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With economic uncertainty ahead, does 8K matter? Will consumers even care about 8K?
  • MadmanMadman

    With the current pandemic situation, and uncertainty around the world economy, I wonder if 8K is really going to matter.

    Look back at the recession of 2008. We had Blu-ray and 1080p. Consumers did not care. They had to worry about keeping their jobs, eating, and feeding their family. Nobody cared that they needed to buy a Bluray player or a 1080p TV if they did not have one. As such, DVDs were still vastly more popular than Bluray because they were cheaper, and the video quality was better than VHS! Even today in 2020, DVD marketshare is still larger than Bluray because they are very cheap, there is a huge used DVD market, and the quality of a nicely mastered DVD is good for most TV-viewing distance.

    I think it's possible this will be the same situation for 8K. The high requirements for 8K doesn't make sense for artists or consumers at this time, especially when nobody has money to spend. Most consumers in 2020 are happy with 1080p. Enthusiasts love 4K right now. Many movie theaters still project films in 4K and 6K. But the amount of people that even know about 8K is so small, I don't see it being a priority for anyone. Plus, if you shoot your indie film in 8K - how many viewers will have an 8K TV? Few or none. Not to mention you will need at least a 200mbit+ internet connection to stream compressed 8K, and even in the United States, only residents of big cities have access to that. My family outside the city still only have 30mbit - and this is in the US!

    With the economic uncertainty ahead, I think 4K / UHD will remain the standard for several years in consumer products. Even in 2020, 1080p remains the standard for computer monitors, and cable TV still streams at 1080i.

    So my prediction is that 1080p & 2160p will continue to remain standard for this coming decade. But 8K will not take off for consumers.

    8K will be the standard for VR only (VR video and images).

    What do you think?

  • 18 Replies sorted by
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    8K will take very long tome to become more or less common.

    As you need really large screen to see it (85" and more).

    Plus ruling class clearly had plans to reduce consumption of middle class and move them to much lower standard to make them much cheaper and push to work.

  • ScotScot

    8K production would be something for the movie theaters first. They always had to move to bigger and better historically to survive against TVs. With the advent of Covid-19 they have even bigger problems to overcome. So when it comes to 8K production equipment it will be a hard sell for awhile. For it to become mainstream for TVs H265 or something better has to become mainstream to handle the bandwidth first. Might bring projectors back vs humongous 85" TVs when it all comes together.

  • kristofermankristoferman

    I personally don't even care that much about 4K. 8K just seems unnecessary but maybe I'm an old man yelling at clouds.

  • MadmanMadman
    8K just seems unnecessary but maybe I'm an old man yelling at clouds.

    I'm in my late 20s, and at least for TV viewing experience, I agree 8K is totally unnecessary. My father gave me a VHS camcorder to play with when I was kid, so that's what I started with. The quality has made leaps and bounds since then (although I still collect rare VHS movies that don't exist in any other format).

    But from standard TV viewing distance, there is essentially no difference between 1080 and 4K, unless you're sitting 3 feet from the TV which is not healthy. In front of a 4K monitor only 2 feet away, ok the difference between 1080 and 4K is more clear, but no so much that 1080 is made obsolete. Watching 4K at a movie theater is a great experience.

    The only practical usage for 8K is VR experiences, since the image is being stretched beyond the human field of view and you're "cropping in."

    Beyond that, there is absolutely no purpose for 8K in the standard viewing environment.

  • apefosapefos

    8K make sense for shopping mall stores to install very large monitors in front of the stores so people walking in the mall can see the products in real size like a fashion show.

    Also in art exibitions museums to show moving paintimgs and art content for people walking in the galery.

    A very large theater screen for cinema projection also make sense. I saw a movie in IMAX 4k cinema theater and the screen was very large and the front chairs was close to the screen so the resolution was not enough for a perfect imersive experience. 8k is useful for this kind of cinemas.

    In situations of people very close to big screens 8k can make sense.

    For home enterteinment 8k is not needed unless if you buy a 8k camera and a very large screen to enjoy it very close.

    4k is more than enough for content production for tv and streaming. Even the GH2 1080p is good enough for TV and Streaming sites because the resolution is very fine.

  • JeffJeff

    Hi I think that 4K is sufficient 8K (and more) will need more ressources from the planet, and...

  • Energy80sEnergy80s

    8K was never meant for the masses. Even 4K is just for the minority. 8K will be aimed at the content creation industry - both for acquisition and display - but VERY FEW domestic homes will be sporting an 8K display any time soon.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @Energy80s

    Actually making 8K camera is only around 10-20% more expensive already (I mean here cost to production, margins for 8K items is much higher still).

    As new 7-12nm LSI is much more efficient compared to 28-32nm in all present 4K cameras.

    8K sensor in S35 and FF is not problem at all.

  • jonpaisjonpais
    1. Blu Rays were awesome, made DVD look like trash, and I bought bunches of ‘em, upgrading my library as much as I could.
    2. Most theaters do NOT project movies in 4K and 6K.
    3. Films are seldom delivered in the original capture resolution. I believe most are finished in 2.5K, and many theaters around the world project them in something approximating SD resolution.
    4. Just because billions of people around the world don’t have internet or OLED TVs does not mean there is not a large market. Same goes for the other things mentioned above.
    5. I can’t believe anyone in the world is still purchasing DVDs. smh
    6. As I said before, films are almost never finished in the exact same format they were shot in. To get true 4K, you’ve got to oversample from a 6K sensor. And with most ILCs you’ve got to shoot 4K to get detailed 1080p. And sometimes films are even upscaled from a lower resolution.
    7. Additional cost of 8K is trivial.
    8. Being able to extract 33 megapixel stills is great for tutorials, bloggers, art departments, fine art books about film and directors, brochures, catalogues, travelogues, posters, and marketing materials.
    9. Better Call Saul was shot with RED Weapon 8K and is enjoyed by fans the world over. Aside from resolution, all the other attributes of the sensor and lens are retained, whether viewed on an iPhone, tablet or laptop.
    10. The ability to add zooms in post with no discernible loss of image quality is very useful.
    11. Re: ‘most consumers’, whether filmgoers notice things like onion ring bokeh, rolling shutter, aliasing, moire, crushed shadows or resolution is irrelevant; what matters is what filmmakers care about.
  • kurthkurth

    @jonpais....# 3 is wrong. Most are projected in 2k. SD....maybe in some little village in India on home theater projectors. I remember seeing Lucas's first 1080p captured star wars at the theater. It looked really good. The new model for theaters, post corona, is a return to drive-in theaters. 8k projection will come in handy for giant screens seen from 200 meters away.

  • jonpaisjonpais

    @Kurth okay, but certainly not 6K. hehe

  • MadmanMadman

    @jonpais Actually, 6K was likely a mistake on my part. I watched a screening of Joker in 4K, and it was mentioned to me that it was shot in 6K on an Arri. But it was projected in 4K - so a mistake on my part.

    The difficulty with the rest of your perspective is that you are an extreme enthusiast. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a very skewed viewpoint that will make you jaded in life. Shooting in 8K or even 4K is not going to make a bad story suddenly good. Many of us are perfectly happy with high bitrate 1080p. Obviously shooting the original footage at a higher resolution makes sense, but there comes a point where, outside of some limited cases, there is no reason for storing petabytes of 8K footage - ridiculous. And as @Jeff said upgrading just to upgrade makes a huge environmental impact. We need to evaluate that as well. Can we settle with 4, 6 8K being the standard so that we're not wasting precious resources on camera technology?

    We've now approached an era of technology that the "advancements" are practically redundant outside of some specific cases. Increasing the resolution is just a boring endless chase. So after 8K, what? We race to 16K? Then 32K? Then 64K? Madness. Show me some real advancements like more affordable lens manufacturing so that I can get anamorphic glass for under $3,000. Or glass that can even resolve that level of detail! That would be a real technical feat.

    As for DVDs, again, you are speaking as an enthusiast. I agree Bluray totally blows away anything else, but I'm not going to huff and puff and pout in the corner if someone only has a DVD. As I mentioned, I still collect VHS! And up to last year I was working for a large distribution company in Europe. 70%+ of sales were still DVD, and the rest were Bluray. No more than 5% were 4K Bluray. For the public, the need is just not there.

    My point is, some technical advancements bring great benefit and opportunity, and deserve to be celebrated. But 8K is not anything particularly impressive to me, and I feel the camera manufacturers have lost all creativity and are instead racing for more resolution as a distraction. In reality, the current cameras already do 95% of what you could possibly want, and you could reasonably keep the same camera for 10+ years and not need to upgrade. So the camera companies make 8K out to be a big new idea to get people interested in buying when 4K still hasn't even approached being mainstream yet.

  • DrDaveDrDave

    I will go for 8K.

  • apefosapefos

    One benefit from 8k will be less aliasing in thin lines even in small screens because there is more pixels to resolve the lines. Even if you cannot perceive resolution difference from a given distance you will see less aliasing. So for people who likes the perfection 8k is welcome.

  • EnoEno

    The only thing that will matter in the end IMO is the price!

    If the price will come down enough and be similar to the 4K offerings at the same sizes, I bet most "consumers" will opt for 8K just because it sounds "more".

  • markr041markr041

    @Eno No. There is still resistance to shooting in 4K because 1) it takes up more storage space, 2) computers cannot handle the higher bitrates or high compression needed, and 3) the users can hardly see the difference on their 1080 computer screens, cell phones and 4K TV's from where they watch. Note; these are not my objections, they are those I hear over and over. I shoot 4K exclusively.

    For serious users, the key advantage of 8K is you can crop in post to 4K and carry out tricks like panning and zooming.

    In terms of visible video picture quality, 10bitcolor maybe and dynamic range certainly make a much bigger difference than does resolution. I think pixel-binned, line-skipping Canon 4K video looks better than the over-sampled, pristine 4K from Sony A cameras. Number of pixels is an obsession of still photographers that does not carry over to video.

  • EnoEno

    @markr041 "There is still resistance to shooting in 4K"

    99% of my clients demand 4K video content. Shooting 1080p nowadays (especial for payed work) is a very bad decision!

    8K will come regardless of our personal opinions, and as every new format the final deciding factor will be the price. But if the price will be the same, people will always opt for the "higher" quality!

  • markr041markr041

    @Eno I agree with your view on shooting 4K. Unfortunately, your and my views on the value of 4K or those of "clients" buying video are not what count. What matters is the vast population of consumers of cameras (not cell phones either). Without their buy-in, there will be no cameras for you or me. And it is these folks who do not care to be bothered by 4K and upward. Now, this is based on internet forums, and it would appear that the majority of posters are, ahem, old and perhaps set in their ways and not representative. But among the young that I know, they could not care less about resolution.

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