Extraordinary resolution (4 times that of 4K), whatever you’re watching!
WHAT IS 8K?
If you use basic math, it may seem like 8K would provide double the resolution of 4K, but that isn’t the case. Since we’re talking two dimensions here — horizontal lines and vertical lines — it’s actually a whopping 16 times the pixels of HD and four times the pixels of 4K: 8K resolution equates to 7680 x 4320, or 33 million pixels (33,117,600, to be exact), instead of 3840 x 2160 (8,294,400 pixels). To more easily visualize it, imagine four 4K TVs placed in a four-by-four grid. That is a lot of pixels.
READY, SET, GO...
8K TVs will likely remain out of reach for most consumers this year, and possibly even next year, but you can expect prices to start falling quickly now that most major manufacturers are producing them. In the same way that 4K prices dropped sharply over just a couple of years, 8K pricing will follow suit — possibly even faster.
Even a year ago, there wasn’t much 8K content you could watch at home, even if you had an 8K TV, but that is slowly changing.
In 2017, video-streaming site Vimeo added support for 8K, and it now has over 6,000 videos tagged as 8K. YouTube got on the 8K bandwagon even earlier, and it too boasts thousands of 8K videos — though strangely its search filters only let you look for 4K as a maximum resolution. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics will be a major showcase for 8K broadcast, at least in Japan, but how much of the games will be broadcast in that resolution in the USA and Canada remains to be seen.
But native 8K content isn’t the only reason to have an 8K TV if you’re looking at a large screen size. 8K TVs can upscale 4K content to 8K, and the difference in clarity is stark.