this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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I am surprised Sony exited the 8K TV market, even though it's likely we will need to wait another ~5 years before we start getting mainstream 8K content (from what I read 35 mm film does map onto 8K very well). That being said, Sony electronics aren't what they used to be.
There isn't a particularly good delivery mechanism for 8K, Blu-Ray tops out at UHD/4K, and streaming is so bitrate starved 8K doesn't even matter.
Chances are BD won't really exist in context of the 8K market. 4K/UHD BD is a niche populated by western collectors and as strange as it sounds, content pirates that never interact with the physical disc but are looking for source, untouched 4K video streams. And I don't believe even top end BD discs can't handle 300 GB sizes that you would need for a 2 hour 8K move in normal bitrate.
That being said, UHD BD is at around 75 mbps. So 8K would be around 300 mbps, In theory if bandwidth costs continue to decline as they have since the introduction of early broadband, you could have streaming services supporting a 300 mbps "premium" 8K stream.
Streaming services pretty much top out at 80Mbps, but more typically are around 15≃20Mbps for even 4K content, so even if they straight quadrupled the bitrate for 8K content you'd only be hitting UHD BD rates.
I don't disagree that BD will not exist for an 8K market, but that's because physical media is being killed.
This isn't even getting into the actual mastered resolution of much of this content, which you're lucky if it's even in 4K, most stuff is still mastered in 2K.
I've never tried 4K streaming (don't have the premium subscription), but 17.5 Mbps for 4K sounds like a joke. There are older 1080 sources (especially with grain) where you don't want to go too much below 15 Mpbs on H264. Even H265 generally works better primarily on newer sources material (post 2005) and encoding high complexity older film with H265 is going to give marginal efficiency improvements relative to H264.
what (legal) streaming service is giving such high bitrates? I thought they were giving like 20 at most
Sony Pictures Core, Kaleidescape, probably a few other niche ones.
I don't think multiplying by 4 is correct here. Even though it's 4 times as many pixels, this is compressed video we're talking about, the limiting factor is how many details are in motion. 1080p blurays are like 40mbps, 4k blurays are only double that bitrate with 4x as many pixels and 25% more color data (SDR8 vs HDR10).
It's a better codec which helps, but 8k could use h266. Also I think 4k blurays have less artifacting than 1080p blurays, so 4k blurays seem to have a surplus of bitrate relative to their content.
I think there exist bluray drives that can support up to 144mbps, so I don't think it's much of a stretch that we could make 8k blurays that look better than 4k blurays with existing tech and the h266 codec. But making people care about even more quality is another matter, if their eyes can't see anything finer than 4k anyways. Most people can't even tell the difference between 4k on streaming services vs 4k on disc.
Agree. I am just spitballing.
From what I've read 8K seems to be the limit in terms of historical content (35 mm benefits from 8K, but not from 16K) and general usage in terms of monitors and TV and somewhat typical scenarios.
Maybe the new GPMI cable will help here?
Can’t do much with a cable if the source (internet or BD) doesn’t have the source material at the adequate quality to support it.
Sony TVs are very well regarded though, they're one of the higher quality devices you can buy.