Philips has an 88-inch 8K OLED TV – but you can’t buy it yet

By On 24 Jan, 2020 At 12:18 PM | Categorized As Techradar | With Comments Off

With OLED tech maturing, the only way is up for the television format – and by ‘up’, we mean upping the resolution count.

Philips, which until now has been happy to finesse its top-notch 4K OLED panels, is now working on an 8K OLED set, which we can confirm we’ve seen in action, albeit incredibly briefly.

Revealed at a press event in Amsterdam, the Philips screen however isn’t yet ready for the public – and as such, has a spec-sheet shrouded in mystery, no firm release date, nor even a hint of a final price.

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8K Ambilight

So, what do we know? We know that the screen will be available at least in an 88-inch size – being the model that we saw in a preview room.

We can also assume that it’ll be making use of Philips newly-announced 4th-generation P5 picture processing engine, which uses AI algorithms to improve the fidelity of images on the fly – this could be particularly important for upscaling lower-resolution sources to the dramatic 8K standard the TV’s panel sets.

Content is also one of the reasons we’re unlikely to see the screen commercially realized anytime soon, either – as a Philips source told TechRadar, there’s simply not enough 8K content for their to be a viable audience for the screen yet, despite other manufacturers chasing to be the early dominant manufacturers in the area.

What we can say however is that, based on a minute-long clip we saw running on the Philips 8K OLED TV, it could be something very special, as a nighttime cityscape showed a crisp and vivid glimpse of the fidelity Philips’ processing engine can bring to the 8K realm. Throw in the immersive behind-the-screen Ambilight tech that sees colors bloom beyond the panel itself, and you’ve got a potentially-dreamlike viewing experience. We’ll keep you posted on Philips’ progress in the coming months.

After something a little more attainable in the near future? Check out the newly announced, AI-powered, OLED805 and OLED855 models, too.

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