Are 8K TVs Really Worth the Hype?

The world’s first 8K TV with a whopping resolution of 7,680×4,320 pixels (four times the resolution of a 4K TV) was unveiled by Sharp at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) way back in 2012.

It took nearly 8 years before the first and only commercially available 8K OLED TV, capable of displaying perfect black levels for incredible contrast at ultra high resolution was made available by LG at the beginning of 2020 with the release of its LG Signature 88Z9P TV at a whooping price of USD 30,000 (Rs 21,89,839).

Since then many other companies such as Samsung, Sony, and TCL have quickly followed the lead and released their own 8K TVs.

And here we are in 2021 with all the hype surrounding 8K TVs, with companies such as Sony & Microsoft releasing their own gaming consoles, PlayStation 5 & Xbox Series X respectively in early 2021 as well as Nvidia Releasing its new RTX 3000 series of GPUs which, all support 8K displays, this has led to a sudden uproar for 8K TVs in the market. But is it really worth the hype? And should you consider buying one in 2021?

The short answer is no, Why? You might ask.

The price

8K TVs are very costly, as is expected from any new cutting-edge technology.

Even the cheapest 8K TVs in India start from around Rs 3,44,900 going all the up to Rs 11,99,994. This is very costly for a country like India which has a really large middle-class population looking for budget options, unless you belong to the upper echelons, along with the Ambani’s and the Tata’s.

For the price of Rs 3,44,900 you can get yourself a really nice 4K TV with all the bells and whistles, plus any game console of your choice, with still some money left that you can use to buy subscriptions for any ott platform such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+Hotstar and so on.

Content availability

Even if you got yourself an 8K TV you won’t have much content to watch that supports 8K resolution natively.

All streaming services except YouTube presently only support 4K content and if you watch traditional tv channels on your tv then you are out of luck because presently no tv channel or STB in India even supports 4K, but not all hope is lost, you would have to depend on AI Upscaling technology which is only provided by few TV manufacturers at the time which upscales your normal HD content to 8K, but still, it won’t be anywhere near native 8K content.

If you managed to get your hands on a new PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X (both of which are out of stock at the moment) with support for 8K at 60fps over HDMI 2.1, there are very few titles such as Cyberpunk 2077 or Resident Evil 8: Village that runs at native 8K resolution so it’s of less use at the moment. But you will definitely be future-proofing for new upcoming games.

Compability with your existing TV setup

Let’s suppose you got past the first two obstacles and got yourself a brand new 8K TV but you won’t get the 8K output you expected unless you upgrade your whole setup to 8K which is not possible at the moment because there are no 8K Blu-ray players or anything else (except gaming consoles) available in the market.

Conclusion

To conclude we can totally say that it’s up to you if you want to get an 8K TV or not. But our recommendation for you would be not to get an 8K TV at the moment because of the reasons that are listed above.