You already need a 3080 to even approach modern 4k and unless some new media/disk format, it just ain't going to happen and isn't worth it.
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025
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article took forever to get to the bottom line. content. 8k content essentially does not exist. TV manufacturers were putting the cart before the horse.
4k tvs existed before the content existed. I think the larger issue is that the difference between what is and what could be is not worth the additional expense, especially at a time when most people struggle to pay rent, food, and medicine. More people watch videos on their phones than watch broadcast television. 8k is a solution looking for a problem.
Hell I still don't own a 4k tv and don't plan to go out of my way to buy one unless the need arises. Which I don't see why I need that when a normal flat-screen looks fine to me.
I actually have some tube tvs and be thinking of just hooking my vcr back up and watching old tapes. I don't need fancy resolutions in my shows or movies.
Only time I even think of those things is with video games.
4K hardly even makes sense unless your tv is over 70" and your watching it from less than 4 feet away. I do think VR could benefit from ultra-high resolution, though.
At 1.6 meter for the metric minded. If you really stretch out and can hit the tv with your toes it's about the right distance.
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I think it’s NHK, or one of the Japanese broadcasters anyways, that has actually been pressing for 8K since the 1990s. They didn’t have content back then and I doubt they have much today, but that’s what they wanted HD to be.
Not familiar with NHK specifically (or, to be clear, I think I am but not with enough certainty), but it really makes a lot of sense for news networks to push for 8k or even 16k at this point.
Because it is a chicken and egg thing. Nobody is going to buy an 8k TV if all the things they watch are 1440p. But, similarly, there aren't going to be widespread 8k releases if everyone is watching on 1440p screens and so forth.
But what that ALSO means is that there is no reason to justify using 8k cameras if the best you can hope for is a premium 4k stream of a sporting event. And news outlets are fairly regularly the only source of video evidence of literally historic events.
From a much more banal perspective, it is why there is a gap in TV/film where you go from 1080p or even 4k re-releases to increasingly shady upscaling of 720 or even 480 content back to everything being natively 4k. Over simplifying, it is because we were using MUCH higher quality cameras than we really should have been for so long before switching to cheaper film and outright digital sensors because "there is no point". Obviously this ALSO is dependent on saving the high resolution originals but... yeah.
it’s not exactly “there is no point”. It’s more like “the incremental benefit of filming and broadcasting in 8k does jot justify the large cost difference”.
Filming in 8k does have advantages. You can crop without losing quality.
I’m sorry, but if we are talking about 8k viability in TVs, we are not talking about shooting in 8k for 4k delivery.
You should be pointing out that shooting in higher than 8k, so you have the freedom to crop in post, is part of the reason 8k is burdensome and expensive.
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Not only the content doesn't exist yet, it's just not practical. Even now 4k broadcasting is rare and 4k streaming is now a premium (and not always with a good bitstream, which matters a lot more) when once was offered as a cost-free future, imagine 8k that would roughly quadruple the amount of data required to transmit it (and transmit speee is not linear, 4x the speed would probably be at least 8x the cost).
And I seriously think noone except the nerdiest of nerds would notice a difference between 4k and 8k.
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I don’t care about 8k.
I just want an affordable dumb TV. No on-board apps whatsoever. No smart anything. No Ethernet port, no WiFi. I have my own stuff to plug into HDMI already.
I’m aware of commercial displays. It just sucks that I have to pay way more to have fewer features now.
The settings app on my smart TV sometimes won't launch. I can't fucking believe it. It's a $1000 TV.
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You can have a smart TV but never set up any of the smart features. I have two LG OLED TVs but rarely touch anything on the TV itself. I've got Nvidia Shields for streaming and turning it on or off also turns the TV on or off. Same with my Xbox.
I just need to figure out if I can use CEC with my SFF gaming PC (so that turning it on also turns the TV on, and turning it off turns the TV off), then I won't have to touch the TV's remote again.
Ethernet port or wifi are good for controlling the TV using something like Home Assistant. I have my TVs on a separate isolated VLAN with no internet access. I have a automation that runs when the TV turns on, to also turn on some LED lights behind the TV.
Fine, but I don’t want the smart features to be installed at all in the first place.
I don’t want a WiFi antenna or Ethernet port in there.
I know that sounds ridiculous, since I can “simply not use them,” but I want to spend my money on an appliance, not a consumer data collection tool.
I don’t want them to have any of my data, and I don’t want to spend money “voting” with my dollar for these data collection devices.
Some of these devices have even been known to look for other similar devices within WiFi range, and phone home that way (i.e., send analytics data via a neighbor’s connected TV as a proxy).
Fuuuck that. I don’t want my dollar supporting this, at all, plain and simple. And I don’t want to pay a premium for the privilege of buying a technically simpler device. I do, but it’s bullshit, and I’m unhappy about it.
Some of these devices have even been known to look for other similar devices within WiFi range, and phone home that way (i.e., send analytics data via a neighbor’s connected TV as a proxy).
Ummm, wut? I'm going to need some quality sources to back this claim up.
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I totally get where you're coming from. It's hard to find devices like that. I think the issue is that regular customers are demanding the smart features, and using them without caring about privacy aspects.
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I don't want 8K. I want my current 4K streaming to have less pixilation. I want my sound to be less compressed. Make them closer to Ultra BluRay disc quality before forcing 8K down our throats... unless doing that gives us better 4K overall.
Yeah 4K means jack if it’s compressed to hell, if you end up with pixels being repeated 4x to save on storage and bandwidth, you’ve effectively just recreated 1080p without upscaling.
Just like internet. I’d rather have guaranteed latency than 5Gbps.
Yep, just imagine how bad the compression artefacts will be if they double the resolution but keep storage/network costs the same.
Doubling the dimensions make it 4x the data.
That's not true for compressed video. It doubles the bitrate for the same quality on modern codecs (265, av1, etc.)
Not if you only double it in one direction. Checkmate.
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Bingo, if I were still collecting DVDs/HD DVDs like I was in the 90's, it might be an issue. Streaming services and other online media routed through the TV can hardly buffer to keep up with play speed at 720, so what the fuck would I want with a TV that can show a higher quality of picture which it can also not display without stutter-buffering the whole of a 1:30:00 movie?
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I don't know if it changed, but when I started looking around to replace my set about 2 years ago, it was a nightmare of marketing "gotcha"s.
Some TVs were advertising 240fps, but only had 60fps panels with special tricks to double framerate twice or something silly. Other TVs offered 120fps, but only on one HDMI port. More TVs wouldn't work without internet. Even more had shoddy UIs that were confusing to navigate and did stuff like default to their own proprietary software showing Fox News on every boot (Samsung). I gave up when I found out that most of them had abysmal latency since they all had crappy software running that messed with color values for no reason. So I just went and bought the cheapest TV at a bargain overstock store. Days of shopping time wasted, and a customer lost.
If I were shown something that advertised with 8K at that point, I'd have laughed and said it was obviously a marketing lie like everything else I encountered.
Asus makes their version of a 4k OLED LG panel with no shitty 'smart' software.
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I haven't seen this mentioned but apart from 8K being expensive, requiring new production pipelines, unweildley for storage and bandwidth, unneeded, and not fixing g existing problems with 4K, it requires MASSIVE screens to reap benefits.
There are several similar posts, but suffice to say, 8K content is only perceived by average eyesight at living room distances when screens are OVER 100 inches in diameter at the bare minimum. That's 7 feet wide.
Source: https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-relationship
4k 25" was worth it for me but I only spent about £140 on it so YMMV it's nice but not essential and after 1080p the extra pixels only add so much
Tell me Legolas, what do your elven eyes see?
Fucking pixels Aragorn, it makes me want to puke. And what the fuck is up with these compression artifacts? What tier of Netflix do you have?
Sorry Legolas, could we just enjoy the movie?
Maybe if the dwarf stops stinking up the place. And don't think I didn't see him take that last chicken wing, fucking dwarves.
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I would be fine with an 8k TV if there was 8k content and they were affordable. I haven’t purchased a TV in over a decade however and my TVs all work fine so I’m not even in the market
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I'm happy with 1080p content. I have a 4k TV and from the couch I can't see a difference. I would be perfectly happy with a bargain 4k TV, bigger the better.
it depends on how big your tv is in your field of view, so a function of size and distance. and obviously how good your vision is.
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8K content is too storage hungry. My pirate ship is already bursting at the seams with some 4K but mostly 1080. I have 130TB of media, if it was in 8K I would need a water cooled server farm.
That's the REAL reason for lack of 8K interest, the pirates are not demanding it. Not until 100TB drives are available for a reasonable price.
The real reason for lack of interest is streaming quality of 4k has been getting worse for years, and is still like 1/10th the quality of 4k BluRay, with enormous levels of compression and artifacts.
8k requires 4x the data. We all know that means every subscription would charge at least 2x more to maintain profit margins of unlimited growth for vulture capitalism, and they'd skimp on the extra data too; leaving users with nothing better than the current 4k.
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It's been observed that the porn industry is often one of the first adapters of new media tech before they become commonplace, but I'm not sure some things need to be shown in that high a resolution.
i read the same comment about 1080p and 4k porn but here we are.
Maybe people will be satisfied when they can put their TV under a microscope to determine the actor's sperm count...
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I like how the article immediately tries placing the blame on the consumer. When in reality it’s the companies putting the cart before the horse and then being shocked when it doesn’t work out.
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I still use a ten year old 1080p Sony TV, and I’ve yet to see a new <$1k TV with a nicer picture than what I have. Granted I don’t really consume any higher resolution content anyway 🤷♂️
How about uncompressed 4k before going to even more compression 8k. I have seen uncompressed 8k content on an 8k TV. I couldn't tell the difference between it and a good quality 4k picture, and I'm admittedly a quality snob. I can tell the difference in 1080 vs 4k pretty easily even on cheap tvs, it's just virtually non existent at 8k vs 4k in tv sizes up to 80 inch beyond viewing inches away from the screen.
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I’d buy one if it came with every David Attenborough (or similar) nature documentary included. I don’t need 8k for games or movies or anything else but I’ll watch the shit out of whatever high budget nature documentaries are produced and put my nose against the screen to see the critter details.
I'll take one! Well, two really. One large one for TV/media viewing and one to replace my 43" 4k monitor. Quadrupling the resolution on that would be amazing.
The difference would be minimal on the media screen, TBH, but Ive seen them in person and can tell the difference. It's just not a big enough difference to warrant replacing what I have.
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