Sony Drops 8K Display Manufacturing, At Least For Now, Waiting For Market Demand To Emerge
May 13, 2025 by Dave Haynes
I missed this when it slipped out, and just came across a post about Sony quietly dropping its 8K Bravia TV line-up, effectively stopping any marketing of 8K. That pretty much leaves Samsung as the only major display manufacturer touting the super high resolution product. LG sells them but hasn’t launched a new one in two years.
If 8K is not being made in large numbers for the TV market, there is little chance that 8K will be a thing for the pro AV and digital signage markets.
Sony has indicated it is not necessarily done, forever, with 8K, but for now, the demand isn’t there.
There would be some very special cases like medical and seismic imaging where as many pixels as possible can be beneficial, but for most applications – whether that’s watching TV or peddling watches in a high-end shop – 4K is more than enough resolution to show gorgeous visuals.
There’s also the simple problem of technology not being ready for it. While there is much more bandwidth than when 8K first started being marketed as the next big thing, it is still a problem moving those huge files. A lot of the consumer market now streams video, and just 4K can burden networks. Remember what happened when Netflix, which knows how to stream, streamed the Tyson-Paul boxing match.
One of the pieces I did for the Future Displays report that came out in January looked at 8K and asked the question: Will 8K Ever Happen?
The display industry absolutely always has a next big thing, and for a while, that was 8K. But while 4K saw wholesale adoption for TVs and commercial displays, there’s not a lot to indicate the pro AV or digital signage industries are moving to 8K.
Several years after 8K displays started being touted by manufacturers, they remain a niche product. Several major manufacturers have actually shelved 8K product lines.
So why hasn’t it happened?
First, 8K doesn’t look wildly different from 4K when seen at normal viewing distances. There are far more pixels, but unless viewers get close to screens, they’re not all that noticeable.
Other display attributes like HDR, color accuracy and contrast – those deep blacks – tend to contribute more to viewing experience than pixel counts. A 4K OLED or QLED may well look better, overall, than an 8K LCD that cost more because of its components and limited production.
Then there’s content – or more accurately the lack of it. Very little native 8K content is produced and the distribution arms for content – like motion picture studios and streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ – aren’t using 8K.
Then there are the technical issues – like efficient video compression and bandwidth support for the very beefy files that have to be moved around and pushed through signal cables. One minute of 8K footage can amount to a 20 GB file.
While 4K can be upscaled to 8K, it is not native and the image processing meant to add pixels can actually degrade overall image quality.
The visuals on 8K displays look amazing when seen at trade show booths. But not that much more amazing, if at all, than 4K on premium LCD and OLED product. Samsung has 65 and 75 inch 8K QLED commercial displays. Sharp has a 70-inch. Sony had a 98-inch 8K but it has been discontinued.
Certainly, the lack of industry energy around 8K doesn’t bode well for R&D teams that are already working on 16K. Chinese display manufacturing giant BOE even showed a prototype at the 2023 display nerd show Display Week – a 110″ beast with almost 133m pixels across a 3.3 square meter screen.
And speaking of energy, 8K TVs were effectively banned in the European Union (EU) as of March 1, 2023, with the EU’s new Energy Efficiency Index (EEI) limiting the maximum power consumption for TVs to 90W, which is lower than the 190W that new 8K TVs tend to use.
Just a clarification, Dave. TV makers did have to adjust their settings to allow the shipping of 8K TVs in the EU, but they are still legal. Mediamarkt in Germany currently lists 21 models. There were several new 8K panels shown at Display Week in San Jose last week. Development continues.