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8K TVs Are Coming, But Don't Buy the Hype (engadget.com)

If the 8,294,400 pixels of resolution on an Ultra High Definition television just don't seem to convey enough detail, fear not: The electronics industry has heard your cry. From a report: Even as UHD TVs, often called 4K TVs for their nearly 4,000 pixels of horizontal resolution, approach half of display shipments in the U.S., set manufacturers have been stepping up their demos of 8K sets that, with their 7680-by-4320 resolution, pack in a full 33,177,600 pixels. And Sharp is now expanding its distribution of one such set, the 70-inch LV-70X500E. Following its October debut in China and subsequent arrivals in Japan and Taiwan, this 8K display will go on sale across Europe at the end of April for about $13,800 at current exchange rates. That, apparently, is supposed to be a reasonable price for a set that supports a video format that offers next to nothing to watch, that can't be streamed on most broadband connections or fit onto Blu-ray discs and which can't even be properly appreciated unless you get a set too big to fit in many living rooms.

[...] The highlights reel playing on a demo unit of Sharp's 8K set required 300 megabits per second of bandwidth to stream, said Adrian Wysocki, group product manager at UMC, the Sharp-owned firm that builds TVs in Poland for the company. He suggested in a conversation Friday that more efficient formats could cut that to 100 Mbps. Only 23.2% of U.S. fixed-broadband connections hit that speed at the end of 2016, according to to the Federal Communications Commission's latest report on internet access services.

3 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. It's for the future, not today. by iamhassi · · Score: 3, Informative

    When 4k came out at five digit prices how much content was available for that? Obviously no one is going to run out to spend $13,000 on a 70" 8k screen. This is for the future, when 100mbit broadband is more common. Remember the cheapest, smallest 4K screens from budget brands like Westinghouse and Hisense were a whopping $4,000-$5,000 in 2013. Those same tvs sell for $300 today. http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/1...

    --
    my karma will be here long after I'm gone
  2. Care less about resolution. More about gamut. by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 4, Informative

    8K broadcast standards use Rec 2020, which has a much wider gamut and can therefor show colors that most TVs these days can't. Rec 2020 is even wider than the DCI-P3 that many high-end monitors benchmark against these days.

    Rec 2020 also defines a larger bit depth: 10 or 12 bits per component rather than 8. This is partly to support the wider gamut, but it'll also help everything else by allowing much better gradients.

    Even if you don't have an 8K TV, ones that use HDR10 and Dolby Vision will benefit: both of these standards use the Rec 2020 gamut. So... bring on the 8K revolution. I want better browns.

  3. Re:Is there a limit? by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 5, Informative

    > But the human eye has its limits too. What's the actual N, beyond which we, the humans -- even those with the sharpest eyes -- can no longer distinguish between N and 2N pixels per inch?

    The TL:DR; version is: Use a 4K distance calculator

    * Distance Graph (PNG)

    * Size to Distance Calculator

    The Long version: It's complicated

    From a well known and respected Photography:

    http://clarkvision.com/imagede...

    How many megapixels equivalent does the eye have?

    The eye is not a single frame snapshot camera. It is more like a video stream. The eye moves rapidly in small angular amounts and continually updates the image in one's brain to "paint" the detail. We also have two eyes, and our brains combine the signals to increase the resolution further. We also typically move our eyes around the scene to gather more information. Because of these factors, the eye plus brain assembles a higher resolution image than possible with the number of photoreceptors in the retina. So the megapixel equivalent numbers below refer to the spatial detail in an image that would be required to show what the human eye could see when you view a scene.

    But if we do the math ...

    Based on the above data for the resolution of the human eye, let's try a "small" example first. Consider a view in front of you that is 90 degrees by 90 degrees, like looking through an open window at a scene. The number of pixels would be

    90 degrees * 60 arc-minutes/degree * 1/0.3 * 90 * 60 * 1/0.3 = 324,000,000 pixels (324 megapixels).

    At any one moment, you actually do not perceive that many pixels, but your eye moves around the scene to see all the detail you want. But the human eye really sees a larger field of view, close to 180 degrees. Let's be conservative and use 120 degrees for the field of view. Then we would see

    120 * 120 * 60 * 60 / (0.3 * 0.3) = 576 megapixels.

    Another calculation estimates around ~2200 dpi.

    http://wolfcrow.com/blog/notes...

    Maximum Resolution of the Eye

    So this is how it is. If a healthy adult brings any display screen or printed paper or whatever 4 inches (100 mm) from his or her face, the maximum resolution he/she can see at is 2190 ppi/dpi. It doesn't get any better than this for 99.99% of us, except maybe during pre-kindergarten years.

    But the legally accepted norm of 20/20 vision only asks for 876 ppi/dpi at 4 inches!

    But since we don't view things from 4 inches away ...

    Cinema
    The width of a cinema screen can vary from 30 to 70 feet (360' to 840', 9144 mm to 21,336 mm). The closest viewing distance recommended is about 40 feet (3x height) -- 12,192 mm. If one is projecting 2K on these screens, the ppi is about 2.4 ppi to 5.7 ppi. If one is projecting 4K, it is about 5 ppi to 11.4 ppi.

    Is this what the eye needs?

    p@0.4 works out to be 1.4 mm or 18 ppi.
    p@1 works out to be 3.5 mm or 7 ppi.

    As you can see, 4K comes very close to what the human eye can fully resolve in a cinema screen at average viewing distances. Obviously, many people sit in the front row, and they'd definitely appreciate higher resolution. Which is why we are moving towards:

    8K and UHDTV

    A 30 to 70 feet screen at 8K (8192 horizontal) gives me from 9.75 ppi to 22.8 ppi. This resolution beats what the eye can resolve at these distances. The future belongs to 8K.

    But, to get 18 ppi (the best possible resolution) for a 70 feet screen, we'll need a horizontal resolution of 15120 or 16K. This is about 128 Megapixels. Is anybody working on this?