LG announcing that it will stop making 8K TVs, following Sony last year and TCL in 2023, got me thinking about how useless the 8K television era has been.
There was once an argument that 8K made sense and would future-proof your pricey TV purchase for years to come. After all, when 4K (3840 × 2160 pixel resolution) TVs became more mainstream in 2016-2018, the same argument circulated. At the time, there wasn’t much 4K content available, but streaming services, physical media, and game consoles have since caught up. Pretty much every major streaming platform supports 4K, 2K/4K gaming is common on consoles, and UHD Blu-ray are very much a thing now. In my case, the Xbox One X and its 4K checkerboarding, dynamic resolution, and HDR10 convinced me to pick up a 4K TV back in 2016.
With 8K TVs (7680 × 4320 pixels), the same thing hasn’t happened. 2021-2022 was arguably the peak of the 8K hype cycle. At the time, lofty promises were made about content natively designed for the resolution, but for the most part, that didn’t happen. Remember when the PS5 was advertised as an 8K console designed to push the resolution to mass adoption? That definitely didn’t happen.
The PS5 can only deliver 8K over HDMI 2.1 Display Stream Compression (DSC), making it incompatible with some 8K TVs. 8K/60hz at 4:4:4 10-bit color exceeds HDMI 2.1’s 48Gbps bandwidth. None of this matters anyway because no 8K PS5 games have ever been released.
Streaming services don’t support the resolution, at least in part because the bandwidth requirements would be wild, and there’s no 8K physical media standard. I remember walking the CES floor in 2019, and every major TV manufacturer was touting 8K as the future of TVs. The industry has changed a lot since then, and during my time at CES 2026, I didn’t see a single mention of an 8K TV, even from the industry’s biggest players.
You can find a few high-quality 8K demos on YouTube, but that’s pretty much it for content. And generally, upscaling high-quality 4K TV shows and movies to 8K often looks worse, or, in some cases, the improvement is barely noticeable, with diminishing returns coming into play in a major way.
So why didn’t 8K work out? It’s just not useful
Most people don’t notice the resolution jump
The University of Cambridge
Every few years, TV manufacturers try to figure out the next big thing to draw buyers into the next upgrade cycle. In the past, we’ve seen 4K, HDR, then real HDR (HDR10 and Dolby Vision), and more recently, HDMI 2.1 and a 120Hz refresh rate. With each of these upgrades, there is a practical benefit for the user, whether it’s deeper blacks and brighter colors or smoother motion in gaming. With 8K, there aren’t any reasons to upgrade.
Now that most of the industry’s major TV manufacturers have ditched 8K, the focus can return to investing in technology with a more practical impact…
Beyond the lack of content and obvious HDMI bandwidth limitations that limit device compatibility, most people won’t even notice the difference between 8K and 4K. According to a study published in Nature by the University of Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology and Meta, you can only see 8K on a 50-inch screen from 3.3 feet, which is extremely close and pretty unusable (I can already feel my eyes burning).
When you look at bigger TVs in the 80-inch to 100-inch range, you’d need to be 6.6ft to 9.9ft away to experience the clarity benefits of the higher resolution, which while more reasonable, is a very specific situation and TV size. TV review-focused publication Rtings has also shared similar results from its own independent tests.
What does this mean for the future of TVs?
8K tried to solve a problem most consumers didn’t have
Now that the majority of the industry’s major TV manufacturers have ditched 8K, the focus can return to investing in technology with a more practical impact, including brighter OLED panels, the rise of Micro RGB LED technology that use clusters of red, green, and blue backlights instead of just blue LEDs, the growing popularity of mini-LED panels in the upper mid-range TV space — and of course, knock-off Samsung The Frame-style lifestyle TVs with not great looking matte LED panels (I’m not a fan, but they’re extremely popular).
Are any of these upgrades a big enough shift to convince the average consumer to upgrade their TV? Probably not, but at least they aren’t as useless as 8K.
