Yes, I can’t afford one.
Thought I’d better clarify that right off the bat.
Also, why is it off the bat?
Is that because the other saying is “to hit it out of the park”, so the first thing for that saying would be to get it “right off the bat”?
ANYWAY, I DIGRESS.
I was lucky enough to be invited along to check out Samsung’s new range of TV’s. They were all great. Spectacular. YUGE. I’m pretty sure there were new one’s of ones I’d previously seen, but I didn’t care (even though they were all exceptionally gorgeous, especially with that spectacular ambient mode running).
I was there for the big boi.
The mamma jamma.
The 8K, all-day, can’t stop, won’t stop television screen…monitor…display.
Anyway that.
It was almost serendipitous that the first thing I saw when I walked in the room was freaking Avengers: Infinity War in 4K ready to go.
“4K! BUT I THOUGHT IT WAS 8K!”
Okay, okay look. 8K IS here. But it also isn’t. With 4K pretty much on the precipice of becoming the new standard for how we consume visual media, 8K is the next step logically. It’s just that the majority of our infrastructure doesn’t fully support it. Yet. I mean you’ve probably had your own issues with 4K streaming, especially here in New Zealand. Yeah, yeah, 1080P comes down like it’s terrestrial TV, but 4K? Some of us still aren’t playing with it fully and can only buffer so much.
So what this means is 4K “PHYSICALLY” is still the go-to for media delivery. Yes, that means “DIGITALLY” we have the means to access 8K media but hoo boy…the current average for this media is a 90 minute movie equaling 24 terabytes.
That’s 24,000 gigabytes.
Or 24,000,000 megabytes.
So you know, not very big at all.
But that goddamn beast of an 82″ TV I viewed, which was charming me with Avengers: Infinity War, is smart as hell. It has AI Upscaling built in. What the heck is that? Well I’d like to think we all know what AI is, which is artificial intelligence. I’m not talking that Haley Joel Osment creepy boy-child AI, I’m talking a computer processor logically handling the load to fill in the blanks between 4K and 8K, which is, yes, double.
LORD THANOS HAS NEVER LOOKED SO GOOD.
I should know. I’m lucky enough to have watched that film too many times on my own 4K television (whose branding I shall not disclose…) and in cinema. That beautiful purple ball-chinned Grimace really lit up the screen in colors so vibrant that I thought he was deadass using the reality stone on me, but he was not. It was simply the power of the Q900R sweeping over me.
Of course they couldn’t not NOT show us 8K footage, and thankfully they had content to show us. I didn’t ask how big the files were, but it’s safe to say that it was most likely between ‘massive’ and ‘ginormous’. And this content…THIS CONTENT…I always hated the “PHOTOREALISTIC” spin or “MOVING PHOTOS” spiel but goddamn…that’s 8K for you. I wasn’t sure if I was IN the media akin to that of the data being IN the iMac in 2001’s Zoolander, but it bloody felt like it.
The Q900R is just another beautiful step from Samsung to take the reins and say to other companies “HEY. RELEASE NEW HARDWARE. TAKE THE RISK. DO THE DARE.”. Whether or not that’s because of their sheer market-size, profits or because they know someone has too is anyone’s guess, but I bloody love them 3000 for doing it, that’s for sure.
And if they all end up like the Q900R, then I’m gonna be here waiting, watching and going “HELL YEAH SAMSUNG, KEEP DOING THIS SH*T IT’S GREAT“.
Because someone has to. And they want to.
