this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025
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article took forever to get to the bottom line. content. 8k content essentially does not exist. TV manufacturers were putting the cart before the horse.
4k tvs existed before the content existed. I think the larger issue is that the difference between what is and what could be is not worth the additional expense, especially at a time when most people struggle to pay rent, food, and medicine. More people watch videos on their phones than watch broadcast television. 8k is a solution looking for a problem.
Hell I still don't own a 4k tv and don't plan to go out of my way to buy one unless the need arises. Which I don't see why I need that when a normal flat-screen looks fine to me.
I actually have some tube tvs and be thinking of just hooking my vcr back up and watching old tapes. I don't need fancy resolutions in my shows or movies.
Only time I even think of those things is with video games.
4K hardly even makes sense unless your tv is over 70" and your watching it from less than 4 feet away. I do think VR could benefit from ultra-high resolution, though.
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https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-relationship
Extensive write up on this whole issue, even includes a calculator tool.
But, basically:
Yeah, going by angular resolution, even leaving the 8K content drought aside....
8K might make sense for a computer monitor you sit about 2 feet / 0.6m away from, if the diagonal size is 35 inches / ~89cm, or greater.
Take your viewing distance up to 8 feet / 2.4m away?
Your screen diagonal now has to be about 125 inches / ~318cm, or larger, for you to be able to maybe notice a difference with a jump from 4K to 8K.
........
The largest 8K TV that I can see available for purchase anywhere near myself... that costs ~$5,000 USD... is 85 inches.
I see a single one of 98 inches that is listed for $35,000. That's the largest one I can see, but its... uh, wildly more expensive.
So with a $5,000, 85 inch TV, that works out to...
You would have to be sitting closer than about 5 feet / ~1.5 meters to notice a difference.
And that's assuming you have 20/20 vision.
........
So yeah, VR goggle displays... seem to me to be the only really possibly practical use case for 8K ... other than basically being the kind of person who owns a home with a dedicated theater room.
What this chart is missing is the impact of the quality of the screen and the source material being played on it.
A shit screen is a shit screen, just like a badly filmed TV show from the 80s will look like crap on anything other than an old CRT.
People buying a 4k screen from Wallmart for $200 then wondering why they cant tell its any better than their old 1080p screen.
The problem with pushing up resolution is the cost to get a good set right now is so much its a niche within a niche of people who actually want it. Even a good 4k set with proper HDR support and big enough to make a different is expensive. Even when 8k moves away from early adopter markups its still going to be expensive, especially when compared to the tat you can by at the supermarket.
It is totally true that things are even more complex than just resolution, but that is why I linked the much more exhaustive write up.
Its even more complicated in practice than all the things they bring up, they are focusing on mainly a movie watching experience, not a video game playing experience.
They do not go into LED vs QLED vs OLED vs other actual display techs, don't go into response latency times, refresh rates, as you say all the different kinds of HDR color gamut support... I am sure I am forgetting things...
Power consumption may be a significant thing for you, image quality at various viewing angles...
Oh right, FreeSync vs GSync, VRR... blargh there are so many fucking things that can be different about displays...
At 1.6 meter for the metric minded. If you really stretch out and can hit the tv with your toes it's about the right distance.
You’re describing my bedroom tv.
I think it’s NHK, or one of the Japanese broadcasters anyways, that has actually been pressing for 8K since the 1990s. They didn’t have content back then and I doubt they have much today, but that’s what they wanted HD to be.
Not familiar with NHK specifically (or, to be clear, I think I am but not with enough certainty), but it really makes a lot of sense for news networks to push for 8k or even 16k at this point.
Because it is a chicken and egg thing. Nobody is going to buy an 8k TV if all the things they watch are 1440p. But, similarly, there aren't going to be widespread 8k releases if everyone is watching on 1440p screens and so forth.
But what that ALSO means is that there is no reason to justify using 8k cameras if the best you can hope for is a premium 4k stream of a sporting event. And news outlets are fairly regularly the only source of video evidence of literally historic events.
From a much more banal perspective, it is why there is a gap in TV/film where you go from 1080p or even 4k re-releases to increasingly shady upscaling of 720 or even 480 content back to everything being natively 4k. Over simplifying, it is because we were using MUCH higher quality cameras than we really should have been for so long before switching to cheaper film and outright digital sensors because "there is no point". Obviously this ALSO is dependent on saving the high resolution originals but... yeah.
it’s not exactly “there is no point”. It’s more like “the incremental benefit of filming and broadcasting in 8k does jot justify the large cost difference”.
Filming in 8k does have advantages. You can crop without losing quality.
I’m sorry, but if we are talking about 8k viability in TVs, we are not talking about shooting in 8k for 4k delivery.
You should be pointing out that shooting in higher than 8k, so you have the freedom to crop in post, is part of the reason 8k is burdensome and expensive.
So correct the person above me, they wrote about shooting in 8k.
The RED V-Raptor is expensive for consumer grade but nothing compared to some film equipment. There are lenses more expensive than an 8k camera.
Which, for all intents and purposes, means there is no point. Because no news network is going to respond to "Hey boss, I want us to buy a bunch of really expensive cameras that our audience will never notice because it will make our tape library more valuable. Oh, not to sell, but to donate to museums." with anything other than laughter and MAYBE firing your ass.
the point is, the cost/benefit calculation will change over time as the price of everything goes down. It's not a forever "no point".
... Almost like it would be more viable to film in higher resolution if more consumers had higher resolution displays?
Not only the content doesn't exist yet, it's just not practical. Even now 4k broadcasting is rare and 4k streaming is now a premium (and not always with a good bitstream, which matters a lot more) when once was offered as a cost-free future, imagine 8k that would roughly quadruple the amount of data required to transmit it (and transmit speee is not linear, 4x the speed would probably be at least 8x the cost).
And I seriously think noone except the nerdiest of nerds would notice a difference between 4k and 8k.
Not only does it not exist, it isn't wanted. People are content watching videos on YouTube and Netflix. They don't care for 4k. Even if they pay extra for Netflix 4k (which I highly doubt they do) I still question if they are watching 4k with their bandwidth and other limiting factors, which means they're not watching 4k and are fine with it.
That's usually the case
TV manufacturers are idiots.