Blu-ray introduced Full HD into our homes 16 years ago. A little over a decade later, in 2016, UHD Blu-ray arrived , with 4K resolution , and that is the best way to enjoy a movie in our home today. However, there are already 8K televisions on the market, but there is still no physical format that supports that resolution. Why is there no 8K Blu-ray yet? Most importantly, will we ever see them?
Manufacturers such as Samsung, LG or Sony already have 8K televisions on the market, with the best features and technologies at the service of users. However, the only way to enjoy the content is through streaming on streaming platforms such as YouTube or through local files that include TV or we have at home.
4 times the resolution, many times less content
One of the advantages offered by 8K Smart TVs is that they include various AI-based processing elements, which allow you to resize a 4K image to 8K and really notice a quality improvement. To this is added that most people continue to buy DVD instead of Blu-ray, due to its lower price, despite the difference in quality is abysmal.
Therefore, if there are already few people who buy Blu-ray in 4K, in 8K they would buy even less. Blu-ray player manufacturers are barely releasing new models anymore, mostly because there aren’t enough upgrades available to launch new models, and many people choose to buy a console to use as a 4K player as well. While a 4K Blu-ray player that even plays HDR10 + costs 169.90 euros, a console like the Xbox Series S costs 299 euros . Manufacturers like Samsung recently decided to exit directly from this market.
The 8K offers four times the resolution of 4K (33 vs 8.2 million pixels). However, despite having been on the market for 2 years, hardly any content is being produced in that resolution. There is no rush like the industry did for 4K, which arrived in physical format almost on par with the first televisions.
This is in contrast to the fact that 8K needs a physical format even more than 8K, since on the Internet a bitrate of at least 50 Mbps is required . 8K Blu-ray is possible, where companies like QuVIS have a compression algorithm that eliminates unnecessary information in the blue color spectrum that we cannot perceive, and they can incorporate a movie on a 100 GB disc. Also, for Blu-ray in 8K it is necessary to have HDMI 2.1, and there is no Blu-ray player beyond PS5 and Xbox Series X that have it.
Disadvantages: lack of codecs and high cost to produce
The price of the discs could be higher, where a 4K movie can cost 30 euros, an 8K one could easily reach 50, already approaching almost what a new game costs. In addition, there is no clear codec to use with 8K either, since the HEVC codec falls short and a new, more aggressive codec is needed.
In the audiovisual industry, most content is being mastered in 4K , or at most 6K , despite being recorded in 8K or 12K. This is to be able to work with better ease with the content, in addition to sometimes cutting planes or directly do not intend to offer it at a higher resolution. As a result, there are currently only a few hundred content in 8K, most of which are documentaries.
Therefore, the industry is currently focused on expanding the availability of 4K, demonstrating that TV manufacturers have gone too far ahead of time, and that there is virtually no reason to buy an 8K TV today. The 8K in physical format will still take years to arrive, if it finally arrives, and this will require a new codec such as H.266 .
