You asked: 8K TVs and gaming, best upscaling bets and cone connections

In today’s You Asked: Do 8K gaming TVs make sense now? When is it time to replace a TV? How does the way a TV produces an image correspond to the way our vision works? And which is better for upscaling: the games console or the TV?

8K Gaming TVs: Do We Want Them…Now?

@adamparker1504 asks: With the PS5 Pro offering 8K gameplay, I can imagine the next-gen PS6 and Xbox aiming for 8K resolutions. Do you think that by the end of this decade 8K will become a genuine consumer desire?

This is a perfectly timed question. The short answer is: yes, I think consumer demand for 8K TVs is about to increase, and quickly. Although not for the right reasons.

I think consumers will see the 8K logo on the box of the PS5 Pro, the subsequent PlayStation 6, and undoubtedly the new Xbox, and will want their TV to have the same logo. (Get the keyboard warriors in line talking about how Sony is generating false demand for 8K TVs. But I don’t think that’s really happening.)

Here’s the thing: I don’t see native 8K gaming coming anytime soon. It takes a monumental amount of processing power to render 4K games at higher frame rates. Playing 8K games at reasonable frame rates? … We will get there, but it will require a huge advance in computing power.

What will be much more common, I suspect, is 4K games being upscaled by the console to 8K resolution – a task, incidentally, that 8K TVs already perform out of necessity. You can upgrade your games from 4K to 8K with any 8K TV currently available, and that’s what the PS5 Pro will do too.

But with console-sourced information for every pixel on an 8K TV, I can see demand for 8K TV increasing because gaming consoles are much more prevalent than high-end gaming PCs. (No offense to my high-end PC gaming people, but you know what I mean.)

People always ask, “Where’s the 8K content?” When there’s an 8K logo on a PS5 box, people who don’t know any better might say, “There’s 8K content” and be happy to buy an 8K TV, figuring they’re going to unlock something special from their expensive new console.

I will say that this should all look great at 77 inches or larger, and definitely 85 inches or larger.

Scale-up conundrum

Thibault Ewbank writes: I’m a new movie buff and I watch all my 4K and Blu-rays with an Xbox One S. My TV is a 2021 LG A1 OLED. I don’t know what to choose for luxury between the Xbox and the television. Upscale seems (to me) like a difficult process to test, so I didn’t find much information.

Here’s the deal: if you set your Xbox to 4K, it’s upscaling everything (other than native content or 4K games) to 4K. Your TV sees a 4K signal and doesn’t upgrade anything. So in practice, you don’t really need to compare your Xbox’s upscaler to your LG A1 OLED’s upscaler.

If you wanted to rely solely on your TV’s upscaler, I think you would need to set your Xbox’s resolution to match the native resolution of your game or content. So, for example, let’s say you were watching a DVD in 480p. If you set your Xbox’s output resolution to 480p and then play the DVD, you will see the TV upscaling from 480p to 4K. You could then change the Xbox’s output to 4K and watch the same DVD clip again to see which performed better.

However, upscaling to 4K from 480p is a difficult task, so you’ll probably find that neither does an incredible job at it.

Is it time to upgrade my TV?

@Allessio777 asks: How many years should I keep a TV before the technological improvement is worth a newer model?

And Premium Member Mike McIntosh commented: I’ve been struggling with FOMO because my 65-inch Sony X950G is about five years old. I’ve got my eye on a replacement for the Sony 65-inch A95L. But the hardest part is justifying the $3,000 price tag for the best image quality in the country. Maybe I can continue living with current TV until I get a deal in the future?

I was thinking about this the other day. You know, in many of my TV reviews I’ve said something like, “If you’re upgrading from a TV that’s five years old or older, you’ll probably notice a huge increase in picture quality.

Sometimes I qualify it and sometimes I don’t. Let me clarify.

What if you have a five-year-old mid-tier TV and upgrade to a 2023 or 2024 mid-tier TV? You’ll notice a big improvement, because much of what was once reserved for the best TVs has now slipped into the mid-range. For example, the TCL 6 series from five years ago was a great TV, but the processing, backlight system, peak HDR brightness, and reduced glare and halo of today’s TCL QM8 are far superior, as are the resulting image quality.

But the increase in picture quality starts to be less pronounced if you’re upgrading from a high-end TV to another high-end TV. For example, if you have a 2019 Sony A9G OLED TV, you’ll see some improvement when upgrading to Bravia 8 (I’m just keeping it to OLED TVs for continuity), but the difference between the two would be much less noticeable than the difference between a 2019 TCL Series 6 and the 2024 TCL QM8.

Ultimately, you need to look at what you have now and compare it to what you can get today for the same or close to the same price, adjusted for inflation.

Mini-LED backlighting is now more common in mid-tier TVs, not just high-end TVs. Processing has improved for some brands like TCL and Hisense, while Sony’s processing, although improved, has had fewer improvements because it was so good to begin with.

See where I’m going with this? It depends on some factors.

And to Mike McIntosh: Your Sony X950G is a solid TV! The A95L, however, is significantly better just because it’s an OLED, but it’s also an exemplary TV. That price is high, however.

Cones and color mixing

Zunaid from Dubai writes: The other day I had an interesting idea about bathing. The human eye has red, green, and blue cones with very broad and overlapping wavelength sensitivities (for example, our green and blue cones overlap strongly and are both stimulated by green light). This got me thinking: do the RGB pixels on our TVs emit a wide range of wavelengths corresponding to the sensitivity of our cones, or do they only emit a narrow range of wavelengths each? How would this affect our perception of TV colors if it were one or the other?
Bonus question: How are cameras and monitors calibrated for color recording and reproduction accuracy? How do we know that the RGB wavelengths recorded by the camera sensor are the same wavelengths displayed by the TV’s LEDs?

I love this question for many reasons. First, we’ll talk about color theory and why screen calibration is so important.

The retinas of our eyes contain two different types of photoreceptors: rods and cones. Rods perceive levels of light, which is contrast. Cones perceive color. We have a cone for red, a cone for green and a cone for blue.

Zunaid, you mentioned that there is overlap between these cones in terms of the red, green and blue wavelengths that we perceive, and that is correct – there needs to be overlap for us to perceive a broad spectrum. Here’s an example: As the blue cone becomes weaker in picking up the blues as they move towards the green, the green rod starts to pick them up. The sum of these two is what allows most people to perceive balanced colors – our brains are mixing the colors and telling us that what we see is yellow, magenta, etc.

A TV also works by combining red, green and blue. And it’s important that the TV covers as much of the entire spectrum of red, green and blue wavelengths as possible. What’s more important is how well a TV can mix these wavelengths. If a TV can produce and mix color wavelengths in the same way that our eyes perceive them, then we say that it can produce colors correctly.

But producing a wide range of wavelengths is relatively easy for TVs compared to their ability to produce extremely pure red, green and blue. That’s why when we look at a histogram of a TV’s pure red, green, or blue color output, we want to see a narrow mountain with as sharp a peak as possible. The purer the red, green and blue, the more demanding a TV can be in producing colors.

That’s one of the reasons we like QD-OLED TVs so much. They are capable of producing the purest red, green and blue colors we have ever seen on a consumer display.

The only way we can know this with any kind of certainty is through measurements. We can use scientific instruments to measure colors and divide them into coordinates on a graph. For example, when I measure a TV using a colorimeter and Calman software, I am measuring the color coordinates that the TV is producing and then comparing them to a reference chart to see how accurate they are.

And that’s where the importance of white balance comes in. I talk a lot about how well a TV blends its whites with a D65 white point. This means we need to see a TV producing white at 6,504 degrees Kelvin. This reference white point is what is typically used during image capture and playback. And we use it because it’s intended to more closely represent daylight. If a TV’s balance is out of balance, its color will also be out of balance.

To answer your bonus question: the only way we can know if a camera is capturing color wavelengths accurately is – again – by measuring what it recorded. If we can get the camera to accurately record what’s happening in real life, then we’ll be fine. But not all cameras do this, which is why color correction is so important.

Of course, much of the art in videos and still images is manipulating colors to achieve the desired effect. Part of what we like about movies, TV, and photos is that they’re not a perfect copy of real life. If you looked at the raw images captured during the recording of the Matrix films, you would notice that they do not have that characteristic green tone. The colorist gave it that greenish look after the fact. And the Matrix films look the way they do because of that artistic choice.

This whole topic goes much deeper. But I hope you understand the importance of measurements and accuracy a little better when it comes to monitors.