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Samsung and LG Unveil 8K TVs (cnet.com)

The latest TV "must have" that you actually don't really need -- at least right now -- has arrived at the IFA electronics show in Berlin. That's 8K, the super-crisp display technology that has four times the resolution of 4K screens. CNET: Samsung on Thursday showed off the Q900, which packs in more than 33 million pixels. The 85-inch TV will be the first 8K TV to hit the US market when it goes on sale in October, although Samsung didn't specify the price. Its arch rival LG a day earlier announced what it called "the world's first" 8K OLED TV. It showed the 88-inch device to some reporters in January at CES but didn't specify when there would be an actual product for consumers. Meanwhile Sharp began shipping the LV-70X500E 70-inch 8K monitor earlier this year to Europe after launching it in late 2017 in China, Japan and Taiwan. 8K TVs dramatically boost the number of pixels in the displays, which the companies say will make pictures sharper on bigger screens. "We ⦠are confident that [consumers] will experience nothing short of brilliance in color, clarity and sound from our new 8K-capable models," Jongsuk Chu, the senior vice president of Samsung's Visual Display Business, said in a press release.

21 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. 8K content? by PeeAitchPee · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So what's the incentive to buy one of these things if the content world is pretty much still on 1080i/p, let alone 4k?

    1. Re: 8K content? by peragrin · · Score: 2

      Wait you get 1080p? My cable company only supplies hd digital for premium access. I get SD for most of my stuff including football

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    2. Re:8K content? by fred6666 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Even to see the difference between 1080p and 4k, you need a 100+ inches TV and move your couch forward a lot.

    3. Re:8K content? by hey! · · Score: 2

      You know, I've been part of a number of tech adoption waves -- email, the Internet, the Web, mobile computing etc. And each time I have encountered the well-known Roger's adoption curve.

      Early adopters in my experience are novelty-driven people. They tend to want new things because having a new thing that most other people don't is exciting. So Samsung and LG are going to be selling these things initially to people who just want to have something not many people have yet.

      This may sound stupid if you're a pragmatist, but early adopters play a crucial role in getting anything new off the ground. As a pragmatist you present a chicken-or-egg problem to a company trying to introduce a technology like this. You aren't going to buy an 8K TV because you have nothing to use it for. That's perfectly rational, but if everyone were like you, content providers would never offer 8K material because nobody could use it.

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    4. Re:8K content? by mikael · · Score: 2

      It is obvious when you watch movies of landscapes. The detail in forests and desert mountain ranges is incredible. 3D TV with those polarized glasses varies is also impressive. It really depends on what is being played. The worst videos are people having food fights or kicking stuff towards the viewer. The best videos are the visual effects movies like Transformers or Battleship, where there are things flying around.

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    5. Re:8K content? by Custard+Horse · · Score: 2

      Well what if you want to see pubic hair mites?

      [yawn] pubic hair is soooo 20th century. All adults shave now. Apparently the fashion has also spread to pre-pubescent children.

  2. Re: Shouldn't that be 16K? Who makes this shit up by Ken_g6 · · Score: 2

    4k and 8k refer to roughly how many pixels wide the screen is. Though since it's multiples of 1920 they came up a bit short.

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    (T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
  3. Anyone care? by Tailhook · · Score: 5, Funny

    I guess both 3D TV owners will have to decide if they prefer non-existent 8K content over non-existent 3D content.

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  4. I don't remember anyone asking for this by snapsnap · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We barely have any 4k content yet.

    1. Re:I don't remember anyone asking for this by RickyShade · · Score: 2

      This is a gimmick. We don't have the storage space or the bandwidth for 8K, and some people say they can't even really tell much of a difference between 1080 and 4K (I can, but I use a 40" 4K TV as my monitor so I'm watching from 3 feet away). One thing it will help with, admittedly, is making dead pixels less noticeable.

  5. Re:64K by bobstreo · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm delaying my purchase until they come out with 64K TV's

    I'm waiting for 640K. It should be enough for anyone.

  6. And 8K content is _where_ again? by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Do these TV's support HDR? Because there is no mention of it in the article. I'd rather have 4K with HDR then 8K without HDR.

    We barely even have content for 4K -- how do they expect to sell them with almost zero content for 8K? I seriously doubt anyone over 65 could even tell the difference between 1080p, 2160p, and 4320p. BluRay just got (relatively speaking) support for 4K -- so who is actually buying these?

    Maybe I should just hold out for the 16K TVs. =P

  7. More interested in a 1080p for cheap by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 2

    Instead of this pointless arms race of resolution that no one actually supports, how about nice, high-quality, reliable 1080p HDTVs at a price point of $100US or less? I think that'd drive more sales than some astronomically priced piece of useless technology.

    1. Re:More interested in a 1080p for cheap by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 2

      Instead of this pointless arms race of resolution that no one actually supports, how about nice, high-quality, reliable 1080p HDTVs at a price point of $100US or less?

      Never happen. There are minimums. In particular, there's a minimum amount of effort required to assemble an LCD TV. Once the yields on the panels themselves are high enough, and the factory is paid for (and some of them are paid for by now), that's the controlling factor. Some of the steps are still too finicky for robots so humans perform them, which induces a price floor a good deal higher than just the cost of materials + cost of energy to refine and assemble them. Still, you can get a $120 24" 1080p screen. It's sold as "factory reconditioned", which usually means "we want it outta the warehouse and we don't want to bother with the original warranty term, so this is how we unload them." Limit 10.

      Once you hit the very bottom of the margins, manufacturers stop making things in favor of something with higher margins.

  8. Needed for soccer by ljw1004 · · Score: 2

    I don't watch TV much. But I watched the World Cup earlier this year and was *dismayed* at the poor picture quality. There weren't enough pixels to see which player had the ball when the camera was zoomed out. When I sat up close then I saw a load of compression artifacts from transmission. The whole picture also lost clarity when panning - which happens all the time.

    I would love to watch an ultra-high bandwidth transmission of 8K soccer in future. I'd happily go to whichever pub or IMAX could broadcast it, and I'd pay a decent amount for it.

  9. Knowing Better by JBMcB · · Score: 2

    This guy's channel is great.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
    [Knowing Better - You Don't See In 4K]

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    My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
  10. Re:Wear sunscreen by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 2

    A person with 20/20 visual acuity would need to sit 0.39 screen heights away to get the full benefit of the 4,320x7680 resolution. That would be 25 inches on a 65 inch diagonal TV.

    That's 7680x4320 for most people...

    And that sounds like just what I want. I specifically want a display device that can exceed human visual acuity. When you've successfully exceeded reality, we're done. Until then, we're not done. If I can see the pixels, they're too big. If I can't see the pixels for any reasonable use-case, then they're finally small enough. 4320p might finally be enough. 2160p isn't. Not quite.

  11. Re:InB4 Why by Solandri · · Score: 3, Interesting

    At 3840x2160, the jagged edges of fonts are almost gone. I can still see them but at such a low level that it is almost subconscious. A doubling of resolution should make that all go away PERMANENTLY.

    Jagged font edges can be "fixed" by anti-aliasing. Your brain is incredibly good at making up details that aren't there if it helps it make better sense of what it's seeing. So if it sees what looks like the smooth curve of the letter O, then it will see a smooth curve even if it's actually made up of different-brightness dots. The illusion is only broken when other info (non-aliased pixels) makes it obvious that the curve isn't smooth.

    If you don't believe anti-aliasing fixes it, then prepare to have your mind blown. Every TV image you've seen has been displayed at non-native resolution. When you watch a 1920x1080 TV, you're actually only seeing about 1890x1060 pixels. For obscure historical reasons, TVs overscan the video image. So if a show is recorded at 1920x1080, the image that's displayed on your 19201080 TV is actually a crop of the center portion of the original image, enlarged to fit the 1920x1080 pixels of your TV screen. That breaks the 1:1 correspondence between image pixels and display pixels. But it's fixed by anti-aliasing. Usually bicubic interpolation, although lately Lanczos has been becoming more popular (it's more processor intensive, but processing power is cheap nowadays). So every TV image you've seen since we moved to digital TVs has had jaggies, they're just hidden from view by good anti-aliasing.

    The real problem with modern displays is that the pixels are square. Pixels aren't supposed to be square. They're supposed to represent an infinitesimally small point, so the most accurate representation is a round blob called a point spread function. Brightest (greatest representation of the pixel's color) in the center, with the edges fading out (color info mixing with that of adjacent pixels). This is actually how the old CRT monitors and TVs displayed pixels, which is why you could use them to display any screen resolution.

    But modern displays typically use a LCD grid with fixed-sized square pixels. Those squares add nonexistent information to each pixel (the sharp edges and the corners). This extraneous information makes the display appear sharper when displaying perfectly vertical or horizontal lines. But that sharpness is an illusion, and you pay the price in jaggies whenever displaying anything that's not perfectly vertical or horizontal. It also doesn't work when the underlying pixel grid of the image doesn't fall exactly on the physical pixel grid of the monitor. Which is why LCD monitors look fuzzy when displaying a non-native resolution which isn't divided by an integer multiple (which are the only resolutions which maintain the correspondence between image pixel edges and display pixel edges).

    Anti-aliasing can help, but it's just a band-aid rather than a real fix. Moving to higher resolutions makes the band-aid less noticeable, and from a technical standpoint may be easier than a true fix (which I'm not sure can even be done with LCDs or even OLEDs). I use a 1080p projector to display a 150" image. And the reason I'm anxious to move up to a 4k projector is that I can actually see the pixel grid. It's easy to zone out and ignore it when watching a movie, but every now and then I notice it and it becomes annoying.

  12. Re:64K by Solandri · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There actually is a good reason not to be annoyed by this resolution race. Holograms require about 1500 dots per mm. So an 8192x4096 display would actually be sufficient to generate holograms if you were able to shrink the display down to 5mm x 3mm. I figure in 20-40 years, display technology and GPU technology will have advanced enough to generate real-time holographic displays.

  13. Re:Shouldn't that be 16K? Who makes this shit up? by ChrisMaple · · Score: 2

    Resolution is NOT by definition pixels; the context must be understood to infer what is meant by "resolution". Traditionally, resolution is measured in lines per millimeter, or more properly "line pairs" (cycles) per millimeter. If you speak to an optical engineer about resolution, he will be thinking in these terms or similar, a linear measure. Pixel count is related to the square of what is normally thought of as resolution.

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  14. 1080i vs 1080p by sjbe · · Score: 2

    1080i is half the resolution.

    No, 1080i is interlaced but the resolution is the same as 1080p. Both are 1920X1080 resolution.