8K Television for sale

I just received an email from richer sounds offering me the chance to buy one of their products, a very nice 8K TV.

I have 4K just now and the broadband I have JUST manages to run it.

So now that technology is jumping leaps and bounds when can we expect the standards of our infrastructure to keep up?
Never?
Who�s fault is it?
Why is it so slow to change?
Do we just sit back and do nothing?
Do we pay the eye watering FTTPoD [so that your neighbours can get FTTP]?
Is there anything we can do?
Is there any point asking?
Will anyone listen?

If it�s that important to you, and you can�t get the speeds you feel you ought ...

Move to where you can.

Your line can support 4k, well my FTTC can barely manage HD. Eventually most can expect to get lines that will support 8k, by then we will have 16k and already 32k is being investigated, such is life.

I would be interested in how many services provide 8K streams at the moment? There is still not a mass of 4K content readily available on mainstream services so likely some time before the average person is going to be streaming 8K even if they have a high speed connection. But then over half the country can get Virgin with headline speeds that would do 8K anyway.

I'm not sure a 8k tv (or 4k tv for that matter) is needed to get a great tv picture. My 11 year old Pioneer Kuro Plasma tv gives a very natural looking picture with great blacks, certainly better than some of the over processed pictures you find on the HDR/4K tvs these days.
RIP Plasma

Picture quality on a 10 year old Pioneer Plasma

versus

Picture quality on the latest & greatest TVs

Last year, I bought a Samsung 4K TV. I found that for some reason it was not compatible with the BBC test 4K transmission of the Wimbledon final. It did work with Netflix. I was not pleased, as this incompatibility was not obvious when I made the purchase.

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

Last year, I bought a Samsung 4K TV. I found that for some reason it was not compatible with the BBC test 4K transmission of the Wimbledon final.

Similar here, but in my case it was Blue Planet 2 on iPlayer that I was interested in. (It couldn't handle the HLG encoding for the HDR side of things.)

But Samsung updated the firmware and it was fine, and the pictures were stunning. Although it did need nearly 25Mbps to stream it

Didn't try it for Wimbledon, or the World Cup.

Edited by billford (Fri 26-Oct-18 10:48:19)

Hi

Due to the extreme compression on video we are in the situation that what we see is usually a step behind the actual decoded number of pixels.

So SD looks terrible.
HD on most platforms resembles something like very good uncompressed SD
4K on most platforms is like watching very good HD if we didn't have the compression, which is why on a HD monitor on a computer switching YouTube to 4K sees a nice improvement.
8K will be able to resolve the detail of 4K and will show us what 4K should have been, but only noticeable on very large TVs and close viewing distances.

The white elephant in the room is you don't actually need more pixels on the screen to see the benefits of 4K, most improvements we see outside of a trade show are simply because of less compression and higher bandwidths allocated to higher resolutions, which we watch on similar sized screens.

In terms of the actual panel resolution, most people don't have big enough 4K TVs to discern much difference provided by the extra number of pixels at usual viewing distances, yes it may look better in "4K" but mostly that is down to the above and more bandwidth provided to compress the video.

8K is a waste of time in the home, it's pure marketing, a way to get us to replace perfectly good TVs using the old marketing strategy of larger numbers must be better. Not only are 8K sources non-existent, the TV needs to eat more power, and if you've also gone for a bigger screen size, then everything else is going to look a little worse. Cinema is pretty much sticking with 4K at this times, but as this is shown with much less compression, still looks good even at huge sizes.

Regards

Phil

My TV has the latest firmware but alas I still don't think it will show the BBC 4K HLG streams.

Cool.

So do you have the few thousand pounds this 8k TV costs available, and could you point us towards any 8k content to run on it?

If you can afford the price of the TV and can find any native 8k content you should have no trouble with the Internet connection required.

Hi,

Are you good friends with Oprah Winfrey??? You would be if you can afford an 8K TV and the broadband to stream content to it! The TV would most likely take up an entire wall to achieve 8K....

Yours,

It would be nice if they upped the encoding rate even for SD/HD. I have watched a few streamed films recently that suffered badly due to encoding.

Watching Black Panther on NowTV there was major pixelation on the screen when they were at the waterfalls - too many things changing at once the encoding couldn't keep up with it and it was incredibly blocky. If they increased the bit rate then they could handle the higher speed changes in those scenes.

In reply to a post by ian72:

Watching Black Panther on NowTV there was major pixelation on the screen when they were at the waterfalls - too many things changing at once the encoding couldn't keep up with it and it was incredibly blocky.

NowTV are terrible for over-compressing their streams, like you I've seen HD that looked like 180p... even their HD is limited to 720p (link). I know that's technically correct but, to me, HD means 1080

No problems with Netflix, Amazon, iTunes or iPlayer (which I know is also only 720 but at least it's free!), which is mostly why I cancelled my NowTV subscription after a couple of months.

That could explain what I see Bill with a Now TV Sports Day Pass watching F1, via AAISP. Often it changes shot and goes �out of focus� for a few seconds, and is quite likely (in the Now TV app to just stop with a full-screen message �Oops, something went wrong�. Close and restart the app (as it advises) and it goes again from the up to date race state.

On initial startup it also tends to lag several seconds behind the action, with the F1 Timing app showing a car leaving the pits before Now shows it entering,