TechByte: 8K TVs are on the market, but are they worth it?

Television technology has come a long way in the last 30 years. You probably remember sitting in front of the TV watching Saturday morning cartoons, or maybe you watched News 12 back in the day.

Well, analog TV is made up of little individual lines, which combined add up to a picture. Nowadays, we use digital signals displayed as pixels on a screen. Standard definition, like your older TV set would be what’s called 480p. That’s like a DVD’s resolution. Starting in the mid 90’s, high definition televisions came onto the market. At the time, the only way to watch anything in HD was with extremely expensive and hard to find equipment, like HD Laserdiscs or HD Tapes. Eventually, the TVs got thinner and Blu-Rays came onto the market. 1080p became the standard. Now we have 4k, beautiful screens, and it seems like it can’t get any better.

Well now, several Japanese and Korean companies have developed 8k resolution TVs. 8k is roughly double the resolution of 4k. Since I can’t actually show you a true 8k image on screen, you’ll just have to take my word for it. But now we have the same problem that we did with HD back in the 90’s. We have the TVs, but there are no media formats that you can buy that support 8k. There are no 8k discs, no 8k streams except on Youtube, and no 8k movies… unless you live in Japan. For the first time ever, Japan’s NHK Satellite TV broadcasted 2001 A Space Odyssey in 8k, captured from a recent film restoration. 

NHK Had been at the forefront of high-definition research. They even filmed the 

Pretty, cool, right? Well, it’ll probably be a while before 8k hits the mainstream market here in the US. We tend to be slightly behind in these things. And since 4k TVs have single digit adoption rates percentage wise… it’ll probably be a minute before we have any 8k discs or streaming services. The absolute cheapest 8k TV I could find on the market was still 1500 dollars. Kinda like how Plasma screen HD TVs were in the early 2000’s.
But for now, the future is bright when it comes to the next generation of display technology… but I’ll personally be waiting for prices to dip before I take out a second mortgage to get a new TV.