Editor’s Note: This content is contributed by Marshall Goldberg, Senior Marketing Manager - Pro AV, Broadcast, and Consumer.
Front row seats.
Courtside at a basketball game.
Ringside at a boxing match.
On the glass at a hockey game.
Right behind home plate.
Experiences such as these put you right in front of the action. You can feel the emotion. You are fully immersed; there are no distractions.
This is the potential of 8K television.
So far, 8K TV demand remains stagnant. According to research firm Omdia, ”8K television sales in 2022 had minimal growth over 2021. We now forecast only 2.2 million households worldwide will have an 8K TV by the end of 2025.” Why is that? Every time new display formats are announced, critics proclaim that the public will not care, and a few years later, the critics are proven wrong.
Consider the case for 8K technology: The pixel count compared to 4K jumps from 8 to 32 megapixels. That is a massive jump. The resolution is so high that if you stand in front of a six-foot-tall 8K display, you cannot see the individual pixels. The realism is jaw-dropping.
The biggest challenge to 8K adoption is the display. At today’s sizes of 65” to 80”, the 8K difference is difficult to perceive, and the promise of an immersive experience is unfulfilled. But with a display that’s six feet tall… or even 20 feet tall… the 8K experience is vastly different, indeed.
Today, consumers cannot purchase affordable displays which are six feet tall, and such displays are large and difficult to transport. Two promising technologies offer a solution: Rollable OLED, and tiled micro-LED. When the day comes that consumers can drive home with an affordable six-foot-tall screen that is as easy to transport as an area rug, adoption will soar. Unfortunately, until sizes jump, and prices fall, 8K penetration will remain low. How many people will buy such a large display? Impossible to say, but certainly, there are those who will.
Today, opportunities for 8K abound, for one simple reason: Using the right display, the content looks amazing. 8K video camera technology is widely available, as is compression, distribution, and playback technology. The internet is certainly fast enough. 8K will bring excitement everywhere that large displays are used – office lobbies, museums, stadiums, sports bars, and theaters. Innovative, forward-looking companies can seize this opportunity to create standout systems that grab attention, mesmerize the viewer, and leave the competition in the dust.
AMD products are ready for 8K, whenever the consumer market is ready. AMD Radeon™ graphics products offer 8K output today, and AMD adaptive SoC products have the high performance, flexibility, and standards-based technologies that enable developers to create systems to capture, edit, mix, switch, compress, transmit, and display 8K video.
In display systems (Figure 1), the programmable logic within AMD FPGA devices is ideal for use as 8K timing controllers (TCONs), which can drive any type of display technology, including tiled systems. These TCONs can maximize color fidelity by smoothly mapping high dynamic range content to the gamut of the panel and performing blending to map out pixel defects and seamlessly stitching panels together into larger displays. AMD FPGA devices are also ready to support 8K projectors in many ways and can be used to stitch together four 4K projectors into a single, seamless 8K display.
If you’re looking to support 8K, now is the time to get started. Reach out to your AMD sales representative today to make sure you, and your products, are ready for 8K!
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