Big Surprise—Nobody Wants 8K TVs

The first 8K TV was revealed all the way back in 2012, and this was going to be the logical next step after 4K UHD sets. Yet well over a decade later 8K displays have completely failed at making any inroads when it comes to market share.

Sony’s TV division says the market has no interest in 8K. Major manufacturers aren’t bothering to develop new 8K TV models, and the market for 8K TVs peaked in 2022 and has been in decline since then. So, in other words, nobody wants these TVs—but why?

The 8K Promise

Bigger numbers are always easy to market. Customers have no problem understanding that more inches are better, that more bits are better, or that more gigabytes are better. They don’t always understand by how much, or where the point of diminishing returns are, but if the new thing has a bigger number than the old thing, it’s better, right?

4K UHD (real 4K is actually 4096 x 2160) is a straight-up quadrupling of the pixel count compared to “Full” HD. By doubling the number of pixels on each axis, you go from roughly two million pixels to eight million.

While 1080p already looks pretty sharp, 4K offers a significant increase in sharpness. At least, it does with the right kind of content, such as nature documentaries of video games using high-end PC hardware.

8K takes 4K and doubles the pixels on each axis again to roughly 33 million pixels. Which means, for a given display size, the pixels become four times smaller compared to a 4K display. Think of how detailed a 4K image is on your current TV or monitor, and then consider something with four times that detail—sounds pretty amazing, right?

Reality Check: 4K Is “Good Enough”

The problem is that 4K is already pretty darn detailed. When was the last time you watched 4K content and thought to yourself “I can see the pixels” or that the image seemed grainy somehow? I’m talking about native 4K content here, of course, so most of your console games wouldn’t count.

Now, if you’ve seen an 8K TV in person, you’ll know that there is in fact a visible difference in image detail comparing the two. No one can claim that 8K TVs don’t have visibly more detail than 4K. Of course, I’ve only ever seen 8K displays at expos and at department stores where large-format 8K TVs are demoed. Here, you can see this difference when standing much closer to the screen than you’d ever use in real life.

Viewing distance is the key factor here, because at normal viewing distances it can be hard to pick up the differences between 1080p and 4K, much less 8K.

The bottom line is that most people, most of the time, in most practical situations, won’t see any difference between 4K and 8K displays that matters.

The Content Problem

That is, of course, assuming that you can find any 8K content at all. While Hollywood films are routinely shot at resolutions higher than 4K, the goal isn’t to produce final content at a higher resolution than this. It’s to have the freedom to reframe and otherwise manipulate the raw footage without hurting the final 4K results.

8K content would cost much, much more than 4K to shoot, store, edit, and stream. Rendering CGI at four times the current standard resolution is likely to make movies that are already too expensive completely impractical.

So, if you buy an 8K TV today, you won’t have anything to watch unless you render it yourself with an extremely expensive PC or upscale 4K content to middling results.

Cost and Practicality

8K starts to make a practical difference at large screen sizes, but how large? There has been a trend towards larger and larger TVs over the years, and it seems that these days the 55-inch TV is in decline, with 65-inches becoming the popular balanced choice. 98-inch TVs are also becoming more popular with both affordable and expensive models of this size being relatively common now.

Even at around 100-inches, at normal viewing distances, the difference between 4K and 8K isn’t all that apparent unless you literally have two TVs side-by-side. But, we don’t watch TV side-by-side and so, ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Besides, for most people, even a 100-inch TV is simply impractical, even if the price of the TV wouldn’t be an issue. So going above 100-inches to justify 8K encounters yet another point of friction.

A Solution in Search of a Problem

But cost is a factor for most people and the price difference between a 4K and 8K TV of the same size is so large that any perceived improvement in fidelity just doesn’t seem worth it. Add to this that current 8K TVs are quite outdated when it comes to features and performance in all other areas of image quality, and 8K is a particularly hard sell.

In the end, no one was hurting for more resolution. Instead, people appreciate higher refresh rates, better motion handling, perfect black levels, high peak brightness, and accurate color reproduction.

What is the problem 8K TVs are trying to solve then? The answer, for now, is that there is no mainstream need for 8K.

Where 8K Actually Makes Sense

Apart from very large format TVs, there are a few other places I can see 8K being truly useful. One of these is in the cinema, where you have to look at something between 700 and 1500 inches in size. It’s true that movies at the theater look softer than they do on my 4K OLED, so getting four times the resolution would be nice. However, someone needs to make the movies in 8K, and as we already covered that’s probably not going to happen for a while—if ever.

Home projection is another area where it makes sense. The cheapest and easiest way to get an image up to 200 inches at home is to use a projector. An 8K projector certainly makes sense, but it’s going to be expensive and hard to implement. Though using pixel shifting technology might be the best compromise. Like the $16K (!) JVC DLA-NZ8 which reconstructs an 8K frame by rapidly pixel-shifting a native 4K frame.

Finally, I think 8K monitors could be a good solution for some types of computer work at a desk. You effectively have four 4K screens with no borders, so if you’re working with lots of data, or are authoring 4K or higher content, there’s a practical use for all that resolution. After all, we eyeball computer monitors closely when working, if not when playing.

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However, I don’t think 8K will ever be a thing because it’s not simply a case of the technology becoming cheap enough for 8K to be trivial on all counts to produce. The limiting factor here is human biology. So, unless we’re going to upgrade ourselves (and I’m all for that), we’re already at or near the sweetspot for display resolution.