Remember 3D TV? Sitting at home with your glasses on, watching Avatar and Gravity as they were the only 3D Blu-Rays you owned? Curved screens, anyone? Just this weekend, as Boba Phil was contemplating bringing a new television into his life, it was noted that TV manufacturers have to keep inventing new features that nobody really wants, just to keep churning out sets for early adopters.
Features and capability that that arrives with a big fanfare before most of the customer base shrugs and moves on. 8K looks like being the latest feature to fail. 4K will remain king, for now.
A report in FlatPanelsHD (via Dark Horizons) confirms that LG is halting production on all 8K TVs. This leaves Samsung alone in the 8K game, but when they announced their 2026 lineup at CES, there was not a single 8K TV on it.
The move is officially a “temporary hold” right now – just like it was for 3D TV back in 2017.
The issues, as always, were cost and content. 8K TVs were much pricier, but nobody broadcasts or produces a disc in 8K, so you paid out all that money and ended up watching upscaled 4K, like a mug. There was also a problem getting an 8K signal through HDMI 2.1.
Meanwhile, a Cambridge study found the human eye can’t detect any difference between 4K or 8K in an average living room at a standard TV viewing distance of about 8 feet/2.4 metres.
So 8K is an evolutionary dead end, like Hell Pigs, the Haast’s eagle, or people from Salford.
