Get Ready For 8K

It was wall-to-wall 8K TVs at CES this year. 8K is almost certainly headed for the PC, but should we welcome it, wonders Jeremy Laird

- Jeremy Laird

Bigger is better. Eight is twice as big as four. Therefore 8K video must be twice as good as 4K. Not convinced? Just ask Maximum PC’s intermittently innumerate editor Alan Dexter. He’ll set you straight. Would that it were so….

8K is, of course, four times as big as 4K when it comes to the number of pixels on offer. But that isn’t the point. It doesn’t help us get at the underlying question that the very existence of 8K video raises. Is increased resolution necessarily better? More specifically, is there any upside in stepping up to 8K from 4K? After all, 4K offers over eight million individual pixels. Could 8K’s 33 million pixels be overkill?

Likewise, what’s the point of 8K if there isn’t any 8K content? Even 4K content is hardly ubiquitous. 8K content barely exists. Not that display makers seemed worried about that at CES in January. Admittedly, not many of the 8K wonders at CES were PC screens, but where HDTVs go, mainstream PCs surely follow. Thus, the PC adopted 1080p and then 4K from TVs. Next it will almost certainly be 8K. For sure, PC monitors and laptop panels are more varied than that, what with superwide monitors ever more popular on the desktop, and some laptops opting for taller 3:2-aspect displays. But what goes for HDTVs usually becomes default for the PC. Make no mistake, 8K is coming.

For the record, 8K typically refers to a pixel grid composed of 7680x4320 pixels. 8K is therefore four 4K pixel grids, just as 4K was a quadrupling of 1080p. In other words, in a relatively short space of time, the display industry has moved from the two-and-a-bit million pixels of 1080p to the 33 million of 8K. That’s a 16-fold increase in pure resolution. Staggering.