We have been waiting for years for 8K TVs to take over the world. It is evident that we are going to sit and wait

In the 80s you guessed that Indiana Jones had a four-day beard, but that’s all. You couldn’t really see it, because on your VHS tapes it was more of a shadow than anything else. Those of us who have gray hair are lucky (or unlucky) to have lived in past times in which image resolution It was something arcane and mysterious.

I was content with the video quality of the VHS tapes of ‘The Goonies’ or ‘Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark’ and I was happy with my C64 and its 320×200 pixels and those matches of ‘Match Day II’ with my brother in which we both enjoyed (and fought) as if we were playing the last game. FIFA EA Sports FC.

Then, of course, everything improved and we began to realize that the resolution was important. We discovered that DVDs and their 720×576 resolution (in the PAL system used in Spain, in the US the NTSC only reached 720 x480) was like seeing the future until that future became the past with the arrival of HD Ready (720p) and especially Full HD (1080p) resolutions. Suddenly it was absolutely obvious that Harrison Ford hadn’t shaved.

That’s when things started to get really serious. So much so that today that Full HD resolution continues to be a de facto standard in the industry, although it has ended up taking a backseat in many areas. with the birth, popularization and rise of 4K resolution. We could no longer only see Harrison’s incipient beard, but even the pores of his skin. That was (and is) wonderful and even a little disturbing: there was no longer that implicit and terrible “beauty” effect of poor and antediluvian resolutions. With Indiana, like everyone else, you saw all the details, for better and for worse.

The industry, which is usually right that more is better, then wanted to propose a new leap. 4K is no longer enough, gentlemen: we must give way to 8K resolution. The standard was created, manufacturers began to offer it in some models and users, who were expecting another visual revolution like the one brought about by 4K resolution, found a reality.

That it wasn’t necessary.

The unbearable lightness of 8K resolution

The slap of reality came erratically but evidently. The studies made it clear that the improvement in image quality It wasn’t particularly noticeable.and the demand for data transmission or storage capacity was so notable that 8K content distribution has ended up being an eternal demo. There are hardly any decent examples that defend that this jump is compensated on a visual level, and there are none that defend its practical validity.

The market for 8K televisions is practically nonexistent. Source: Omdia.

In recent times this reality is becoming more and more evident. As they pointed out in FlatpanelsHD, TCL already began to abandon themand he decided the same LGDisplay. Samsung is the only one great manufacturer that for some inexplicable reason continues to defend the market, but neither LG nor Sony —recently transferred to TCL— they are already betting on that market.

Sales of these televisions they reached their peak in 2022but since 2015 only 1.6 million of these TVs have been sold, when according to Omdia There are “close to 1 billion 4K TVs in use.”

The failure of 8K has been total in all sections. The world of video games was one of those that most suggested that that resolution could make sensebut it is 2026 and although we have the most powerful graphics in history, moving a game to 8K and 60fps is almost a utopia for the vast majority of users. And if not, tell the PS5.

Not only that: Being able to play at 4K@60 is already an achievement in AAA games. And it’s better not to talk about streaming content: enjoying it in 4K even with the bandwidth we have is far from the norm, and being able to access 8K streaming poses too many challenges and few (or no) practical advantages.

The matrix of the minimum distance at which it is recommended to view a screen of a certain size and with a certain resolution. Source: University of Cambridge.

And it’s not just that: as we said, it is very difficult to appreciate the differences with 4K video. a study from the University of Cambridge published in Nature revealed that we could only appreciate them if we had a 50-inch TV one meter away.

Everything works against 8K resolution, and although in the future that could undoubtedly change, interest in this type of content and TV seems to have faded.

I highly doubt Harrison Ford cares. To me, of course, it doesn’t.

In Xataka | China already has its own alternative to HDMI and DisplayPort interfaces: it is called GPMI and reaches 192 Gbps