Whatever happened to 8K TVs?
More pixels weren’t enough to convince viewers or the TV industry that 4K needed to be replaced.
If you're up for a good laugh, go back and read some articles about 8K TVs from between 2016 and 2022. At the time, you would have thought it was a done deal that TV tech was shifting to 8K. Yet here we are, and there are about as many 8K TVs in homes as there are vintage gaming consoles.
That supposedly inevitable future never became a reality. LG backed out of the 8K market when LG Display stopped making 8K panels. Sony discontinued its remaining 8K TVs, while TCL had already cited low demand. Samsung remains the primary holdout with limited entries in its lineup.
The sales figures speak volumes. Research firm Omdia reported nearly a billion 4K TVs in use worldwide, compared with cumulative sales of just 1.6 million 8K sets since 2015, with 8K sales peaking in 2022.
The content never caught up with the screens
An 8K TV is capable of displaying 7,680 x 4,320 pixels. In theory, viewers might want four times as many pixels as 4K, but this number is meaningless when there are virtually no movies, TV shows or streaming libraries in 8K. Streaming and physical media offerings never developed a viable 8K ecosystem.
To be fair, it's inaccurate to say there are no 8K broadcasts anywhere. Japan's NHK operates BS8K, a dedicated channel featuring arts, cultural topics and nature. There are a few others, like China Media Group's CCTV-8K and Spain's RTVE, but all three combined barely move the needle.
With little to no 8K content, the only remaining option is upscaling to the higher resolution. This improves overall presentation, but it fails to serve as a strong advertisement for native 8K capabilities.
There's also a practical angle: four times the pixels of 4K means more image data to process, store and transmit. Many home internet connections cannot handle 8K streams, and 8K gaming requires extreme hardware that almost nobody owns.
Without an established supply of content that takes advantage of the improved visuals, consumers never had a compelling reason to purchase these televisions.
Is there any point in getting an 8K TV?
There might be niche reasons to try an 8K TV, though it is not going to future-proof anyone's living room in its current state. If you have native 8K material and a screen large enough to make a visual distinction, it's an improvement over 4K. However, screen size and viewing distance make all the difference.
A University of Cambridge study highlights this limitation regarding how much detail the human eye can distinguish. For example, a 44-inch 4K or 8K set viewed from 2.5 meters away fails to deliver anything better than a lower-resolution screen of a similar size.
This comes down to diminishing returns. Moving from standard definition to 1080p was a much larger jump than moving from 4K to 8K. While contrast, color performance, HDR and brightness matter, 8K represents incremental improvements that cost significantly more than a solid 4K set.
For the vast majority of shoppers, a 4K TV remains the best option. An enthusiast with a massive living room and enough space to position a very large 8K set at an optimal distance may enjoy it, but the broader market has shown little interest.
