If you’re enjoying the shiny new 4K TV you just treated yourself to, you’re about to get seriously upstaged. Sharp today unveiled its plans to launch an 8K TV-Monitor to the European market, having successfully launched 8K products to other markets since October of last year.
The LV-70X500E will be available in European markets at the end of April, with a suggested retail price of 11,999 Euros.
The 70” display comes with a whopping eight HDMI inputs – four of them support standard 2K/4K inputs, while the other four are reserved for bundled 8K input through 4 parallel HDMI connections. That purely down to current tech standards – HDMI 2.1 can theoretically carry resolutions up to 10K, but it’s still not as mainstream as current HDMI 2.0, which peaks out at 4K resolution. So any 8K video that has to be natively displayed will involve a serious bit of cabling.
With that in mind, Sharp has said that the LV-70X500E will be able to display native 8K video or pictures off a USB drive, as well as being able to upscale content to 8K levels using an advances picture processing suite to avoid pixilation. It also supports High Dynamic Range through HLG and HDR10 for making compatible content really stand out.
Not quite ready for your living room
What’s important to take away with the LV-70X500E is that it’s being billed as a TV-Monitor, and not as a regular TV. The best uses for it will be for the medical industry for displaying high-resolution patient scans, or for editing high-resolution photography and video.
While it technically can be used in your living room, the TV runs Sharp’s very basic proprietary OS, so there’s no app ecosystem such as on TVs that run Android. That means you’re going to have to connect a device such as an Apple TV or Chromecast in order to actually use this as you would a normal TV.
