8K Association is Formed-But Why?

Overview

During CES 2019 the newly formed 8K Association held its inaugural meeting where its Executive Director, Chris Chinnock, is hoping to create a series of events to get the video industry on the same 8K page.

The newly-formed 8K Association (8KA, for short) is currently made up of Samsung, Panasonic, TCL, Hisense and AUO who have tasked themselves to come up with a set of standards that will enable the wide adoption of 8K by both manufacturers and consumers alike. Planning to create a “Good, Better and Best” label for 8K products; whatever that may mean.

With 4K adoption only sitting at about 15% with the consumer, and no broadcasters supporting 4K yet (see ATSC3) why do we need this? There is an old adage; “just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should”. Just how far into the future are these companies looking?

My 2 Cents – A Very Personal Rant

My households only TV is an HD 42″ Panasonic plasma, but I am an early adopter of 4K, well pseudo 4K actually, with my JVC RS640 projector, Oppo 203 and Oppo 205. Some may ask why keep the old plasma? Several reason: its looks terrific with great blacks, plenty of brightness, great dynamic range, is ISF calibrated to REC709 and sitting 15 feet from it you can’t see the pixels So why upgrade it when I can watch 4K, UHD and WCG movies in my purpose built home theater on a 2:35:1 105″ screen and still not see the pixels?

So please tell me what is the rational for the move to 8K when currently only 15% of the public have moved to 4K? The most significant improvement from the move to 4K is not the 4K resolution, it is the HDR and WCG. 8K brings ONLY resolution improvement and unless you sit a few feet from the screen or the screen is at least 80″ for a viewing distance of 3 feet you gain NOTHING, and that is with 20/20 vision!

Don’t forget, we are still only supporting DCI-P3 color gamut not REC2020 yet and the dynamic range is still a long ways off what we can see in real life. Supporting the complete color space and full dynamic range is what all efforts should be directed towards as these would provide REAL WORLD visible improvements not this ridiculous obsession with more resolution, which under typical viewing conditions cannot be seen.

Sorry, I forgot, the manufactures are doing what they do best. Winding the general public up into some form of buying frenzy in order to line their greedy pockets by trying to get the public to believe that their lives will be just perfect once they upgrade to 8K ….what’s next 16K?  I think not.

I work in this industry, designing and building broadcast, TV, production and high end AV facilities. While there is now a slow move to IP based fiber infrastructures to support 4K, and technologies yet to come, few broadcasters have shown any interest in even 4K let alone 8K, there is no return on investment (ROI) for these high resolution standards. Unless of course ATSC3 caches on – which seemed notably absent at CES2019! 4K is now just starting to percolate into the production, sports and many high end and corporate AV facilities. It could be a decade before there is a significant uptake of the 4K standard by the consumer, let alone 8K. That is assuming there is no down turn in the American economy.

The uncompressed bandwidth required by 8K is totally cost prohibitive for most business models unless enormous compression rates are used. As of now there is NO MEDIUM to the home that provides a better image quality than a 4K Blu-ray plastic disc; some of which exceed 80Mb/s. (Netflix supports up to 25Mb/s). There is virtually no native 8K material, nor is their likely to be in the near future; that is ignoring whatever NHK Japan is broadcasting via satellite, and up converting 4K isn’t 8K. It is nothing more than a guess at what should be displayed, NOT what was actually there in the original image. Yes, modern scalers with AI can do a very good job at guessing what the 8K image should look like, but can you fit that sized display in your room or do you want to sit that close to your screen?

I’m sorry, just as my home is a 3D free zone it will also be an 8K free zone. I am not a ‘stick in the mud’, nor anti-technological advances. It would just be nice if we completed one upgrade before moving onto the next, especially as this upgrade brings almost nothing to the average viewer. Except of course ‘bragging rights’!

It will be interesting to see what other manufactures sign up to this new association and what 8KA end up proposing to the public and program distributors in order to get them hooked.

More about the 8K Association may be found here.

See my earlier post on 8K connectivity here.