12/05/2019
Tomorrow’s technology today? Not really, some of the world will get it next year and some places in maybe another decade.
I still remember seeing LCD TV’s for sale in Melbourne for around US$20,000 a long time before they were available in New Zealand. For the NZ market, “HD” or 1K was sold as a premium service and I think only recently pay TV subscribers didn’t have to pay extra for a 1K service.
At the same time in Japan, if you hit the very bottom of the TV market you can get a 2k TV (they are pretty awful), but 99% are 4K by default. You can get those for less than 50,000 yen (US$500) but for a higher specification model expect to pay between US$1,000 and US$2,000 (over 100,000 yen) - more than that, you're probably wasting your money influenced by advertising and salespeople.
On top of this, less than two years ago I saw 8K TV for sale in Kyoto for 1,000,000 yen (about USD9,500 at the time), and soon after discounted to 900,000 yen. Later, they made their debut in Tokyo stores.
Randomly walking past an appliance store this afternoon, I see a 60” 8K for 479,000, less than half the price.
NHK will broadcast the Olympics next year in 8K and that is on top of their earlier achievement of broadcasting the Olympics in colour and via satellite (back in 1964). Some in Japan will enjoy in 8K “HD”, others unfortunately will have completely adequate 1K (my 30,000 yen TV works quite well even if it is quite obsolete). HD sold to the world as “high definition”, but not really.
As a footnote, the human eyeball might distinguish a little extra detail at 16K, but that will be the limit of TVs – there are no more gains after that.
As a second footnote, I'm pleased to have met two of the engineering team that helped develop the original flat scree TVs here in Japan :)
