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.

Comments

I want these for pictures

[SuperKendall]

Sure it's going to be a while before you see much 8k VIDEO content...

But what the naysayers are ignore is how awesome these will be for images.

Also a nice side effect of putting on 8K displays, is it drives the cots of 4k displays even cheaper in the meantime.

Re:I want these for pictures

[omnichad]

Also a nice side effect of putting on 8K displays, is it drives the cots of 4k displays even cheaper in the meantime.

And more specifically, it's the same manufacturing needed to make smaller 4K displays. This is just trying to monetize the fact that smaller 4K panels are being manufactured with fewer flaws.

Re:Brave take

[HornWumpus]

If you're sitting close enough to see the pixels, you are 'watching the equipment' not the show. Like an 'audiophile' listens to the stereo, not the music.

4k screens are for monitors and VR displays, 8k will be the same. I'm just glad stupid people will cover the R&D costs of my future monitors.