Submitted 20 hours ago by TheImpressiveX@lemmy.today to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.howtogeek.com/big-surprisenobody-wants-8k-tvs/
Another possibility for why consumers don’t seem to care about 8k is the common practice by content owners and streaming services charging more for access to 4k over 1080p.
Normalizing that practice invites the consumer to more closely scrutinize the probable cost of something better than 4k compared to the probable return.
I think 8k has a use, just not in consumer televisions for things like Netflix or gaming. 8k’s real use is most likely in the medical field where high high high high detail is extremely important.
How high detail if 300 dpi is already almost impossible to separate into dots for a human eye?
Some surgeries don’t open someone completely up and rely on imaging machines (like when they put a stint in a heart). Also some surgeries are done remotely. So high detail can be important.
Why would the medical field need 8k screens? They can just zoom in on a lower res display y’know? Nobody is looking at a screen with a magnifying glass
I think a possible application for 8k displays is the huge displays where viewer is extremely close to the display. But that would still just be the same pixel density as a lower res display.
Another are I think high pixel density might be useful for is patterning. Like PCB manufacturing and other photoresist stuff. But that’s problem already solved by much cheaper technologies
I work in construction and the “digital” plan table has a resolution issue.
Not exactly surprising, considering the TV’s and monitors are outpacing the contemt creators and gaming development.
A lot of gamers don’t even have GPU’s that can crank out 4K at the frame rates most monitors are capable of. So 8K won’t do much for you. And movies and regular TV? Man, I’m happy there’s 4K available.
A 4K screen will be more than most folks need right now, so buying an 8K at the moment is just wasted money. Like buying a Ferrari and only ever driving 25 mph.
Also I think the improvements in HDR and brightness recently are more substantial than the update to 8K. At normal viewing TV distance you’d be hard pressed to see the individual pixels, even on a 1080p screen.
Even for PCs there isn’t much reason to go about 2k screens (1440p).
Also to add to this. 8k sounds 2x as large as 4k. But that isn't true. 8k is four times the pixels of 4k, so can you imagine what kind of GPU or content stream you will need to make sense...
I do want a dumb 8K TV. I do not want all the so called smart features of a TV. Small Linux device with kodi works way better.
hmm, I wish there was some open source TV OS that I could put into my tv to kind of jailbreak it. Remove all the tracking and ads bs but still allow me to use Netflix and Plex and jellyfin. I don’t think such a thing exists though.
Some Xiaomi TVs have root exploits, so you can manually disinfect the OS, but it’s cumbersome to get done since you need to enter adb commands over the remote control to get there in the first place.
Easier to just use an external device and the TV as a screen only. Personally I’m using the Nvidia Shield for 5+ years now and regret nothing.
Not ideal, but you can air gap the TV from the network, and use some small sbc, or even a firestick or android box. That’s what I do. Stremio?
I do want a TV that can access Netflix etc without another box. I just don’t want the surveillance that comes with it.
As far as my TV is concerned I don’t have an internet connection.
I personally hate Kodi UI. But I get your point
i can’t tell the difference between 1080 and 4k at the distance i use it.
my computer can’t run games in 4k and burning money to keep up with it is dumb.
That’s… not how that works.
how would that be?
could you tell 1080p vs 4k screens apart from, say, a distance of 5m?
Surgeons already use cameras trough small holes instead of cutting you open wide. Screen technology finds a way.
I watch torrented shows with VLC on my laptop. Why would I want a giant smarphone that spies on me?
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.
My $2500 TV doesn’t have a power button if it makes you feel better.
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.
Sometimes that doesn’t even matter anymore; they’ll refuse to work now without a network set up.
tv absolutely peaked at this (serious)
I blacklist the TVs Ethernet and WiFi MAC addresses. I strongly encourage using a computer, Apple TV, or anything that can’t fingerprint everything you use your tv for.
This. I’ll happily buy an 8k TV only if it’s a dumb TV/monitor.
No, I want only one DP port and to have a separate box that selects sources. That way I have the ports I want
Yeah, no shit. The only possible use is gaming, and even PC owners have been upscaling for some time now.
The only case where you might even notice a difference by going to 8K resolution is high end VR, but that’s no reason to have 8K in a TV.
Even 4K is overkill for most movies. The HDR is the selling point there, which I’ll admit looks nice.
It’s useful in photography. 8K is 33 megapixels, which some modern cameras can exceed (whereas 4K is 8 megapixels which every camera exceeds).
Not really, there isn’t much of a point in viewing your images at native resolution while editing. In fact in lightroom when you’re viewing the entire image you’re always looking at downscaled version anyway for performance reasons and need to punch in to see actual pixel level detail.
Agree that it’s HDR, not actually resolution that makes that much difference.
That and the motion smoothing that looks really good on the display videos in the shop where it’s always splashing paint, or dripping honey, or tracking shots of trees, but it makes movies and TV shows look terrible, like the behind the scenes footage before they put all the effects in.
I don’t even want 4K. 1080p is more than good enough.
I wish my eyesight was so good that I could see obvious flaws in a 4k image.
You may not want 4K but I bet your ass wants a OLED TV because those are fucking amazing and I would be concerned if youdidn’t want one
Even my smartphone doesn’t have OLED display.
If I was in the market for a new TV I’d probably go for an OLED assuming image burn-in is no longer an issue with them, but I’ll happily use my 15 year old LED TV for as long as it lasts. I can tell the difference in contrast when side by side with LED/LCD but in normal daily use I don’t pay any attention to it.
I also think that 1080 is fine for normal living room distance. In my case, though, I use a 42" 4K as a monitor, where I have the equivalent of 4 1080 monitors. No gaming, but for my use it’s more practical than multiple monitors.
I also see no use, but I also stuck to 1024 far too long (also because that thing just kept working)
I’ve still got the last good plasma TV. Power usage is horrible but the picture is great.
article took forever to get to the bottom line. content. 8k content essentially does not exist.
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.
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, 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.
Not only the content doesn’t exist yet, it’s just not practical. Even now 4k broadcasting is rare and 4k streaming is a premium, 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).
Not only does it not exist, it isn’t wanted. People are content watching videos on YouTube and Netflix. They don’t care for 4k. Even if they pay extra for Netflix 4k (which I highly doubt they do) I still question if they are watching 4k with their bandwidth and other limiting factors, which means they’re not watching 4k and are fine with it.
TV manufacturers are idiots.
That’s usually the case
I hear anything at or above 8k resolution negates the need for anti aliasing entirely… But I feel that my pc would would be running at or around 10-15 fps for most games I would care about anti aliasing on.
Nice in theory, definitely can’t handle that many pixels in reality.
Half the games I play are 2D, the other half are not overly demanding either. Wonder what you would need to run deep rock galactic at 8k 144hz? Probably one of the more demanding games I have played lately. But if I was to spend money on better equipment for that game it would be sound equipment.
Who is out here filming at that resolution anyway? Cannot fathom the file sizes of anything made for these TVs
So many things have reached not only diminishing returns, but no returns whatsoever. I don’t have a single problem that more technology will solve.
I just don’t care about any of this technical shit anymore. I only have two eyes, and there’s only 24 hours in a day. I already have enough entertainment in perfectly acceptable quality, with my nearly 15 year old setup.
I’ve tapped out from the tech scene.
It creates more problems than it solves. You would need an order of magnitude more processing power to play a game on it. Personally I would prefer 4K at a higher framerate. Even 1080 if it improves response.
Video in 8K are massive. You need better codecs to handle them, and they aren’t that widely supported. Storage is more expensive than it was a decade ago.
Also, there is no content. Nobody wants to store and transmit such massive amounts of data over the internet.
HDMI cables will fail sooner at higher resolutions. That 5 year old cable will begin dropping out when you try it at 8k.
4K is barely worth the tradeoffs.
Fun fact; Here in Brazil, the cheaper tv models being sold are 720p, and a lot of people buy them and don’t even know what video resolution is, neither they feel like missing something lol
I would much rather have 1080p content at a high enough bitrate that compression artifacts are not noticeable.
Most Americans are out of money and can’t find good jobs. We are clinging to our old TVs and cars and computers and etc. for dear life, as we hope for better days.
And what can you even watch in true 8K right now? Some YouTube videos?
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.
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
What’s the point? Even if you pay extra for “4K” streaming, it’s compressed to hell and the quality is no better than 1080p. What are you going to even watch on an 8K TV?
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.
Will it make the 480x720 videos I watch on my 4K tv look twice as good?
Here I am still downloading the 720p versions of movies and not minding at all. If I want hyper resolution imagery I just go outside.
I got a 4k monitor, and I could barely tell the difference with 1080p
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
And of course the comment section with “16k around the coner, progress doesn’t stop”.
I work off metered data. I’m happy with 360p.
I want 8K TVs, but only when there’s abundant native 8K content to watch on it - otherwise there is no point.
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.
derry@midwest.social 1 minute ago
4k ought to be enough for anybody