8K production would be something for the movie theaters first. They always had to move to bigger and better historically to survive against TVs. With the advent of Covid-19 they have even bigger problems to overcome. So when it comes to 8K production equipment it will be a hard sell for awhile. For it to become mainstream for TVs H265 or something better has to become mainstream to handle the bandwidth first. Might bring projectors back vs humongous 85" TVs when it all comes together.

8K just seems unnecessary but maybe I'm an old man yelling at clouds.

I'm in my late 20s, and at least for TV viewing experience, I agree 8K is totally unnecessary. My father gave me a VHS camcorder to play with when I was kid, so that's what I started with. The quality has made leaps and bounds since then (although I still collect rare VHS movies that don't exist in any other format).

But from standard TV viewing distance, there is essentially no difference between 1080 and 4K, unless you're sitting 3 feet from the TV which is not healthy. In front of a 4K monitor only 2 feet away, ok the difference between 1080 and 4K is more clear, but no so much that 1080 is made obsolete. Watching 4K at a movie theater is a great experience.

The only practical usage for 8K is VR experiences, since the image is being stretched beyond the human field of view and you're "cropping in."

Beyond that, there is absolutely no purpose for 8K in the standard viewing environment.

Hi I think that 4K is sufficient 8K (and more) will need more ressources from the planet, and...

@Energy80s

Actually making 8K camera is only around 10-20% more expensive already (I mean here cost to production, margins for 8K items is much higher still).

As new 7-12nm LSI is much more efficient compared to 28-32nm in all present 4K cameras.

8K sensor in S35 and FF is not problem at all.

@jonpais....# 3 is wrong. Most are projected in 2k. SD....maybe in some little village in India on home theater projectors. I remember seeing Lucas's first 1080p captured star wars at the theater. It looked really good. The new model for theaters, post corona, is a return to drive-in theaters. 8k projection will come in handy for giant screens seen from 200 meters away.

@jonpais Actually, 6K was likely a mistake on my part. I watched a screening of Joker in 4K, and it was mentioned to me that it was shot in 6K on an Arri. But it was projected in 4K - so a mistake on my part.

The difficulty with the rest of your perspective is that you are an extreme enthusiast. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a very skewed viewpoint that will make you jaded in life. Shooting in 8K or even 4K is not going to make a bad story suddenly good. Many of us are perfectly happy with high bitrate 1080p. Obviously shooting the original footage at a higher resolution makes sense, but there comes a point where, outside of some limited cases, there is no reason for storing petabytes of 8K footage - ridiculous. And as @Jeff said upgrading just to upgrade makes a huge environmental impact. We need to evaluate that as well. Can we settle with 4, 6 8K being the standard so that we're not wasting precious resources on camera technology?

We've now approached an era of technology that the "advancements" are practically redundant outside of some specific cases. Increasing the resolution is just a boring endless chase. So after 8K, what? We race to 16K? Then 32K? Then 64K? Madness. Show me some real advancements like more affordable lens manufacturing so that I can get anamorphic glass for under $3,000. Or glass that can even resolve that level of detail! That would be a real technical feat.

As for DVDs, again, you are speaking as an enthusiast. I agree Bluray totally blows away anything else, but I'm not going to huff and puff and pout in the corner if someone only has a DVD. As I mentioned, I still collect VHS! And up to last year I was working for a large distribution company in Europe. 70%+ of sales were still DVD, and the rest were Bluray. No more than 5% were 4K Bluray. For the public, the need is just not there.

My point is, some technical advancements bring great benefit and opportunity, and deserve to be celebrated. But 8K is not anything particularly impressive to me, and I feel the camera manufacturers have lost all creativity and are instead racing for more resolution as a distraction. In reality, the current cameras already do 95% of what you could possibly want, and you could reasonably keep the same camera for 10+ years and not need to upgrade. So the camera companies make 8K out to be a big new idea to get people interested in buying when 4K still hasn't even approached being mainstream yet.

One benefit from 8k will be less aliasing in thin lines even in small screens because there is more pixels to resolve the lines. Even if you cannot perceive resolution difference from a given distance you will see less aliasing. So for people who likes the perfection 8k is welcome.

@Eno No. There is still resistance to shooting in 4K because 1) it takes up more storage space, 2) computers cannot handle the higher bitrates or high compression needed, and 3) the users can hardly see the difference on their 1080 computer screens, cell phones and 4K TV's from where they watch. Note; these are not my objections, they are those I hear over and over. I shoot 4K exclusively.

For serious users, the key advantage of 8K is you can crop in post to 4K and carry out tricks like panning and zooming.

In terms of visible video picture quality, 10bitcolor maybe and dynamic range certainly make a much bigger difference than does resolution. I think pixel-binned, line-skipping Canon 4K video looks better than the over-sampled, pristine 4K from Sony A cameras. Number of pixels is an obsession of still photographers that does not carry over to video.

@Eno I agree with your view on shooting 4K. Unfortunately, your and my views on the value of 4K or those of "clients" buying video are not what count. What matters is the vast population of consumers of cameras (not cell phones either). Without their buy-in, there will be no cameras for you or me. And it is these folks who do not care to be bothered by 4K and upward. Now, this is based on internet forums, and it would appear that the majority of posters are, ahem, old and perhaps set in their ways and not representative. But among the young that I know, they could not care less about resolution.