The World’s First 8K OLED TV Is Finally for Sale

The world’s first 8K OLED TV — a 88-inch gigantic beast by LG that is so sharp it will murder your eyes — is available for sale starting today in Korea, with North America and Europe following in the third quarter. According to The Verge, the TV will retail for roughly $42,000.

Credit: LG

(Image credit: LG)

We saw the LG 88 Z9 at CES 2019 in Las Vegas and we were extremely impressed, as usual. We weren't as blown away as we were by LG's rollable TV, but the quality is just incredible to thanks to OLED per-pixel’s self-illumination nature. OLED avoids the use of backlight panels, which illuminate the entire screen washing out blacks and turning them into dark grays. True black pixels results in insane contrast ratio and dynamic range, which makes Samsung and everyone else’s look like bad when you compare them side to side.

If you add the 8K resolution to that ability, the result is kind of vertigo-inducing. Any human will have a hard time seeing pixels in this thing. The company says that this TV has 33 million pixels, with a 7,680 x 4,320 pixel resolution — 16 times more than Full HD and four times the pixel count of 4K.

The TV is driven by an AI processor to move all that eye candy at 60 frames per second. The processor can also analyze what’s happening on screen in real time, optimizing the quality to remove noise and banding. The processor also handles the upscaling, since there’s not much 8K content right now. In fact, it’s probably way too early to grab one of these TVs, as 4K content is just starting to come to the market now.

Jesus Diaz

Jesus Diaz founded the new Sploid for Gawker Media after seven years working at Gizmodo, where he helmed the lost-in-a-bar iPhone 4 story and wrote old angry man rants, among other things. He's a creative director, screenwriter, and producer at The Magic Sauce, and currently writes for Fast Company and Tom's Guide.