PEEPING AT PIXELS

The whys, wherefores and when of 8K

One of the things this writer learned in a long career as an analyst is that, if a technology is going to be successful, it needs both drivers and enablers. If there are no ‘drivers’, there is no reason to make it happen, but without ‘enablers’, those wanting to drive developments may not be able to make it happen. So what are the drivers and enablers for 8K?

The Drivers

The key driver for 8K is the long-term target of trying to capture images that are as close as possible to reality. The core research was done by Dr. Masaoka, a very distinguished display scientist at NHK, the Japanese national broadcaster, who found that you need the equivalent of 8K on a big domestic screen to get enough resolution so that viewers, sitting close-enough to get a truly immersive experience, could not distinguish between real objects and images of those objects.

There are also new applications such as 360-degree video that really need way more pixels than traditional flat panel displays. In addition, even if you plan to distribute or display in a lowerresolution format, such as DCI4K or UltraHD, you get a much better image because of oversampling if you capture in 8K. At the DEG Entech Fest in California in April 2023, Loren Simons, who looks after Digital Cinema for Red cameras, pointed out that while 8K was spectacular for images with detailed textures, it’s also great for giving a real ‘smoothness’ to images.

The Enablers 8K cameras have been available for years and now there is a wide range of cameras available in different form factors and with different levels of cost and quality. Smartphones are capable of surprisingly good 8K capture.

The second driver for 8K capture is that you can use ‘pan and scan’ techniques to extract portions of the image to get effects and shots that would be really hard with a lower-resolution camera that is tracking a particular subject. As 65-megapixel camera-maker, IO Industries, recently highlighted, you can capture an ice hockey match and then use tracking to follow the puck with much better clarity. Oh, and if you need to crop an image to remove a dangling microphone, you can do so without losing quality.

Editing has also become much easier with the development of better GPUs and processors with optimised video processing. NHK recently reported that it edits its 8K content on MacBooks with Apple’s M1 processors. Cloud-based editing also helps to take away the technical barriers that made 8K more tricky a few years ago.

Delivery to the display has been improving with the development of next-generation codecs that can compress 8K down to a practical level, given the huge boost in broadband connectivity in recent years. The 8K Association does not expect broadcasters to jump quickly to 8K – even FullHD and 4K can be difficult for their business models – but streaming companies do not have the same challenges. Amazon, for example, has recently opened the first 8K HDR LED cinema in the world in Culver City.

A highly-respected display analyst used to say at industry events that, “for LCD makers, the pixels are free”. That’s not strictly true, but it is the case that the basic technology for making 75” 8K LCDs is the same as making 18.75” FullHD LCDs. That means LCD makers can develop 8K TVs relatively easily, although it is a lot harder for OLED makers. (If you want to dig into the weeds of this, pay a visit to www.displaysupplychain.com). Average TV sizes continue to grow globally and the companies in the LCD business need to increase the area of LCDs being sold to deal with a big over-supply in 2022, so there will be continued pressure for them to sell more and bigger TVs.

So, in terms of enablers, you have the technology now to capture and create 8K content, to deliver it and to display it – and those are the critical elements.

Of course, there are plenty who will say “8K, there’s just not enough content”, but this writer remembers when this was said about FullHD and UltraHD/4K. In a surprisingly short time that will change, and those who have worked to create content in 8K, even if it is delivered in FullHD or UltraHD/4K now, will be in a very strong position to go back to their content and create even better versions as the technology rolls out in the future.

Bob Raikes is a veteran of the electronic display business and is editor of the 8K Association Newsletter, as well as a contributor to Display Daily and the SID’s Information Display magazine. He can be contacted at bob@8kassociation.com