What does matter a great deal is HDR and 10-bit colour. Human eyes can perceive about 20 stops of dynamic range, but the best cameras max out at about 15 stops and most TVs struggle to exceed 8 stops. A typical TV only covers about 40% of the visible colour gamut, with particularly pronounced deficiencies in green and cyan.
The benefits of HDR are slightly harder to explain than "more pixels are better", but the difference is visible at first glance.
Disagree. I see the pixels even from 7th row back at digital 4K theaters.
Going beyond 4k in digital cinema projection will have some benefits, but they won't be perceivable by the majority of people in the majority of seats. In the extreme case, someone with perfect eyesight sat on the front row can see up to about 11k.
A far bigger issue is the deprofessionalisation of projection. The overwhelming majority of cinemas no longer have a fully trained projectionist. As a result, serious errors in projection are commonplace. There's a huge amount that can go wrong between the DCP and the screen; without a trained person in the projection booth, it's left to the patrons to notice if a film is being projected out of focus, in the wrong aspect ratio or at the wrong brightness.
Streaming 8K is actually nice and useful for having good quality 360 video.
For the foreseeable future, the value of shooting 8K will continue to be post-production reframing.
Seems risky to double-down on the broadcasting market.
Also for applications in security and industrial, the higher the resolution, the better. So there is certainly a business case for 8K and higher.
The camera we are building utilizes four 4K sensors operating at 60FPS, with full raw capture in 10 bits. So the data throughput is the same as this Sharp camera. http://www.sphericam.com/sphericam-beast/ There is interest from the broadcast and filmmaking industries, as well as other industrial applications.
As far as this Sharp camera goes, I think the main business reason that this product exists is for the Tokyo Olympics, which will make a big push for 8K broadcasting, spurred by very considerable funding from many big players in Japan.
