4K/6K Fading Out - NAB 2024 Lists "8K/12K" Interest

[Zack Birlew]

Alright, like I've been saying, 8K+ is clearly becoming the new bottom standard and it's even more clear now that during NAB 2024 registration you're all going to see "8K/12K" under the interest topics selection! I registered yesterday and I was surprised that 12K was being listed as well with 8K as "8K/12K" so that's a pretty good indicator that the industry is setting up to move on towards higher resolutions. Remember, we're definitely going to see some new 4K and 6K cameras for at least another year or two but 8K is going to be the new main resolution with 12K and up being the higher end. This has happened before from the HD to 4K transition so now I'm definitely eager to see what 8K/12K options could be introduced at NAB this year to be everyone's new workhorse cameras!

 

[Phil Holland]

I have a private demo of a (the) 16K television coming up, but haven't seen Sony's 12K just yet. We have a hot minute before that becomes a home reality for any or most.

That said, I am fortunate to have produced work for up to 32K resolution exhibition displays, but that's also real specialty work using arrays built project by project. My last ones were 24K, 20K, and 16K in width. Fairly short in image height due to how they are viewed however.

8K will be the next big boom, but it's still taking time. Longer than I expected, but we've had about 3-5 years worth of "influencing delays" on what I thought the timeline was doing. But from top to bottom, everything that is needed for this exists now. 8K does exist in other markets today and it's certainly notable that YouTube has supported it for a real long time.

12K through 16K will indeed happen for home televisions though and at smaller screen sizes than what has been shown already. Not likely approachable for most until next decade or extremely late this decade. If I was a betting man, we'll need new HDMI and DisplayPort standards/protocols before these really hit. And perhaps something we've never seen before to be created to support this. Hardware-wise, you can drive a 16K signal off a single box right now, but it's beefy to do well.

 

[Phil Holland]

I should add, "the new bottom standard" is unfortunately still below HD. But thankfully nobody really is making a pure HD camera these days. But many are delivering HD or less.

 

[Patrick Tresch]

Still fighting to get 4k DCP here...
Even hollywood is slowly getting out of 2k standard. They are slowly sorting it out since Arri has a "real" 4k camera and there are none saying " you don't need 4k" to get on par with film.

Now let's dump that 1.85 film format and use the native digital 1.90 DCI format to fill those ugly black bars on the theater screen.