Electronics giants didn’t even wait for 4K to go mainstream and proceeded to developing 8K TV models. The world’s first 8K TV, made by Sharp, will go on sale in October carrying a price tag that’s too much for common people.
First showcased as a prototype at CES back in January, Sharp’s 8K TV will be commercially available in October. Sporting an ultra-high definition (UHD) or Super Hi-Vision resolution, Sharp LV-85001 is capable of displaying simultaneously 16 times more pixels than 1080p TVs and monitors.
Cramming so many pixels doesn’t make much sense unless there is also a large diagonal, so the Japanese electronics giant has included an 85-inch (216 cm) panel. Considering this enormous diagonal, people will have to first think if they have room for the TV, and then purchase it, assuming that they can afford it at all.
Unless someone has heard you singing “I wanna be a billionaire,” and decided to make your dream come true, chances are you won’t be able to afford this telly. Since not a lot of people have 16 million yen ($133,000) lying around in their house, Sharp will start selling their 8K TV to video production companies and video broadcasters on October 30.
UHD TVs are not yet a necessity, but Sharp and several other Japanese companies are already preparing for the 2020 Olympic Games, which will be held in Tokyo. By launching products such as this 8K TV, electronics manufacturers encourage television broadcast companies to improve their quality. It is estimated by 4K will become the norm in 2018, and by 2020, we might already see 8K content on our television sets.
When the resolution goes higher, the entire industry needs to go through a revolution. That means that companies need to develop 8K cameras, along with more powerful computers for processing and storing the video. Not at last, transmission systems should be updated in order to make sure that they can withstand that much bandwidth. Hopefully, storage hardware will become larger and cheaper, as the proliferation of the h.265 codec doesn’t do much good on its own.
Sharp will unveil yet another 8K TV model at Ceatec Japan 2015, in early October, and I cannot help but wonder what will this company, LG and Samsung have in store for us at next year’s CES.
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