Sharp LV-70X500E 8K 70-inch TV monitor on its way

Still feeling smug with your 4K TV? Well, it appears that you’re no longer at the cutting edge now that Sharp has unveiled its plans to launch an 8K TV-Monitor to the European market.

The Sharp LV-70X500E boasts a 70-inch display and 33 million pixels (7,680 x 4,320) resolution. That’s four times more than 4K Ultra HD and 16 times as many pixels as Full HD.

Ready for the next step in oneupmanship? Here are the details.

Sharp 70-inch 8K telly

The 70-inch display comes with a whopping eight HDMI inputs – four of them support standard 2K/4K inputs, while the other four are reserved for bundled 8K input through 4 parallel HDMI connections.

The reasoning for all that HDMI-ness is purely down to current tech standards. You see, HDMI 2.1 can theoretically carry resolutions up to 10K, but it’s still not as mainstream as current HDMI 2.0, but that tops out at 4K resolution. So any 8K video that has to be natively displayed will involve a serious bit of cable know-how.

However, Sharp has said that the LV-70X500E will be able to display native 8K video or pictures off a USB drive. It will also be able to upscale content to 8K levels using an advanced picture processing suite to avoid pixilation. Furthermore, as you would hope, there’s also support for High Dynamic Range through HLG and HDR10 for making compatible content really stand out.

TV-Monitor – huh?

This swish 70-inch 8K monster is being billed as a TV-Monitor, and not a regular telly. The reason for this is that it’s actually aimed at the medical industry for displaying high-resolution patient scans. Alternatively, it could also be utilised for editing high-resolution photography and video.

Of course, if you have the space and the cash, you could slap it up in your living room. The display runs Sharp’s very basic proprietary OS, so there’s no app ecosystem such as on TVs that run Android. That means you’re going to have to connect a device such as an Apple TV or Chromecast in order to actually use this as you would a normal TV. But, let’s face it, if you’re considering buying the LV-70X500E then the rest is small potatoes.

Price and availability

will be available in European markets at the end of April, with a suggested retail price of 11,999 Euros