8K has been around for a while now, I’ve seen huge (108″) 8K displays at E3 for three years running. Even so, we’re too busy focusing on 4K these days, and two versions of 4K at that – true 4K (4096 x 2160) and UHD (3840 x 2160), although no TV you can by in a store is true 4K, that’s a cinema standard. *All* TVs that claim to be 4K are actually UHD.

Yet technology marches on, and just as we are seeing the very early development of new technologies such as quantum dot displays, so are we seeing the early attempts to move past 4K resolution towards an 8K consumer standard.

As if to prove that we are truly moving in that direction in a very real way, YouTube has a couple of 8K videos up on their site, however you won’t be able to see them in their true glory because you’re not using an 8K display to watch them. To be fair, they’re impressive even at 1080p.

The other issue is watching at 8K will tax your internet connection severely, and unless you have a superfast connection, you’ll see a lot of buffering.

It’s even interesting to see the resolution notation on the screen, almost surreal for someone who pays attention to that sort of thing. In the lower corner, where a little red [HD] would appear, it says [8K]. It’s hard to see in the screenshot below, but it’s there over the settings icon in the lower right.

As the options show, you don’t have to go all the way to 8K, you can stop at a measly 4K if you’d like, but the 8K option is there in case you need it. Which you don’t. But you want it. You know you do. Even the menu looks a little strange with all those options.

This makes me suspect we’ll start to see 8K televisions sooner rather than later, although I don’t think we’ll see even hints of them as consumer devices for over a year at least, plus I believe they’d need a new type of display technology to truly show off the higher resolution, like the aforementioned quantum dots or perhaps Dolby Vision. Technology moves fast, though, so who knows?

Here’s the video at all available resolutions for your enjoyment (Caveat: I could only get it to work in Chrome).