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The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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There’s no 8k content, and only recently do standard connectors support 8k at high refresh rates.
There’s barely any actual 4K content you can consume.
Honestly a little surprised the IMAX guys didn't start churning out 4k+ content given that they've been in the business forever.
But I guess "IMAX in your living room" isn't as sexy when the screen is 60" rather than 60'
You don’t even need IMAX for 4K; ordinary 35mm film can normal scan to a nice 4K video. Films shot on the 65mm IMAX cameras would probably make good 8K content, but most of that was educational films, not what most people apparently want to watch all the time.
The digital IMAX projections were actually a step backwards in resolution.
Sure. But the cameras exist. You can use them for other stuff.
Hateful Eight was filmed in 70mm, and while it wasn't Tarantino's best work it certainly looked nice.
IMAX film is equivalent to 12K. Their digital laser projectors are only 4K.
IMAX is a mess. They can't even figure out a consistent aspect ratio, so most of the content shot on IMAX is cropped after delivery.
They don't want IMAX in your living room, they want IMAX in the IMAX theater, where you pay a premium for their service.
IMAX is 4K or less content. Its edge is special projection that can look good and brighter on huge screens.
Only imax film prints are significantly better than anything else
People really need to understand a lot of what "smart" TVs do is upscale the "4k" signal to something actually resembling real 4k.
Like how some 4k torrents are 3GB, and then a 1080p of the same movie is 20gb.
It's "worse" resolution, but it looks miles better because it's upscaling real 1080 to 4k instead of taking existing shitty 4k and trying to make it look better without just juicing the resolution.
So we don't need 8k.content for 8k.tvs to be an incentive. We need real 4k media, then 8ks TV would show a real improvement.
Yeah, you’re talking about bitrate. A lot of the 4k content is encoded using more efficient codecs, but if it’s sourced from the streaming services the bitrate is so abysmal it’s usually a tossup between the 1080p or 4k stream. At least the 4k usually has hdr these days which is appreciable.
Yeah most of the time I don't give a fuck about 4k. It's HDR I'm after.
Yeah. A 1080p Bluray clocks in around 20GB. A 4K bluray is 60-80GB.
If you're downloading something smaller it's probably lower quality
I feel like that's not true. But you've gotta try. If you're streaming it, chances are it's not really any better. 4K Bluray (or rips of them...) though? Yeah it's good. And since film actually has 8K+ resolution old movies can be rescanned into high resolution if the original film exists.
Supposedly Sony Pictures Core is one streaming service that can push nearly 4K Bluray bitrates... but you've gotta have really good internet. Like pulling 50-80GB in the span of a movie runtime.
You're probably aware of this since you mentioned bitrate, but a lot of 4K streaming services use bitrates that are too low to capture much more detail at 4K compared to a lower resolution. A lot of games will recommend/effectively require upscaling (DLSS/FSR/XeSS) to achieve good performance at 4K. All of this is still maybe better than 1440p, but it shows 4K is still kind of hard to make full use of.
Not true on paper but true in practice. Most people don't buy/use Blurays (or any other physical media) anymore to the point that retailers aren't even bothering to stock them on the shelves these days. Their days are certainly numbered and then all we'll be left with is low quality 4k streaming.
I've got a nice 4k mini LED tv with a 4k Blu-ray player and there's plenty of excellent 4k content but it's a niche market because most people aren't using physical media for movies. 4k streaming is garbage compared to UHD Blu-ray.
Ironically there actually is if you bother pirating content because that's the only crowd that will share full 4k Dolby Vision + Dolby Atmos/DTS-X BluRay rips.
Aside from that though, even 4k gaming is a struggle because GPU vendors went into the deep end of frame generation, which also coincidentally is the same mistake lots of TV OEMs already made.
There is a lot 4K to consume now. That was the reality 5 years ago (even 4K exists more than 10). I would say 4K is becoming slowly the new FHD, but very very slowly.
The problem is that there is a lot low quality 4K, because of bandwidth, size etc.
I feel like most streaming platforms plan lock it and still compress it to crap though.