LG To Show Off New 55-Inch 8K Display at CES

MojoKid writes One of the most in-your-face buzzwords of the past year has been "4K," and there's little doubt that the forthcoming CES show in early January will bring it back in full force. As it stands today, 4K really isn't that rare, or expensive. You can even get 4K PC monitors for an attractive price. There does remain one issue, however; a lack of 4K content. We're beginning to see things improve, but it's still slow going. Given that, you might imagine that display vendors would hold off on trying to push that resolution envelope further – but you just can't stop hardware vendors from pushing the envelope. Earlier this year, both Apple and Dell unveiled "5K" displays that nearly doubled the number of pixels of 4K displays. 4K already brutalizes top-end graphics cards and lacks widely available video content, and yet here we are looking at the prospect of 5K. Many jaws dropped when 4K was first announced, and likewise with 5K. Now? Well, yes, 8K is on its way. We have LG to thank for that. At CES, the company will be showing-off a 55-inch display that boasts a staggering 33 million pixels — derived from a resolution of 7680x4320. It might not be immediately clear, but that's far more pixels than 4K, which suggests this whole "K" system of measuring resolutions is a little odd. On paper, you might imagine that 8K has twice the pixels of 4K, but instead, it's 4x.

Comments

We don't care how many pixels it has

[91degrees]

That's useful for technical matters like bandwidth calculation but the user cares about clarity.

8K can display a line half the thickness of 4K. That's what matters.

"Content" is an obnoxious red herring..

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Perhaps if you are buying your LCDs just to watch TV the 'content' argument is a serious problem; but c'mon, essentially all modern 'TV's are just big monitors with built in ATSC/DVT-B tuners and severely questionable EDID data.

Especially when the resolution is an integer multiple of what the existing 'content' was designed for, and a PC with suitably punchy GPU (which actually isn't much punch these days unless you are gaming, where things can admittedly get damned expensive at high resolutions, this isn't the bad old days when you had to buy some freaky Matrox unit to get a VGA out that didn't turn into blurryvision when it met a real monitor) can drive a seriously enormous screen, who cares?.

Quit carping about how Sony hasn't yet graced us with Premium Ultra HD Content on Blu-Ray 2.0 and embrace the fact that you can buy a terrifying pixel-battery of your very own at surprisingly attractive prices. Still a few kinks to work out at very high resolutions that currently available displayport or HDMI standards can't drive properly; but that's really the remaining issue.

Too small to be of any benefit.

[Computershack]

At 55" and average viewing distances of 8ft you're not going to notice all the detail of even 1080p. You literally need to be sat a couple of feet away to get the full benefit of 4K on a 55" display.

Can't see the difference: WRONG

[MrL0G1C]

I have a 46inch 1080p screen, at normal viewing distance I can make out jaggies and I hate font smoothing because it looks blurry. I've seen that chart that says what distances different native resolutions are effectively discernible and IT IS WRONG by 50% - I can see the difference clearly where the chart says I shouldn't be able to.

Re:About time

[Jaime2]

I'd believe you, but computer monitor resolution was on an upward trajectory until 2005, when consumer HD took off. Since then, it's been nearly stagnant for nine years. This is simply the progress we should have seen a long time ago.