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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.
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.
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.
5.5" phone screens are at 2560x1440, with 4k on the way. 8k on a monitor...what's the hold up?
Phones seem perfectly able to light the screen and drive the pixels at less than 4W TDP. Seems odd that 8k is such a large challenge given volume, mass and power budgets 20-100x that of a phone.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
THAT CHART IS WRONG.
Seriously, I can easily see jaggies where it says I shouldn't be able to, IT IS WRONG by a large factor.
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You can even get 4K PC monitors for an attractive price
Citation needed (...please!)
8k won't be ready for anything any time soon. HDMI 2.0 doesn't even support 8k 30Hz, and few TVs have Displayport. 4k Blurays are taking their time arriving to market, and 50GB arguably won't be enough for 8k without a codec upgrade which would itself require a new disc player. What portion of existing bluray players have old HDMI ports or processors that can't handle 4k content? It's not like 4k TVs are high-margin items anymore -- I saw a nice 50" one at Walmart for $699 a few weeks ago, and there were cheaper ones online. The price has hit rock bottom before there's even the demand for them. Unlike 4k cameras, there are only a couple prototypes of 8k cameras, so almost all content will be rendered CG for a while.
I'd read countless arguments on Slashdot that human eyes can't discern resolution higher than 1080p in a 50" TV over 10 feet or so, before I actually watched a demo 4k TV running 4k content, for about 15 minutes. If you have a 50" TV in your bedroom, 5 feet away from where you're sitting, you can definitely notice a huge improvement in detail. I stepped about 15 feet away and in most scenes it was still usually an obvious, substantial improvement over 1080p.
An electronics retailer in Europe held a contest, setting a cordon that people had to stay behind, more than 10 feet away from two televisions, and were asked which was the 4k tv and which was the 1080p. 98% of people correctly guessed which was which. Maybe people asked others who cheated, but it suggests that "most people can't tell" is bullshit. I seem to recall when the Apple retina display claims first came out, a scientist mentioned that humans' actual acuity was about 50% better than what Apple was claiming. It's also worth noting that while a single still retina image may be at a certain DPI, there are psychovisual effects (like depth perception) that can improve the resolution inside the brain, beyond what one retina picks up at one time. The eyes also saccade all the time, which I seem to recall can be interpolated to improve resolution.
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So what genius decided to switch us over to the horizontal resolution?
Digital theater projection has used the 2K and 4K terms for a very long time. Nevermind that going to a 2K digital theater is little better than watching a 1080p TV, 4K is the gold standard for theater because it approaches/surpasses the projection quality limit for 35mm (by the time you account for grain, film copying, and sharpness). I'm not saying 35mm can't hold more detail, but the signal to noise ratio is low beyond that.
4K is a big deal because it matches the best visual experience you can get in the theater. You may say that you don't even need higher than 1080p, but Apple started it with their "retina" display. We've hit and surpassed the Nyquist limit in digital sound a long time ago. Apple's phone display reminded people that this is now getting very possible with video.
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.
The people who are replying that the viewing distance charts are wrong need to understand what the recommendations apply to.
First, they apply to the average person, whoever that may be. Since we all have slightly different eyesight, there are people who will see jaggies at the recommended range and people who will not.
Secondly, the vast majority of the distance recommendations refer to televisions and video, not computer monitors and text or still images. Computer monitors tend to have more precise pixel color and lighting control which makes them sharper but also makes it easier to see jaggies.
The point is that the charts were developed for TVs playing video and they tend to be accurate for this usage. Any application beyond that is pretty much out of scope.