New year's resolution: is 8K something you need to worry about?

Have you upgraded to a 4K monitor yet? Chances are you haven’t, especially if what you do with your computer doesn’t require a higher resolution. Big monitors are expensive, there are a lot more options to consider when buying one than there used to be, and if you want to push a lot of pixels, you’ll need a more powerful computer too.

If you are staring at a 4K - or even a 5K - screen all day, wondering how you coped with a mere 1080p model, you might be starting to think about 8K. It looks like the next obvious step on the monitor upgrade path, and bigger numbers are always better, but with 32-inch monitors such as the Dell UltraSharp UP3218KA and the brand-new ASUS ProArt PA32KCX costing many thousands whether you price them in pounds, dollars or euros, and 8K TVs like the 77in LG Z3 coming in at about twice the price of similarly sized 4K OLEDs, 8K is a massive investment that you’ll need a good professional reason to go for.

So why would you want 8K in 2026? The most straightforward reason is that you’re creating and editing high-resolution video, and want something that can display your final result in all its glory. Unless you have an astonishingly good workstation computer you’ll still want to use lower-res proxy files for scrubbing through and editing, before swapping back to the 8K originals for export, but being able to see your completed movie at native resolution is an important step in the process.

That’s a pretty niche use case, however, and native 8K content on streaming services is almost non-existent. There's some upscaled 4K video out there too, just to make things more confusing, but the fact remains creating and playing back 8K content appeals to a tiny minority.

Part of this comes down to the sheer number of pixels: in camera terms, if a 4K frame is an 8MP image, then an 8K one is 32MP (just as a 4K display has four times as many pixels as a 1080p one, so 8K uses four times as many as 4K), and at even 24 frames per second that’s an awful lot of data.

To deal with this, more efficient compression algorithms have been invented, but to play these back, you need more computing power to do the decompression. There's also the question of internet speeds, as you’ll need a fatter pipe to deliver the high-bitrate video streams 8K requires.

Pixel power

And don’t even think about gaming at 8K. While it’s possible, even GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 can’t manage it at a decent frame rate without using the magic of DLSS upscaling and frame generation. So much, in fact, that you start to ask yourself if you’re seeing natively rendered pixels at all, or just interpolations.

According to the Steam Hardware Survey in November 2025, only 4.83% of PC gamers are playing at a 4K resolution, with 1080p the most popular with 52.83% of players, and 1440p at 20.79%. No one's gaming at 8K, though there could be someone in the 2.74% classed as 'other' resolutions.

There's also the question of viewing distances. The UK may have the smallest living rooms in Europe, but we still sit far enough away from our TVs that we won’t be able to tell much difference between a 4K and 8K picture. For an 8K picture, the optimum viewing distance is 0.8H, where H is the height of the TV.

Using a 75-inch screen for easy maths, as it’s about a metre tall, we get a distance of just 80cm to be able to fully distinguish the extra pixels over 4K. Exactly the sort of behaviour your mother would tell you off for, saying you’d get square eyes.

Computer monitors are different. We sit closer to them, stare at them for longer periods, they often display static rather than moving images, and so the amount of detail we can perceive is higher.

One of the great benefits of large 4K computer screens has been the ability to tile windows across them and still have them cover enough pixels to make them usable, and 8K will only play into this once the screens get large enough to make it worthwhile - on a 32in screen, there's no benefit to the extra pixels over a 4K display.

Things are also changing in the direction of 8K becoming a broadcast standard. You can pick up an 8K-capable camera easily enough, and some smartphones can shoot it, though with their tiny sensors and fixed lenses, it’s highly debatable whether that’s anything more than a marketing gimmick to put on the box. YouTube accepts 8K (7680 x 4320) uploads. Blackmagic will happily sell you a camera that shoots in 17K (17,520 x 8,040). DaVinci Resolve now supports 32K editing, at more than half a billion (30,720 x 17,280) pixels per frame, but you’ll need an M5-based Mac to do it and presumably a hard drive array the size of a small American state. Shooting at these high resolutions can be useful for cropping and downscaling for better 4K output and potential future remasters, but there's currently not a vast market for it.

So while 8K seems all but inevitable, and will have some benefits, there are perhaps other things we should improve too before we leave 4K behind. Getting higher framerates for smoother motion (where appropriate, without losing the cinematic quality of 24fps), better colours with RGBW sensors, increased dynamic range, HDR that doesn’t make people look like they’ve been sunburnt, screens that support dynamic resolutions and variable refresh rates so that consoles can display games at their best, upscaling and compression methods that don’t leave the video stream a blurry mess.

And most importantly, a way to get all these technologies into the hands of creators and consumers without completely cleaning out their wallets. We’re looking at a high-resolution future, we just have to work out the best way to get there.