Salespeople might well be informing the public on how Full HD has just been beaten by Ultra HD, but there’s another level beyond this, and Apple may well be jumping onto this sooner than we expect.
Consider this an interesting way to start the slightly shorter week, but there’s word Apple could be on track for releasing a new even more impressive Retina iMac later this year running a more staggering 8K resolution.
For those trying to work out what this is, 8K is the level beyond that of 4K because yes, there certainly is something beyond Ultra High Definition, and a few manufacturers even have prototypes, though there aren’t many.
We’ve certainly seen a couple of very large 8K TVs, and these run the resolution of 7680 x 4320, higher than that of 4K’s 4096×2160, which in the Ultra HD space sits at the more common 3840×2160.
This might just be a bunch of numbers to you, but essentially 8K is also known as Quad UHD, meaning it is roughly four times the resolution that UHD is, packing in more pixels and consequently more detail.
The TVs running this level of resolution are likely a few years off again, partly because 4K is still in the early stages of taking off, and also partly because there’s so little 4K content out there, so imagine how much 8K content there is.
That said, Apple may well be interested in producing a new Retina iMac running this very high resolution style of display, based on something that Apple-specific website 9to5 Mac picked up before it was taken down.
According to the writers there, LG’s press play from its display division recently included a blip that said “Apple has also announced that they will release the ‘iMac 8K’ with a super-high resolution display later this year”.
We probably don’t have to tell you that Apple has not said that, and the current Retina iMac runs a 5K resolution not an 8K one, suggesting that LG might have accidentally spilled the beans on what it is producing for Apple, and what will be coming later this year.
It could also be a mistake, but it seems a little unlikely, especially when you factor in that there would be no reason for LG to even mention the idea publicly.
That said, we’ll hopefully know more later this year, so as always, stay tuned.
