enough coffee to list all the examples. And if I did, I would probably die of caffeine poisoning first. Side note, why does Sony's name come up a lot in these types of lists ... oh yeah, having a foot in content AND device camps. "Man who sit on fence get splinters". Content division's paranoia cripples the device and stops the device technolo
Content (Score:2)
broadcast tv is still shit-tier bitrate 1080p (or even sometimes 720p/1080i still). streaming platforms are marginally better bitrate, but still rarely even have 4k content. there are 4k blu-ray movies. but honestly, im not sure i've seen any 8k content ANYWHERE!? im sure if i explicitly search for it, i can find it, but the casual content around me is 4k or lower.
and beyond that, we're also at the point of diminishing returns. we're at the point where the production cost of the convent vs the demand makes
Re: (Score:2)
> but honestly, im not sure i've seen any 8k content ANYWHERE!? im sure if i explicitly search for it, i can find it,
Have a look where Betamax failed, in the corner of porn you'll find some 8K smut :)
8k is nice for computers though (Score:2)
I'm posting this from my home PC with Dell's 8k monitor. It's nice to see completely crisp text, even at small sizes, and certainly a noticeable quality improvement from 4k. But that's because I am sitting a few inches away. I recently bought a new television, and while I was tempted to pick up a cheap used 8k model, in practice it would make no difference when viewing it from the sofa.
Even Dell seems to have retreated from 8k, however. Their newer top-end monitor has a roughly 6k horizontal resolution.
8K will of course be a thing, just not yet. (Score:3)
Silly premise. The future will bring us 8K, and heck, much better resolutions than that too. There are quite a few things leading to it not being popular *yet*.
1. Something needs to drive it, without jitter. That means whatever storage medium the movies/series are on, needs to have enough processing power to decode the video and ship it to the TV. This is less of a problem now in 2025, but my original Popcorn Hour box had problems with 1024p. And that was in 2015.
2. There need to be enough bandwidth, everywhere, for folks to actually be able to watch content over streams. Sure, lots of us have GB connectivity and fiber et al - but that's far from everywhere. Even in 2025. If you don't have enough bandwidth - why would you be interested in this?
3. Even Blue-Ray would not be able to store a movie w/o heavy compression, and what's the point of 8K if you have compression artifacts all over the place? A 2 hour movie needs 100G+ , and if it's not compressed to hell and back - probably quite a bit more.
4. Connectivity. You need to be able to deliver this over a single cable, which needs to be standardized. This might have happened by now - but it needs to be everywhere. Specially designed non-standard stuff won't cut it.
5. Pricing. Very few people will fork out $2K+ for a TV. I still don't even have 4K TVs as they were too expensive last time I refreshed my TVs. Next TV I buy will of course be 4K - as the prices are now OK. For 8K TVs to become mainstream, prices needs to become reasonable.
But we'll get there. We just need the rest of the "delivery technology", standardization, etc. to catch up, in addition to prices to drop. Give it another 10 years.
Of course, (Score:2)
because 16k will be the next big thing.
I have a 2017 27" 5K iMac, where's 5K content ? (Score:2)
I just finally got fiberoptic to view 4K videos/movies. But where's 5K content. I eyes can only see so much fine details that 8K is overkill and price is way too high.
Yes but... (Score:5, Funny)
...maybe enough time has passed that 3d could be tried again?
Re:Time for 3D tv to make comeback? (Score:2)
[1]You got the wrong TV, silly head! [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdRMVhlNP5I
Re: (Score:2)
> "...maybe enough time has passed that 3d could be tried again?"
It should be. 3D is not about resolution, but adding depth. While nobody will see any difference between 4K and 8K video (few can differentiate 2K and 4K at normal distance), EVERYONE will notice 3D. Some might not like it (I do), or want to bother with it, but it is certainly a major feature. And for content filmed correctly, it can add a lot to the experience.
3D failed in the market due to:
1) The lack of buyable content (3D Bluray).
2)
Re: (Score:2)
My comment was a jab at the fact that our recent 3D mania was not the first one.
It failed this time exactly for the same reason it did the previous times. It's a novelty that adds no lasting value to anything. There's only so many times you can be bothered to see random junk popping out of the screen. You've seen it once, you've seen it all. And then the reasons you list come to play and everyone discovers that while 3D isn't in any way better than 2D, it is in multiple ways worse. And they walk away from t
Re: (Score:2)
> "It's a novelty that adds no lasting value to anything. There's only so many times you can be bothered to see random junk popping out of the screen."
If there is random junk popping out of the screen, then it is exactly the kind of crap content that gives 3D a bad reputation. Done properly, 3D should and will add positively to the immersive experience. Maybe you haven't seen anything done well? I have a number of movies that were natively shot and mastered in 3D and look fantastic.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes and no. Even big budget productions can botch the 3D experience a lot. My prime example is the ending of the first Hobbit movie, when the eagles carry the dwarfs, Gandalf and Bilbo away. This scene does not make sense in 3D, because details that are necessary in 2D like Depth of Field do not work in 3D, where you can choose what to focus your eyes on. Being forced to see the eagles in focus, and the background blurred was killing depth perception to me. Additional, the perspective suggested by the size
Re: (Score:2)
If 3D is such a failure, why do 3D movies still come out regularly in theatres?
In fact, one of the big reasons Hollywood stopped doing 3D Blu-Ray releases was to encourage people to see the movie in theatres rather than wait for it to come out on disc. By making 3D a theatre exclusive, that is.
3D at home still remains popular, or did, given how VR works. (And anyone complaining about glasses should know a VR headset is much worse than glasses).
3D home releases still happen - Germany with Turbine and Japan s
Re: (Score:2)
It's not dead, it just smells funny...
I don't know where that popular is. I don't know anyone that cares about 3D movies the slightest bit, except the one guy who used to ramble about the great potential within, but never knew of any examples of that potential being put to worthy use.
I'm sure there are people who enjoy the spectacular colourful visuals offered by Tron. Otoh there's also people who enjoy the spectacular colourful visuals offered by dropping acid. Neither of these have anything to do with wha
Re: (Score:2)
3d works in theaters. You can make it work by spending big piles of money.
Do you want to spend big piles of money to watch TV at home? Maybe you do, but not enough other people do.
Re: Yes but... (Score:2)
Not everyone can see 3D. Iâ(TM)m part of a sizeable minority who donâ(TM)t have any or have just partial stereoscopic vision. And who wants to wear special glasses to watch TV anyway, especially if they already wear glasses? I enjoyed the original Avatar for what it was as a story in the cinema (subsequent ones are shit), but it was annoying having to wear the glasses even though they offered nothing to me.
Re: (Score:2)
> "Not everyone can see 3D"
And not everyone can hear in stereo. Doesn't mean things should only be in mono. And not everyone has good 360 degree sound perception, doesn't mean we should abolish surround sound. And not everyone can see full color.... you get the idea.
3D video, even done well/correctly, isn't for everyone. Nobody is suggesting it should be forced on people :)
Some people (like me) can't stand high framerate and "motion smoothing". Some love it. Most don't seem to notice or care either w
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with 3D is that it's very hard to get it right. If part of the image is out of focus, some people are going to get headaches. If there is too much use of depth with stuff popping out of the screen, headaches. And even if it is done perfectly, you need special glasses and a good seating position.
8k is the same as all other 2D TV on the viewer's end. The issue is making it. At 8k you can't do manual focus, for example. You need upgraded editing equipment. It's been deployed in Japan for years, and
Re: Yes but... (Score:2)
Ironically, it's possible. Processing power and refresh rates have improved enough to get rid of the flicker thing. Streaming has all but replaced Blu Ray so there's enough bandwidth to make it work. AI would maybe be useful for converting 2D media into 3D. Displays are big enough to make the image look like you're watching through a gigantic window. It's those damned shutter glasses that might be the final hurdle. Well, and making the screen viewable for 2D and 3D watchers at the same time without covering