8K TV and upscaling: does AI make a difference even without native content?

When dealing with a native high resolution TV of the panel, and even more so with an 8Kwe inevitably come across the upscaling processwhich consists in scaling the resolution of the source content to the native resolution.

The current major limitation of 8K panels is the substantial lack of 8K Ultra HD native resolution content and sources. 8K which corresponds to a resolution of 7680 x 4320 pixels, or a total of about 33 million pixelsagainst the approximately 8 million pixels of televisions and related content in 4K Ultra HD.

This is where upscaling comes into play, i.e. the on-board electronics of the television, with its processor and algorithms. Switch from 4K to 8Kbut all in all also from Full HD to 8K, it is a rather easy and linear interpolation process. A very different matter when starting from lower quality sources, like SD, or even HD 720p, where the horizontal to vertical pixel ratio of the content no longer matches perfectly. At that point the interpolation becomes decidedly more complex and we can no longer be satisfied with classics bilinear or bicubic algorithmsotherwise bad aliasing defects, also called jaggies.

Moreover, the starting content is not always particularly sharp, either because there is grain (see old film footage, for example), noise or even simply compression artifacts. All of this reproduced in higher resolution upscaling would appear decidedly less sharp, fake and not very pleasing to the eye.

So that’s where it comes into play now artificial intelligence with its predictive algorithms, machine learning and artificial neural networks, trying to “reconstruct” and simulate the perceptive behavior of the human brain to re-elaborate the content by applying the most effective and “natural” upscaling interventions possible. All giving the impression of displaying content in native resolution, although in reality it is not.

It’s what all TV manufacturers are working towards and, in particular, Samsung for several years nowfirst with the advent of 8K resolution models and now extending the approach to 4K Ultra HD resolution models, which today integrate the same processors “Quantum Processor AI” of older brothers.

We therefore decided to check how effective these upscaling algorithms really are, by realizing our demo video in native 8K resolutionusing a Canon R5 camera (for which we have to thank Canon itself), capable of shooting up to 8K resolution. We then downscaled the same clip to 4K, Full HD and even 720p. At this point we can compare the yield from the various versions and understand to what extent the upscaling actually makes the native indistinguishable from the upscaled. We tell you on video how it went.

In order not to be conditioned by the initial footage, which may have been made to somehow facilitate the upscaling process, we have created our own demo clip in native 8K resolution. Clip that was shot on the streets of Milan in different light conditions and with different focal lengths in order to be able to count on non-homogeneous material to be fed to the television electronics.

The shots were taken with a Canon R5 camera, with 35mm f/1.8 and 24-70mm f/2.8 lenses, in 8K RAW 4:2:2 10bit @25fps (the maximum cadence allowed by the memory cards in our possession). All the 1.3Gbps footage was then uploaded to a Apple Mac Studio and through the software DaVinci Resolve Studio 18 of Blackmagic we edited the clip, applied the LUT, made the color correction in REC709 10 bit and exported everything in versions ProRes 422 10-bit in 8K (native resolution 7860 x 4320 pixels), 4K Ultra HD (3840 x 2160 pixels, Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) and 720p (1280 x 720 pixels).

The four versions in ProRes (our “masters”) were then encoded in H.265 / HEVC respectively at about 120 Mbps (8K), 60 Mbps (4K Ultra HD), 30 Mbps (Full HD) and finally 15 Mbps (720p).

Once in possession of our clips, we loaded them onto a hard disk and fed them to the integrated media player of the Samsung QN900B 65-inch 8K TV. We sat about 1.5 meters from the display and all the impressions you see in the video are “live”we went – as they say – off the cuff and nothing was “filtered” by previous off-air visions.

Obviously having carried out and worked on the shooting, with Davide Fasola we knew where to focus, in particular, our gaze and what to expect. For this reason we wanted to involve you in this experiment too Elena Toni, never present in any phase of the working of the clips and therefore absolutely free from possible conditioning.

For those wishing to evaluate the upscaling quality of their TV or playback source, our demo clip created for this experiment is available on YouTube in 8K (which will then eventually be automatically downscaled according to your reproduction system) or downloadable in native 8K, 4K Ultra HD, 1080p and 720p (all in Mp4) at the following links:

Learn more about Samsung’s upscaling technology at this link.

Content in collaboration with Samsung