Sharp's $77,000 camcorder shows that 8K is coming soon

> By unexpectedly introducing a camera like this, Sharp is pushing the 8K agenda ahead for broadcasters, particularly in Japan. Sharp happens to make 8K televisions as well, so once we all get bored of 4K, it wants to have the next thing to sell us.

For the foreseeable future, the value of shooting 8K will continue to be post-production reframing.

Seems risky to double-down on the broadcasting market.

8K is largely pointless as a broadcast format and marginal even as a digital cinema format. 4k is already at the outer limits of visual acuity. Someone with 20/20 vision can only resolve about 60 pixels per degree, so you need to be sitting six feet away from a 50" screen to even notice the difference between 1080p and 4k. Unless you're filling your entire visual field with pixels, 8k offers no appreciable benefit.

What does matter a great deal is HDR and 10-bit colour. Human eyes can perceive about 20 stops of dynamic range, but the best cameras max out at about 15 stops and most TVs struggle to exceed 8 stops. A typical TV only covers about 40% of the visible colour gamut, with particularly pronounced deficiencies in green and cyan.

The benefits of HDR are slightly harder to explain than "more pixels are better", but the difference is visible at first glance.

For 360º imaging in general, the higher the resolution the better. This is not only for VR applications, but also for use cases where the user is viewing only a portion of the image at one time. This includes filmmaking and broadcasting use cases, where a portion of the sphere is remapped to rectilinear (aka "normal") projection, and cropped to 4K or fullHD.

Also for applications in security and industrial, the higher the resolution, the better. So there is certainly a business case for 8K and higher.

The camera we are building utilizes four 4K sensors operating at 60FPS, with full raw capture in 10 bits. So the data throughput is the same as this Sharp camera. http://www.sphericam.com/sphericam-beast/ There is interest from the broadcast and filmmaking industries, as well as other industrial applications.

As far as this Sharp camera goes, I think the main business reason that this product exists is for the Tokyo Olympics, which will make a big push for 8K broadcasting, spurred by very considerable funding from many big players in Japan.

You must have exceptionally good eyesight. For someone with 20/20 vision, 5k is the limit of resolvability for a 90 degree angle of view. A typical cinema configuration gives an angle of view of between 45 and 60 degrees in most seats.

Going beyond 4k in digital cinema projection will have some benefits, but they won't be perceivable by the majority of people in the majority of seats. In the extreme case, someone with perfect eyesight sat on the front row can see up to about 11k.

A far bigger issue is the deprofessionalisation of projection. The overwhelming majority of cinemas no longer have a fully trained projectionist. As a result, serious errors in projection are commonplace. There's a huge amount that can go wrong between the DCP and the screen; without a trained person in the projection booth, it's left to the patrons to notice if a film is being projected out of focus, in the wrong aspect ratio or at the wrong brightness.

I have no beef with 8K in a philosophical or technical sense, but I only worry about bandwidth. To me, 1080p alone is already taxing the infrastructure given the mass of humans incessantly streaming. While my old eyes can certainly grok the difference between 1080p and 4K, I just wonder if it is really worth it in most cases? Do I need to see a sitcom in 8K? Is an unboxing video in 8K going to sell the product better than 1080p? I game quite a bit and I still think 1080p is the sweet spot for most games given the cost/benefit ratio of hardware and gameplay. The skeptic in me can't help but think it is nothing more than a ploy by the camera manufacturers and the ISPs to get me to spend more money. But then, I'm old, so take it for what it is worth.