A few years after the major TV manufacturers made big promises about 8K TVs, nearly all are either continuing models from previous years or dropping 8K entirely. In 2025, only Samsung has announced new models, and they’re all far too expensive for what they offer. This is why we are not recommending any 8K TVs this year.
This may seem strange since it’d be easy to assume, based on their price and resolution, that 8K TVs are top-of-the-line TVs. How are we not recommending the “best” TVs in our list of best TVs? The fact is, while the 8K TVs we’ve tested have generally been good, they largely outperformed by models featuring technology that has a greater effect on picture quality, like OLED and Mini-LED, while being cheaper per screen inch.
The failed promise of 8K
If we take a step back, it’s not too surprising to see how we got here. 8K TVs held the promise of even more detailed, sharper images, but rarely were they able to truly make good on that promise. Despite having fourtimes as many pixels as a 4K TV, 8K TVs were limited in their potential because there is very little 8K content. Without real 8K content, all you could show on these TVs is upconverted 4K content. And while upconverting has gotten quite good, it is not the same as, nor does it look as detailed as, actual 8K content.
This is unquestionably the old chicken-and-egg scenario. Why make 8K TVs when there’s no 8K content? But why make 8K content when there are no 8K TVs? This was the same issue with early 4K, and if we go way back, even early HDTV. With the latter, there was a strong push across multiple industries to get everyone away from their old standard definition TVs.
There was a similar push with 4K because it allowed for much larger screen sizes, and most importantly, the majority of legacy content could benefit from the extra resolution. This is because most movies and TV shows were historically captured on film. Without going too far down a rabbit hole and generally speaking, 35mm film has more detail than what’s possible to capture with HD and is often similar to what you can get with 4K. That’s a super broad statement, but for our purposes, the bigger issue is that the same can’t be said about 8K.
Hisense’s 8K, from 2023.
Sure, perhaps some 35mm negatives, and likely the larger 70mm negatives of a handful of big-budget movies, could look better in 8K versus 4K, but that’s only a fraction of the total number of movies and TV shows. While many shows and movies now use at least 4K cameras, almost none use 8K. Even the productions that use higher-than-4K cameras rarely, if ever, release that higher-resolution content. It’s 4K at best.
The other issue is where would you even get 8K content, even if more was available? The mainstream streaming services are set up for 4K and could, theoretically, offer 8K content on select devices (again, chicken-and-egg). Cable and satellite often still struggle with offering 4K content in many areas. This is all to say, 8K TVs are race cars without a track to race on and drive poorly on the street.
Where’d the 8K TVs go?
Scott Ramirez, TCL’s vice president of product marketing and development for home theater, had some insight during a broader talk with CNET:
“I don’t think I don’t think 8K is going to be very important in at least in the near future. There’s very little content available for 8K. And without 8K content, really not much advantage for the consumer and still a price premium. And the other thing is the picture quality of 4K has gotten so amazingly good… What has been more important, more impactful [for] picture quality has been increasing the contrast, increasing the color purity, the color color gamut, increasing the brightness, [and] the overall HDR impact. These things seem to have much more impact for the consumer than going from 4K to 8K.”
Hisense is taking a more wait-and-see approach, according to Ondre Clarke, director of TV product marketing:
“Hisense has been driving the shift toward bigger, high-performance TVs, making premium large screens more accessible than ever. We’ve seen incredible growth in this space, and we’re continuing to push the boundaries of performance and quality and features that matter most to viewers today. At the same time, we’ve been actively developing 8K and while the U.S. demand isn’t there yet, we’re ready to bring 8K into our lineup when the time is right”
LG also sees the potential of 8K while acknowledging the reality. David Park, head of media solutions customer value enablement, told us:
“There is an element of “future proofing” when purchasing an 8K TV but due to the lack of available 8K content, 8K adoption among consumers is extremely slow. With that in mind LG is currently focusing on providing the best picture and viewing experience on our 4K OLED, QNED and UHD TVs.”
The numbers
What do we mean by “expensive”? Let’s take a look at Samsung’s 2025 lineup, compared with its own (excellent) QD-OLED models, as well as some other options. The cheapest 8K model is the 65-inch QN900F, which has an suggested retail price of $3,299. Its 65-inch S95D OLED, which we described as having the “best all-around image quality we’ve ever tested,” is $2,000. There is no magic sauce, especially no AI sauce as featured in its new models, that’s going to make an 8K LCD look better than a QD-OLED.
But let’s say you want to go bigger. The 77-inch S90D OLED is currently $2,100. The 75-inch QN900F 8K? $4,299. The comparison tilts even more in favor of OLED than the higher-end 8K models, the QN990F line. Then it’s $5,499 for the 65-inch and $6,499 for the 75-incher.
If you want to go really big, and you’d need to if you want to get any return on investment of all those pixels, there’s a 98-inch QN990F that’s a blistering $39,999. You can currently get a 100-inch Hisense for 5% of that. Sure it’s “just 4K,” but since there’s no 8K content, the smaller pixels will be wasted unless you’re sitting really, really close.
Are the above comparisons skewed because they’re mostly last year’s models? Well, they’re for sale as of this writing, so I’d argue no. Also, if they’re replaced with new models, those will still be cheaper than the 8K TVs.
Looking ahead
Does this mean we’ll never recommend another 8K TV? To hedge a little, we’ll see. The problems listed above have little to do with any manufacturer’s ability to make a product. We know they can make 8K as they’ve done it. The problem with 8K is the lack of content. There’s very little any company (well, other than Sony), can do about that. Without 8K content, as mentioned, there’s very little point to an 8K TV.
That wouldn’t be a huge issue if the TVs were the same price or cheaper than their 4K counterparts. They’re usually more costly, however, and only perform as good or worse as some of their competition. Since resolution is only one aspect of picture quality and not one of the most important, this makes 8K an expensive feature you can’t really use.
So for 2025, we’re not recommending any 8K TVs. If prices fall, 8K content suddenly becomes widely available, or there’s some other major and unexpected shift, maybe we will in the future.