8K TVs

Behold the most glorious goggle boxes you’ve ever seen

LG OLED88Z9

No, we haven’t accidentally stuck an extra ‘9’ on the LG OLED88Z9’s price. It really does cost a buck short of sixty grand. If you happen to have that sort of cash lying around, though, there is a good reason why the OLED88Z9 costs so much more than the other

sets featured here: it uses an OLED screen. Unlike LCD TVs, where external backlights are shared across many pixels at once, each pixel in an OLED TV makes its own light and colour. Which proves particularly handy when you’re talking about pixels as tiny and numerous as those you get in an 8K TV. In dark scenes especially, where rival LCD screens would have to compromise either the intensity of bright highlights or the darkness of blacks, the OLED88Z9 gives full expression to even tiny details.

OLED viewing angles are peerless too, while the way OLED technology allows an 88-inch screen to sit on a chassis that’s just a few millimetres deep seems to defy physics in a breathtaking way.

$59,999, lg.com

SONY KD-85ZG9

Sony’s debut 8K TV is a typically emphatic effort from the Japanese brand, where its native 8K resolution is just one of many

groundbreaking charms.

It’s also, for instance, the brightest TV ever, getting close to the 4,000-nit brightness peaks found on some of the most aggressive HDR sources out there. It thus has the potential to show such full-on HDR images completely natively, without having to ‘remap’ them to lower brightness levels like other TVs do. The extreme brightness also means that daylight HDR scenes look unprecedentedly lifelike

and convincing, while colours look vibrant and refined. Despite this, the technology Sony uses to give the 85ZG9 a wider viewing angle compromises its contrast a little, and means you can sometimes see backlight ‘blooming’ around stand-out bright objects. But for many this will seem a small price to pay for the 85ZG9’s really extraordinary sharpness, detail and brightness.

$19,999, sony.com.au

SAMSUNG QE75Q950TS

The Samsung QE75Q950TS’s picture quality is jaw-dropping, delivering in full on the almost uncanny realism that’s 8K’s trademark. Even better, it uses new deep learning and AI technology to turn the 4K and HD sources you’ll still mostly be watching into 8K

more convincingly than any TV before it.

Its QLED Quantum Dot colour technology also helps it deliver unmatched extremes of brightness and colour with aggressive high dynamic range (HDR) images. At the same time, a new backlighting

system, which controls the current as well as the voltage used to light the TV’s 480 separately controlled zones of LEDs, provides the most deep and controlled black colours ever seen on an LCD TV. Add in an innovative ‘Object Motion Tracking’ sound system that places sound effects in precisely the right place on the screen, along with a wealth of gaming features, and the Samsung QE75Q950TS is the very definition of a cutting edge TV.

$11,595, samsung.com