TV Manufacturers Backing Away From 8K

The resolution race appears to be over, with 4K coming out on top.

FlatPanelsHD reports that LG is officially halting production on all 8K TVs. LG’s Z3 in 2023 was its last manufactured model and has now been discontinued. The move leaves Samsung as the only remaining manufacturer of TVs at that resolution, a company that made no mention of any 8K TVs in its 2026 lineup announcement at CES last month.

The site claims LG is calling this a ‘temporary hold’ and said it would be ready to resume if customer interest in the technology changed. Still, this is being widely seen as 8K effectively being killed off the way 3D TVs were back in 2017, when manufacturing on them stopped.

The news isn’t hugely surprising – 8K TVs were often significantly more expensive than their 4K counterparts, and there is still not even a broadcast or disc format for 8K, meaning the only thing you could watch was upscaled 4K and even then – many of the few 8K TV models made wouldn’t accept a compressed 8K signal over HDMI 2.1.

As ZDNet points out, a recent Cambridge study found the human eye can’t detect a difference between 4K or 8K over a lower resolution for an average living room TV viewing distance of about 8 feet/2.4 metres.

With TV manufacturers skipping 8K, they’re now seemingly focused on better picture technology over higher resolution with brighter, deeper contrast, and richer colour TVs, along with better upscaling and processing for lower-resolution content.

LG announced last month its “Designed for LG Gaming Portal” certification program that aims to create an optimal gaming experience for players with improved latency, connectivity and interoperability between controllers and the LG Gaming Portal gameplay experience.

Source: TechRadar