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Comment by jpgvm | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I will ever need 8K.

When I got a 1920x1200 display in circa 2004 that was pretty beast but I could still see pixels, I knew it could be better in theory even if it was already so much better than what else was on the market.

However when 4K IPS and especially the latest generation of 4K OLEDs came along I realised at my viewing distances (and my degrading eyesight) I'm never going to see another pixel again.

So for me I don't see what 8K is going to do for me. OLED with it's perfect blacks and awesome peak brightness and fast refresh times haven't left me wishing for much other than a GPU that can keep up.

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> I don't think I will ever need 8K.

I won't need it until I can't buy anything else. 95% of the content I view on my 4K TV is 1080p. At living room distances, it's fine.

So, to be honest, I used to think this too, until I got an old crt television so I can play my old console games properly[0]. It sits next to my normal tv, and so me and my fiance can play splatoon together side by side on screens I hooked up an hdmi to rca converter to it and my switch dock. The loss of resolution makes it hard to read the text, even though the screens are relatively the same size. May be in 1995, I never thought I really needed that much more resolution, but a 1K screen does fit in more details, some of them important like text, into a screen in a manner that I appreciate once I've seen it in a game.

I do think high frequency rate monitors are a gimmick, but I did read somewhere (lost the link) that scientists do think the human ability to see resolution isn't really physically restricted beyond just the limits with one's own eyes. So, don't knock it I guess and claim 640K ought to be enough for anybody just yet.

[0] it is an "in" thing to play "retro games" now, although generally some older games do just look better on a crt over blocky pixellated hdmi converters.

Thing is I looked at the 8K side by side with my new 4K LG G2, I genuinely couldn't see the difference in 8K Dolby Vision content running natively vs 4K on the G2. (which is why I took the LG home instead of the 8K Samsung I was comparing it to, subjectively I preferred the LGs HDR presentation).

Maybe someone with better eyes than me can but I'm never getting younger so my eyes are downhill from here so if I can't see it today I'm not going to see it in the future.

I'm not talking about something subjective like "I don't think it's worth the difference", I'm talking "my eyes literally can't see the difference".

> I do think high frequency rate monitors are a gimmick

Do you mean refresh rate? If yes, I used to think that but couldn’t be more wrong. Nowadays I have a 144hz monitor and I’m considering even going >240hz.

If you have the gear to push that much fps it’s a night day difference.

> I do think high frequency rate monitors are a gimmick...

Same. I don't scroll often enough to care. Or rather, I don't try reading and scrolling at the same time.

I mean, if scrolling is your use case, they're probably not for you. High refresh rate is mainly worthwhile for gaming, being nicer on the desktop is a pleasant bonus but hardly the reason to pay for one.

Agreed for monitors, but there's significant room for improvement in the VR space.

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