The State of 8K

Abstract

Televisions and monitors with a whopping 7,680- by 4,320-pixel resolution have entered the market, but with rare exceptions the content and delivery systems to support these 8K devices have not kept pace. Even so, there is more to 8K than the classic chicken and egg scenario.

Every so often, a new TV feature—full high definition (HD), ultra-HD (4K and 8K), curved screens, “smartness,” OLED, 3D, quantum dots, and so on—appears on the market to differentiate new TVs from old ones. Depending on the degree of your personal cynicism, these features advance the state of TV performance or exist mostly to convince consumers to buy more and newer models. Ideally, both factors are at play. Smart TVs, for example, started out as a differentiator and quickly became a sine qua non. On the other hand, 3D television is an off-cited example of a flop—an unmet need that was never really a need or want. Most consumers weren’t compelled enough by stereoscopic content to jettison their old non-3D sets. (Cinemagoers have been kinder to 3D, which has become a common, if not dominant, viewing option at movie theaters.) One of the newest such differentiating features on the market today is 8K resolution. And as with many of the features that have come before it, experts disagree on how successful 8K will be, especially in the short term.

Taking a Closer Look at 8K

Close-up is a great way to view 8K, because its pixel-dense resolution stands up to inspection from just centimeters away, something that wouldn’t happen with, say, your old HD set, on which you could see every pixel at a range of inches away. (If you grew up with your parents telling you to sit farther away from the TV, this high density might not sound like a selling factor. We’ll get to that later on.)

8K takes its name from the rounding up of its horizontal resolution, 7,680 pixels. The current de facto high-resolution standard for TVs is 4K, which is shorthand for 3,840 horizontal by 2,160 vertical addressable pixels. Before 4K was 1,080p, which stood for 1,920 horizontal by 1,080 vertical pixels. The important point is that in going from 1,080p to 4K to 8K, there are twice as many horizontal pixels and twice as many vertical pixels in each iteration, quadrupling the number of pixels with each step. When 16K arrives—and you’ll probably read about it in this magazine in a year or two (no kidding)—it will represent a quadrupling of 8K. For a representational idea of how this works, see Fig. 1, the November/;December 2012 cover of ID magazine. It depicts screen frames increasing in size to represent the number of pixels that would actually be contained in each iteration.

Figure 1

Using screen frames, this November/;December 2012 ID cover represents the increase in numbers of pixels from NTSC and Pal (innermost rectangle) to 8K (outermost rectangle).

8K Then and Now

Although 8K is cutting-edge technology, companies have been working on it for some time. In the 2012 issue of ID (shown in Fig. 1), Takayuki Yamashita, Hiroyasu Masuda, and their colleagues at NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, wrote “Super Hi-Vision as Next-Generation Television and Its Video Parameters,” an article that introduced the concept of 8K and NHK’s plans to develop both 8K and 4K as immersive high-resolution technology for next-generation television systems. (NHK refers to both 4K and 8K as “Super Hi-Vision.”) The company continues to be at the forefront of 8K development.

Prototypes for 8K TVs were shown in the early to mid-2010s, including a set from Samsung at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in 2014.¹ Sharp started shipping a 70-in. 8K monitor in China, Japan, and Taiwan in late 2017 and in Europe by mid-2018, for about €11,000.² Dell has been selling an 8K monitor in the US for about a year. In America you can now buy a Samsung 8K TV, the Q900, for about $15,000 USD (Fig. 2).

Figure 2

Samsung introduced its first commercially available 8K TV at IFA 2018 in Berlin last August. The set became available in the US in October 2018 in an 85-in. size. Image: Samsung

Many companies—including Samsung, Sharp, LG Display, and Sony—were showing 8K at the Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA) in Berlin in August 2018. Samsung’s and Sharp’s LCD-based models are available now, and sets shown by LG (OLED) and Sony are tentatively earmarked to ship later in 2019. All the 8K TVs on display at IFA, according to reporters from a wide range of publications, looked fantastic—although TV manufacturers rarely showcase new devices that don’t look first-rate.

The Need—or Lack Thereof—for 8K

Right now, 8K has its fans and its detractors, its pros and cons. When it comes to the latter, the 8K sets shown at IFA are very expensive, especially because, in practical terms, that extra resolution may not make that much of a difference, or any difference, when you’re sitting several feet away from the screen, as is the case in most TV-viewing situations. And you won’t have any 8K content to watch yet, unless you live in Japan, where NHK just rolled out some limited 8K programming. Last, if 8K content existed, it would be so massive in terms of bandwidth that it might not be able to squeeze through the pipeline to your set. But while all of the above caveats certainly apply, they are not the entire story. Let’s look more closely at the issues of resolution, content, and infrastructure.

If Super-High Resolution Appears in the Forest…

One of the central criticisms of 8K is that it’s unnecessary because we can’t see the resolution well enough to appreciate it. The August 2018 CNET article “8K TV: What you need to know” sums up the basics of the argument: “You’ll need to sit really close to an 85-inch 8K screen to get any benefit of the extra resolution…. In other words, from farther than 5 feet away you won’t be able to see any benefit of an 8K TV compared to a 4K TV.” ³ In the average US home, the couch or easy chair is situated a good deal farther than five feet from the TV. “Ideal” viewing distances for even 1,080p and 4K may also seem a bit close for comfort. However, if you’re willing to rearrange your den, you can follow the guidelines from experts such as mail-order electronics retailer Crutchfield.com, which suggests 4.6 to 6.9 feet as the optimal viewing distance to see the detail on a 55-in. 4K TV screen.⁴

According to Mark Fihn, analyst and publisher of the Veritas et Visus family of newsletters that cover the flat-panel display industry, statements about what we can and cannot see in terms of resolution are usually based on the Snellen eye exam, which assumes 20/20 vision for everyone. “Many people see much better than that,” he says. He also noted that people can observe the difference between resolutions at distances they should theoretically not be able to. In the September 2018 issue of the Veritas newsletter High Resolution, he wrote, “I have conducted controlled tests at the local WalMart, interviewing shoppers to discern their ability to recognize differences in resolution. Even at distances as great as 60 feet, especially when viewing still images, it’s a simple matter for most people to identify higher resolutions.”⁵ Even though Fihn’s consumer survey was somewhat informal, the results do line up with other anecdotal observations. For example, high-resolution TVs are often extremely impressive when seen from a distance on trade show floors, even though we are not supposed to be able to “see” the resolution from far off.

There are other benefits of high resolution that are not directly related to how closely you are looking at the screen, notes Jeff Yurek, director of marketing and investor relations at quantum-dot maker Nanosys. “On the capture side,” he says, “8K resolution makes 4K better by giving content creators more flexibility in production. It offers the ability to reframe the image in postproduction while still delivering full 4K resolution, and it enables a lower noise floor through supersampling. Finer pixels can also better capture the unique character of camera lenses. On the output side, there’s much more to 8K than just raw ‘sharpness.’ The human visual system picks up on finer gradations between colors, with less banding and tighter dynamic range mapping, so the viewer sees a more realistic, lifelike image.”

In a 2018 interview with ID, NHK author Yamashita said, “Regardless of the resolution of the content [2K, 4K], [it] will look better on an 8K TV. That is because the dot pitch of an 8K TV is finer, and the gradations can be reproduced more smoothly.” (He concedes, however, that this would not be true for very old content shown on a large screen.)

Yet another argument for why the high resolution might come in handy is, surprisingly, 3D. While acknowledging that 3D is considered a failure for in-home viewing, Fihn says he is still a strong proponent of it. He believes that stereoscopic (glasses-based) TV failed to take off because as watchers, people rarely devote their full attention to the TV screen. “TV is a social event,” he says. Even if we are not interacting with others in the room, we are looking at our phones, eating, working on our laptops, knitting, etc. Having to take 3D glasses on and off isn’t compatible with these viewing habits, he says. “You can’t even glance at the clock on the wall.” The higher resolution provided by 8K will remove the need for glasses, and, according to Fihn, autosterescopic 3D will become popular because we can watch it in the casual manner to which we are accustomed. “To enable no glasses, you need more views,” he says. “4K is almost good enough and 8K will be.” And according to Yamashita, 3D applications such as virtual reality may provide the ultimate impetus for 16K.

TVs First, Content Second

Without question, there is virtually no 8K content out there to pull in with your fancy new 8K set, should you choose to buy one. This is always a tricky situation with new technology. (Just ask anyone who got behind laser disks instead of VHS or Betamax.) Do you invest in a device before you can do much with it? 8K broadcasts to date have been confined to special events like the World Cup and the Olympics in Rio, which could be watched at designated public areas with designated equipment. As of December 1, 2018, however, NHK began broadcasting 8K content over a satellite channel called BS8K. According to Yamashita, viewers in Japan will also be able to watch via a cable channel that will re-modulate and retransmit the 8K content. He also mentions that the 8K broadcasting will be carried out at a frame rate of 60 Hz, adding, “We are continuing research and development of cameras, displays, interfaces, and high-quality codecs that can be used for video production so that we can upgrade to 120 Hz in the near future.”

Fihn also notes that a great deal of 8K content already exists in the form of still images. “There are an awful lot of people who walk around with an 8K camera in their pocket,” he says, referring to the fact that many smartphones come with such cameras. 8K displays can show that content to its best advantage. Given the number of people who display slideshows of static imagery on their TV sets these days, the idea is not far-fetched.

Pipeline Problems

Next, there is the question of bandwidth. Let’s say you have an 8K TV and 8K programming. To get the programming to the device in Japan right now, the answer is by satellite or by satellite via cable. For terrestrial digital transmission, streaming services that offer 4K video already contend with broadband bottlenecks. Streaming in 8K will require jumping to a much higher bandwidth, such as the gigabit speeds available on fiber and cable networks in cities but not much elsewhere. Will the changes to the content delivery infrastructure that would need to happen to accommodate 8K be evolutionary or disruptive in nature? Fihn says, “Both. I think it will happen slowly, but it will happen. And I actually think 8K, like 4K, will happen more quickly than most analysts currently predict.”

“You hear, ‘Nobody asked for 8K.’ But our job in the display industry is to innovate new experiences, not to say ‘OK, good enough.’ If we did that, we’d still be on SD!”

– Jeff Yurek, director of marketing and investor relations at quantum-dot maker Nanosys

8K Today…or Later

Despite some general pushback on 8K, Yurek says he is bullish on the technology (while freely acknowledging that because his company makes technology that enhances TVs, it’s in his interest to be so.) “The common refrain is kind of a snarky hot take,” he says. “You hear, ‘Nobody asked for 8K.’ But our job in the display industry is to innovate new experiences, not to say ‘OK, good enough.’ If we did that, we’d still be on SD! It’s also worth noting that upscaling technology has improved quite a bit since the last time we went through a resolution transition. Even if 8K content isn’t immediately available, your 8K TV still looks better, and I think the early 8K TV reviews bear that out.” (This is also due to upscaling technologies that companies like Samsung are providing in their 8K sets to optimize content.)

Yurek also thinks that from the point of view of marketing, 8K is not a fly-by-night gimmick: “Consumers totally get resolution,” he says. He thinks they will start buying 8K TVs long before 8K content is available. “4K content is growing rapidly but still lags HD, especially on the broadcast side,” he says. “Most people still have 720p cable, yet you almost can’t find a non-4K TV in the store now. I think Michael Cioni, senior vice president of innovation for Panavision, has the right take on this in that resolution will continue to improve with a definite rhythm, almost like Moore’s Law. We should get used to it. I think 16K will happen too.” Fihn also says that 8K has immediate potential in terms of desktop productivity. He is currently using a 32-in. 8K monitor from Dell. It is high-end, at about $4,000, but if you use screens for a living (like he does), it will serve you well, he says. “You can put four Microsoft Word pages on a 32-in. screen and they are entirely readable,” he says. “You’re looking at better fonts, because you have more pixels. The 8K provides so much more information and it’s crystal clear.” For streaming, he notes, it’s not going to outdo non-8K devices, but for users like stockbrokers, artists, and so forth who would really benefit from higher resolution of static imagery, it is a productivity enhancer.

Even though Fihn is generally pro-8K, he agrees that there is no need to run out and buy an 8K TV. “I do agree generally with the statement that you do not now need an 8K television if all you do is sit there and watch moving images,” says Fihn. “But if you were to use it to show still images, or desire a significantly improved desktop computing productivity experience, that’s different.” So unless you’re the kind of comfortably well-off person who has to have the latest of everything, you don’t need to throw out your 4K set and buy an 8K one immediately. However, make no mistake: 8K TVs are on the way. And as consumers respond with interest—which they undoubtedly will—the content challenges will be addressed. Before you know it, you may be wondering if you should ditch that old 8K for a 16K model.

Biography

• Jenny Donelan is an editor and writer who has focused on display technology for more than 10 years. She can be reached at [email protected].