8K rising, and the HDR problem for cinemas...

“If you just look at the amount of sets that are forecast to ship and have shipped already, then we’re looking at an install of nearly 300 million households worldwide with a 4K TV in three-and-a-half years time”, Paul Gray told Sound+Image. “And indeed in 2019, we’ll see 1.4 million 8K TVs that will ship as well [chart above].

“And something occurred to me when I watched the latest Star Wars movie around Christmas time in my local very average cinema, that the black level in the cinema was extremely poor on the screen, and that we can now actually be in a situation where what you see at home, the video performance, is actually better than the cinema.

“The cinema owners have a real problem here — to do HDR they need laser projection, and our forecasts from talking to people who manufacture cinema projection equipment is that the best screens, which will be the really premium screens of 12 meters or bigger, will be very very few — maybe only a thousand or so in a couple of years time. So there will be a shortage of premium cinemas, because there isn’t the financing model this time round to drive that refit of projection equipment that we had with the shift to digital that unlocked 3D cinema.”