Did AI stick a fork in 8K televisions?

The American dream of sitting home all day in means-tested public housing while enjoying streaming programs on a beautiful OLED TV seems to be dying due to our evil AI overlords. Televisions are becoming MORE expensive, not less, because AI is buying all the processors, memory, and fab capacity. (See “TVs are finally being hit hard by the AI-fueled memory crisis: for the first time, the cost of the processors is higher than the display panels in some models”, October 2, 2026.)

Movies are still being made primarily in 2K Digital Intermediate because Hollywood can’t afford the memory and processing power to do editing and effects at 4K. Our brothers and sisters in Japan introduced practical 8K devices about 12 years ago (Wokipedia). I would have expected 8K televisions for desktop monitor use and for living room use by now.

Should we just give up on ever having an 8K television at consumer prices? I know that the theory is we can’t use that much resolution with current sizes and viewing distances, but I don’t believe it. There are a lot of situations where one can walk right up to a TV and inspect detail, e.g., if it is displaying a document. Maybe it isn’t necessary for enjoying a movie mastered in 2K, but there are lots of ways that a big screen can be used other than for watching a movie. Family photo collage, for example. One of our neighbors recently got a 100″ TV at Costco and there is nothing in front of it. If the machine were 8K he could put an entire vacation’s worth of photos on the screen at once and people could walk up to the TV if interested. (I don’t like how it looks in his house, incidentally, when it isn’t on. It is a truly massive black hole in the wall. If I can take over from Donald Trump as dictator I will order TV companies to put in all kinds of great features for what the TV can/should do when nobody is watching TV.

Separately, who has bought a TV roughly 85″ in size lately? We have a low-end 86″ LG that we got for $900 at Costco in 2022. It was a floor model and came with a 5-year warranty. I wanted to see if something that huge was actually what we wanted. Should we splurge on an 83″ OLED? We never watch when the room is brightly lit (sometimes in the afternoon because of passionate NFL fans, but windows can be shaded). Or are the vastly-cheaper LCD TVs nearly as good? One of my big dreams, as noted above, is convenient software for running a slide show when the TV isn’t being used for TV (we might watch actually watch 10 hours per week).

Gemini on why we could never have a $900 OLED TV this size, even without AI as our enemy (not in quote style):

The reason OLED TVs max out at 83 inches instead of the standard 85 inches comes down to the fascinating—and ruthless—math of how panels are manufactured in factories.

Every OLED TV starts its life as part of a massive, garage-door-sized sheet of glass called “Mother Glass.” Most OLED factories use what is called a “Gen 8.5” size sheet. Manufacturers need to cut this mother glass into TV-sized rectangles with as little wasted glass as possible, much like cutting cookies from rolled-out dough.

Engineers figured out a highly efficient cutting layout (called Multi-Model Glass production) that perfectly fits two 83-inch panels and two 48-inch panels onto a single Gen 8.5 sheet with almost zero waste. If they bumped the size up to 85 inches, the 48-inch panels would no longer fit. They would have to throw away a massive amount of unused, highly expensive mother glass, which would make the 85-inch TVs prohibitively expensive.

Manufacturing an OLED panel requires depositing ultra-thin organic materials with near-perfect precision in a vacuum. It is a highly volatile process. A single microscopic dust particle or moisture drop can ruin an entire panel. If a tiny defect happens on a 55-inch panel, they throw away a 55-inch panel. If it happens on an 83-inch panel, they have to throw away a massive piece of inventory. The cost of all the ruined large panels gets baked directly into the retail price of the ones that survive the factory.

Standard LCD panels are completely commoditized; there are dozens of massive factories in China and Taiwan churning them out, driving prices into the floor. Large-scale OLED TV panels, however, are incredibly difficult to make and are almost exclusively manufactured by just two companies on earth: LG Display and Samsung Display. Without a flood of cheap, third-party competition, there is no pressure to slash prices.

OLEDs will likely always carry a premium simply because the organic technology fundamentally resists the kind of dirt-cheap mass commoditization that makes 85-inch LCDs so affordable today.

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CES 2012: