It will be interesting. I’m guessing that this many pixels will not be used at all for 16:9 aspect ratios.
Computer displays have a certain maximum height. Anything too tall and you’ll find it uncomfortable to have on your desk less than a meter away from your eyes. Too much vertical head motion will lead to neck strain.
And once you’ve gone into the realm of “retina” resolutions (say, 200-250 ppi), adding more pixels doesn’t gain anything. All the extra pixels will produce better images on very large screens (say, above 70") or for projectors, but neither of those form factors are practical for desktop use.
So if we do see 8K and 10K computer monitors, I predict that we’ll only find them in ultra-wide aspects with curved screens to reduce horizontal head motion. We’ll probably see the same number of lines as 4K, but stretched into wider aspects (e.g. a 32:9 display featuring 7680x2160 pixels).
At least that’s my prediction. But it’s really anybody’s guess right now.
In January 2016 Japan’s NKTV began broadcasting 8K content via satellite:
In January 2018 NKTV launched the first 100% 8K TV channel via satellite and cable:
The 2020 Olympics and Paralympics, which are likely to be postponed till 2021, are scheduled to be shot in 8K by NKH TV and will be broadcast live via satellite, unless the pandemic is still active.
Sony and Panasonic have been selling 8K TVs in Japan for a while now, and LG and others are moving in to the market. 8K TV sales have been doing well across the Asia Pacific:
There’s no word yet about whether or not NBC Has plans to shoot or broadcast the Olympics in 8K for the US consumer market. There’s no 8K currently being broadcast in the US, and not a peep about it from Netflix, who was the first out of the gate with 4K. But I do think that 8k is inevitable down the road. Netflix is the #1 streaming service in Japan.
Sure yes NHK did trials before this with the BBC here in London, before then launching a limited service, and plans for this (now next) year’s Olympics. But outside of that limited market and context, in NA/Europe (or other developed markets), there is hardly any native 8K content, broadcast or otherwise.
Netflix may be the first like they were with 4K (no doubt their plans will add a tier for ‘only another few bucks a month’!), but satellite/cable will still be ages away I suspect (as in 2+ years minimum, I reckon), and terrestrial can forget about it, as they can barely transmit FHD over the air, never mind 4K or 8K, even using newer codecs like h265.
Becoming beyond perceptible/pragmatic for close working displays now. Increasing resolution driving larger displays away from the desk, where human scale dictates useful scale, my neck whips from left to right quite enough thank you. When we get off the desk and on the wall we hit viewing distance metrics which render resolution gains irrelevant pretty quickly.
Chasing an end game on all that.
Data rates and tonal range will be everything, deeper pixels man… Eye health another. The form of illumination becoming key, I still think my old HD plasma TV has a more beautiful color tonality than any of my probably more precise higher end displays, it feels gentler on my eyes too. I know they’re not as green as the more modern display technologies.
In my wife’s new office complex where over 10K people work they gave every desk a 34" wide display. 3440x1440. And it can operate as a single large display or dual displays. Which in development and support environments works great. I see this as more where larger displays go.
(Although it has been mostly empty for the last month or so.)
That’s an ultra-wide display. At that size and resolution (110 dpi), the panel’s height is only 13", which is the same as my old 24" display with its 16:10 aspect ratio.
It would be good to have two of them…
Perhaps one above the other…
My son has a similar ultra wide display, but they all feel too short to me. I have a 27" iMac with two NEC 24" monitors in portrait mode beside them, kind of a stocky tall square beside the iMac. I get loads of work done with them.
