Consumer Technology Association sets official standard for 8K UHD TVs

[Guest]

The “better pixels” argument seems invalid for tv’s. Everytime they add resolution, the tv’s also get bigger. So the pixel pitch shrinks marginally.

Also, 4K OLED 55” has proven to be of equal or greater quality than plasma. And the dual LED monitors coming out are pretty exciting, as they have most of the image quality os plasma and oled, and yet also the benefits of led. ...if it ever becomes consumer tech.

iPhones and iPads and 4K laptops show that resolution on a screen is a good thing in general. No one i have ever met said “the iPhone X is too sharp”. Infact, just yesterday, a friend who has an iPhone 5 mentioned how much better the new screens are.

With cameras, yeah, we are cramming 4K+ worth of pixels into the same space. Trying to fit the same amount of pixels on a postage stamp as we would onto an 80” screen. Projectors have it difficult too.

But TV’s can just get bigger.

 

[puredrifting]

I would not call raw an innovation, more like a kludge.

Ideally, we want RGB sensors and get rid of all this debayering nonsense.

This is what I think needs to happen innovation wise:

• RGB only sensors, no more debayering nonsense
• No more chroma subsampling, CODECs are perfectly able to do perceptual compression without this nonsense
• Floating-point code values recording scene linear and get rid of the gamma zoo
• Adding interlacing to the seven deadly sins

I look at it as Baby Steps. Sure DeBayering RAW is a kludge but it's here and workable today, whereas RGB sensors, as far as I know, are not (are they?)
From a user standpoint, they have at least made shooting and editing RAW passably convenient and it does have real benefits for the end user.

I've saved some pretty badly exposed shots from tough shooting situations simply because they were shot RAW, same as my stills. Of course it's best to expose and
shoot things, "right", but in documentary, just like in news, it's always better to capture the shot by any means necessary than to adjust everything to
get it right, but miss the shot.

 

[puredrifting]

I'm glad you are able to meet with the manufacturers, because you and I have the same opinions about cameras

Sadly, I usually meet with them when they are at final prototype, not conception, but I definitely point out common sense operational gaffs that could be easily fixed in the hopes of when they introduce the next model, the "issue" will be overcame or worked around.
I doubt I had anything to do with it but I did meet with Canon after the C200 had been out a few months and asked them point blank, "Japan isn't going to make CRL an orphan format, are they?" Then a few months later, working with the C700FF, I told them, "Codex is
an amazing end to end RAW capture system, but it would have been nice if Canon had included CRL as a lower cost alternative for documentary and event shooters who are actually probably a stronger market for this camera than the studios". FF to today and we have the
C500 MKII that shoots 6K, 4K and 2K CRL, which is brilliant. I am sure that other people they worked with echoed some of the same sentiments to them and the end result is encouraging.

 

[Guest]

The fear that 8K tv means 8K cameras and 8K workflow and all the upgrades and costs that come with it all for no benefit to camera ergonomics and image quality and innovation is valid. Hopefully this time around it will be easier to choose our formats. I can’t imagine broadcast swiftly moving to 8K, when they still do 720 60p. HD deliverables are still a thing.

8K tv’s shouldn’t be like the HD transition. The HD transition was forcing users off an analogue system, into a fully digital one. When 4K tv’s came out, it changed streaming and blu ray, but films were still predominantly shot in 2K and film. Tv was still predominantly HD flavors.

With 8K, i think we’ll see less muscle in forcing everyone to upgrade. I doub’t even Netflix will push for it anytime soon. The Monstro doesn’t even meet 8K requirments.

All that said, 8K screens are very welcome. Finally, a large screen without discernable pixels (unless you get really really close). I’ll still watch something in 720. But it will be fun going through old photos. Or researching a project and having multiple tabs open, each being full res. A workspace that can finally no be cramped. Or editing without multiple screens and that awful split.

Editing with a standing desk, and having two or three 4K windows open and being able to walk up closer and then back to the desk.

It may seem funny to anyone with the 1080 mentality, but a screen’s resolution should be greater than the camera.

 

[DLD]

8200 pixels on an 80" screen is still ~ 110 pixels per inch. Most modern mobile screens are over 400 PPI.

As to the RGB sensors - technically, a human eye only needs a 4:2:2, so 17.6 MPX (5.7K) is fine for 4K, which is why it has taken root in many cameras, beginning with F65. 8K would then need a 66 MPX sensor. A 33 MPX Bayer would be 6K 4:2:2.

 

[Cary Knoop]

As to the RGB sensors - technically, a human eye only needs a 4:2:2,.....

Set your computer monitor to receive 422 and you realize that your color bleeds around text.

 

[Guest]

8200 pixels on an 80" screen is still ~ 110 pixels per inch. Most modern mobile screens are over 400 PPI.

As to the RGB sensors - technically, a human eye only needs a 4:2:2, so 17.6 MPX (5.7K) is fine for 4K, which is why it has taken root in many cameras, beginning with F65. 8K would then need a 66 MPX sensor. A 33 MPX Bayer would be 6K 4:2:2.

4:2:2 is fine for most situations, but 4:4:4 is better for extreme color, like at a concert, or by fire light, where the color shifts mean a loss of resolution. Also, if you want to shoot for black and white, an rgb sensor is like having all the bw filters at once. Rgb sensors grade like raw, without a debayer process.

Ultimately, the bayer pattern is the more effecient way to get resolution, and in most cases, it is imperceptible from tru rgb.

 

[Tom Roper]

The “better pixels” argument seems invalid for tv’s. Everytime they add resolution, the tv’s also get bigger. So the pixel pitch shrinks marginally.

Also, 4K OLED 55” has proven to be of equal or greater quality than plasma. And the dual LED monitors coming out are pretty exciting, as they have most of the image quality os plasma and oled, and yet also the benefits of led. ...if it ever becomes consumer tech.

iPhones and iPads and 4K laptops show that resolution on a screen is a good thing in general. No one i have ever met said “the iPhone X is too sharp”. Infact, just yesterday, a friend who has an iPhone 5 mentioned how much better the new screens are.

With cameras, yeah, we are cramming 4K+ worth of pixels into the same space. Trying to fit the same amount of pixels on a postage stamp as we would onto an 80” screen. Projectors have it difficult too.

But TV’s can just get bigger.

Maybe you should see a Dolby Vision Pulsar 4000 NIT HDR monitor. It's 1080P. Think 8K looks better than that? Not as long as you are far enough from the screen to not notice the pixels, yet the intensity adds far more realism than adding dimmer tiny pixels . Why would Dolby use 1080p instead of 4K or 8K? Because the pixels are better, more color volume defined as intensity and gamut together. You can take 4 pixels of the same brightness added together you don't get 4 times the intensity. Bigger pixels are better pixels. They handle more current. They reproduce with more intensity and wider gamut. 8k is only going to add delay to better pixels for OLED and continue the predominance of inferior backlit LCD. OLED struggles to achieve HDR brightness in existing 4K, never mind 8k. It's a guarantee that 4000 nits popping off the screen at 1080p is going to wow the cinema enthusiast more than getting nose prints on the glass to see tiny pixels on an 8K that don't matter.

 

[High1ander]

Honestly, you don't need a "big room" for a big TV anymore. I have a very average sized bedroom, at best, and I have a 55" set hanging on the wall and could have(and should have) put a 65" there. As far as living rooms, dens and other "public/family" rooms in houses where you'd typically have a larger TV, it's probably even less of a problem in a lot of cases. People talking about entire walls becoming TV/displays... It's here already(almost). There are ultra-short throw 4K projectors that are affordable and available today that can project 120" images literally inches away from the wall/screen. The one I'm contemplating only needs to be 7.2" away to do 120". Even factoring in the depth of the actual projector itself, it's less space(depth) than my current 92" RPT uses. It'll hide behind my current center channel and actually allow me to push the 'low-boy' component cabinet back closer to the wall and the center channel a little farther back, as well. So, I'll actually get a much larger "TV" and regain some space. And now that I think about it, I'll actually have more space than when I had a 27" SD tube there in an entertainment center set-up.

I myself will make the living room fit the TV and not the TV fit the living room. However, plenty of people don't want TV's bigger than 40-55" because of how the rest of the room will look, or they think that is a good size regardless of space. I have a projector and 3m wide screen, about 150" diagonal, which is as wide as I can go, so I am all for bigger screens. TVs are like furniture, yeah a big table and a big couch might be nice but look like crap if not fitted properly in its space.

 

[Guest]

Maybe you should see a Dolby Vision Pulsar 4000 NIT HDR monitor. It's 1080P. Think 8K looks better than that? Not as long as you are far enough from the screen to not notice the pixels, yet the intensity adds far more realism than adding dimmer tiny pixels . Why would Dolby use 1080p instead of 4K or 8K? Because the pixels are better, more color volume defined as intensity and gamut together. You can take 4 pixels of the same brightness added together you don't get 4 times the intensity. Bigger pixels are better pixels. They handle more current. They reproduce with more intensity and wider gamut. 8k is only going to add delay to better pixels for OLED and continue the predominance of inferior backlit LCD. OLED struggles to achieve HDR brightness in existing 4K, never mind 8k. It's a guarantee that 4000 nits popping off the screen at 1080p is going to wow the cinema enthusiast more than getting nose prints on the glass to see tiny pixels on an 8K that don't matter.

Cinema can stay in the 4K world, imho. But for a home screen, i like the option of a big 8K screen for multi purpose uses. Then having a 1080 or 4K for sitting back and watching shows.

 

[Guest]

Maybe you should see a Dolby Vision Pulsar 4000 NIT HDR monitor. It's 1080P. Think 8K looks better than that? Not as long as you are far enough from the screen to not notice the pixels, yet the intensity adds far more realism than adding dimmer tiny pixels . Why would Dolby use 1080p instead of 4K or 8K? Because the pixels are better, more color volume defined as intensity and gamut together. You can take 4 pixels of the same brightness added together you don't get 4 times the intensity. Bigger pixels are better pixels. They handle more current. They reproduce with more intensity and wider gamut. 8k is only going to add delay to better pixels for OLED and continue the predominance of inferior backlit LCD. OLED struggles to achieve HDR brightness in existing 4K, never mind 8k. It's a guarantee that 4000 nits popping off the screen at 1080p is going to wow the cinema enthusiast more than getting nose prints on the glass to see tiny pixels on an 8K that don't matter.

Double quoting here.

There are times, especially watching tv at night, when i don’t want the 4000nits experience. Even my plasma is a bit bright for late night viewing. I want to fall asleep, and bright screens can be annoying.... unless, i am going for that “wow” factor.

The thing is, that there are uses for screens outside of cinema and broadcast.

As far as the “bigger” pixels, how big is the 1080 Pulsar? Can it be 4x bigger and make eye popping 4K?

While i love the idea of having up to 4000nits of blinding pain just lurking underneath the hood. And ultra realistic contrast, it is more of an experience than a pleasant relaxing feeling.

But i hear you. It would be awesome to have one of those. But if is smaller than 60”, then i am sure they can make a 4K version without a hit on quality.


8K screens don’t need to be ubiquitous. We are no longer in the NTSC/PAL/Secam world. It is digital and format agnostic for the most part. Sometimes resolution is more important, and sometimes color and hdr are.

 

[Guest]

As a cinematic experience, i really hope cinemas harness the ultra bright potential.

There is a screen in chatsworth, CA that is basically a very large TV. The saturation for cartoons looks gorgeous on it. For live action, i am still not seeing it dialed in quite right. The idea of having extra nits available for different scenes is pretty cool. Could be far more dramatic and emotional than the low light of old film projection. Can keep most of the movie in the lower nits, and then have a Space odyssey light tunnel, and big music. Could be pretty intense.

The Pulsar is LED tech though, right? Or is it something else? A water cooled tv sounds like no wall mounting in the home.

 

[Tom Roper]

Double quoting here.

There are times, especially watching tv at night, when i don’t want the 4000nits experience. Even the my plasma is a bit bright for late night viewing. I want to dall asleep, and bright screens can be annoying.... inless, i am going for that “wow” factor.

The thing is, that there are uses for screens outside of cinema and broadcast.

As far as the “bigger” pixels, how big is the 1080 Pulsar? Can it be 4x bigger and make eye popping 4K?

While i love the idea of having up to 4000nits of blinding pain just lurking underneath the hood. And ultra realistic contrast, it is more of an experience than a pleasant relaxing feeling.

But i hear you. It would be awesome to have one of those. But if is smaller than 60”, then i am sure they can make a 4K version without a hit on quality.


8K screens don’t need to be ubiquitous. We are no longer in the NTSC/PAL/Secam world. Itnis digital and format agnostic for the most part. Sometimes resolution is more important, and sometimes color and hdr are.

There is no doubt the future is 8K, and if you are in the market for a new tv right now, then the future is also now. Otherwise I don't see the basis of necessity for 8K, certainly not the hype that it gets. The Sony Bravia 8K at the retailer is beautiful. Is it more beautiful than the 4K LG or 4K Sony branded LG OLED? For a bright room LCD is usually better, for a dark cinema OLED is better. But I thought the 4K vs 8K part of the evaluation was just about moot. They are so close in apparent sharpness for comparable screen sizes as to not be a factor. And I don't really think people enter in with idea that I'm going to buy just the largest tv that the pixels can hide in. They go in first with a screen size already in mind, and a place for it. Of those TV's, the 8K Sony and 4k LG OLED, I think the latter wins by a little bit but there are reasons to go with LCD, you don't want to risk burn-in, you're a gamer, or still photographs. I want HDR10+ so a Samsung 8k could make the most sense for me. So basically then, what you said above with one exception. My girl friend, and it's to my benefit to trust her on this, says there are only two things the bedroom is for, and watching tv is not one of them. :happy:

 

[Guest]

Tom, i don’t know much about the Pulsar. Is it Oled or LED? Or what kind of tech are they using for their monitors? Google only turns up a basic article, and then some mixed results.

The most accurate images i’ve seen are on those 4K $40K Sony grading monitors, so far.

 

[DLD]

There is no doubt the future is 8K, and if you are in the market for a new tv right now, then the future is also now. Otherwise I don't see the basis of necessity for 8K, certainly not the hype that it gets...

I'd say it makes sense to buy a 4K set now because they have gotten so inexpensive and wait until the 8K prices have come down and there's more 8K content available. From purely accounting point of view, the downward price movement on an 8K set will more than cover the investment into a quality 4K model over the course of the next couple of years.

 

[Run&Gun]

I myself will make the living room fit the TV and not the TV fit the living room. However, plenty of people don't want TV's bigger than 40-55" because of how the rest of the room will look, or they think that is a good size regardless of space. I have a projector and 3m wide screen, about 150" diagonal, which is as wide as I can go, so I am all for bigger screens. TVs are like furniture, yeah a big table and a big couch might be nice but look like crap if not fitted properly in its space.

I'm not saying that everyone should go out and get a 75", 85", or larger screen, I was just saying that the barriers of absolute room space are not the same as they once were, with current and coming screen and projection technology.

And I have to admit that I'm a little jealous of your 150" set-up. 120" is unfortunately at my upper limit in my den, unless I switched walls and covered the fireplace. I actually can fit a 150" screen on the wall with about 4" to spare on each side(counting the frame), but then the towers would encroach into the sides of the screen. 135" would still physically work, too, but the projector isn't rated for that. So 120" is my practical limit.

 

[Gary T]

I'm not saying that everyone should go out and get a 75", 85", or larger screen, I was just saying that the barriers of absolute room space are not the same as they once were, with current and coming screen and projection technology.

And I have to admit that I'm a little jealous of your 150" set-up. 120" is unfortunately at my upper limit in my den, unless I switched walls and covered the fireplace. I actually can fit a 150" screen on the wall with about 4" to spare on each side(counting the frame), but then the towers would encroach into the sides of the screen. 135" would still physically work, too, but the projector isn't rated for that. So 120" is my practical limit.

Yes, big beautiful 8K screens are coming thanks to the advent of technologies like MicroLED. Current OLED and LED screens cost more to manufacture as they get larger while larger MicroLED sets cost about the same to manufacture as those with smaller screens. That will allow Samsung and others to manufacture 2000 nit 100" screens with perfect blacks for about what it costs to manufacture a 50" model. Of course they will charge more for the larger sets but once the technology become ubiquitous the premium shouldn't be that great.

It will likely be a few years before MicroLED sets are commercially viable. Cable is still stuck back in 2005, so hopefully by then we'll have much higher quality streaming options that deliver true 4K+ HDR images.

I have a 65" OLED that I wish it was 75"+ so I think this is great news. I'll retire the OLED to the bedroom and embrace my Orwellian future with my 120" MicroLED Telescreen in the living room.

The modularity of MicroLED makes it a bit easier to scale the size of the displays, too. To oversimplify, say a 50-inch TV has 10 modules with around 830,000 pixels on each module. Put more of those same modules together, and a company could sell an 8K, 100-inch TV for essentially no difference in production costs.

https://www.cnet.com/news/microled-oled-screen-technology-samsung-the-wall/

 

[High1ander]

I'm not saying that everyone should go out and get a 75", 85", or larger screen, I was just saying that the barriers of absolute room space are not the same as they once were, with current and coming screen and projection technology.

And I have to admit that I'm a little jealous of your 150" set-up. 120" is unfortunately at my upper limit in my den, unless I switched walls and covered the fireplace. I actually can fit a 150" screen on the wall with about 4" to spare on each side(counting the frame), but then the towers would encroach into the sides of the screen. 135" would still physically work, too, but the projector isn't rated for that. So 120" is my practical limit.

Of course, it is easier now to have a large 77" TV than 15 years ago with their backprojected that couldn't be hanged on the wall, etc. and people will probably go for "more is more". The problem I run into if I want bigger screen than 150" is making space for speakers on the side of the screen. There are screens which allows for speakers to be behind them, but then that would require holes in the wall or the screen to be push out, which wouldn't work. That is one small drawback with future large "solid" screens is not allowing sound to pass thru.

 

[Thomas Smet]

8200 pixels on an 80" screen is still ~ 110 pixels per inch. Most modern mobile screens are over 400 PPI.

As to the RGB sensors - technically, a human eye only needs a 4:2:2, so 17.6 MPX (5.7K) is fine for 4K, which is why it has taken root in many cameras, beginning with F65. 8K would then need a 66 MPX sensor. A 33 MPX Bayer would be 6K 4:2:2.

Mobile screens may be 400 PPI but they are also viewed inches away from eyes so they need to be. PPI means squat on its own. Unless one sits three feet in front of that 80" display to fill their entire view it means nothing. An interesting point to note but the older Apple 27" iMacs were 110 PPI. The non retina ones I mean. Sure maybe not the best looking pixel ratio but not horrible either and that's when a person was sitting extremely close.

Nobody is going to watch a 8k TV that close except for extreme cases like my daughter trying to get close to Baby Shark through the TV.

As for the 4:2:2 thing that may be true of optical low pass filtered bayer images but computer graphics are pretty bad at 4:2:2. The sharper the image the worse 4:2:2 can look. There is honestly little to no point staying with 4:2:2. It is a by product of the video era and has no place anymore in anything but broadcast projects. We have the storage and bandwidth to handle 4:4:4 and even if it visually is a horrible ROI I would rather have I than not have it.

 

[Thomas Smet]

I would not call raw an innovation, more like a kludge.

Ideally, we want RGB sensors and get rid of all this debayering nonsense.

This is what I think needs to happen innovation wise:

• RGB only sensors, no more debayering nonsense
• No more chroma subsampling, CODECs are perfectly able to do perceptual compression without this nonsense
• Floating-point code values recording scene linear and get rid of the gamma zoo
• Adding interlacing to the seven deadly sins

One small issue with a RGB sensor is we would suddenly have raw data or lightly compressed video 3x larger than bayer raw video. Bayer definitely has its faults but it really acts as a great form of image compression where we can get a RGB 4:4:4 image out of 1/3 of the data. Formats like true uncompressed and ProRes4444 are now a total waste compared to raw formats like Braw and ProRes Raw. Visually any uncompressed or lightly compressed video is from a bayer sensor anyway so they gain absolutely nothing at all except a much larger file.

Bayers sensors will always have that unique ability to deliver what most consider to be an amazing RGB image with 1/3 of the data. Even in the stills world that do pixel peep and crop to extreme levels there is rarely a complaint about bayer sensors.

I would love to see 3 chip cameras make a come back but recording a 444 format with something like that is going to be heavy.