 On the Friday before CES started, LG announced that they'd be unveiling a lineup of real 8K TVs for 2020. Hell yeah! 8K has finally become a thing- Wait a second. Why did LG say real 8K so many times in this release? It's in the headline, it's italicized, which must be for emphasis because it doesn't appear to be part of the branding. Could LG be implying that someone else, perhaps a major competitor like, god I know, Samsung does not have real 8K? Did Samsung really create its own certification program because their 8K TVs couldn't meet the same specs as LG's? Okay, now I'm curious. So I went down a rabbit hole to find out which 2020 8K TVs are actually legitimate for consumers to buy. All the scandalous details after this message from our sponsor, Pulseway. Don't have employees to send to work or CES for you? Pulseway lets you remotely monitor, manage and control all your Windows, Mac and Linux machines from one app. Create your free account and try it out using the link below. In September 2019, the Consumer Technology Association, or CTA, the same group that puts on CES, announced the official industry display definition and logo for 8K ultra high definition televisions. The idea is that consumers laying down serious money for an 8K TV will be able to see this logo on the box and trust that the TV inside the box is capable of the performance you'd expect. Things like having 7680 by 4320 pixels, inputs that deliver content at that resolution at 60 frames per second, and the ability to upscale content from lower resolutions because let's face it, Elon Musk will probably be living on Mars before most of us will be able to stream 8K movies from Netflix. But there's another requirement in this certification that might sound a little weird to you. The one that's at the center of all this controversy. The CTA spec states a display shall meet a minimum of 50% contrast modulation using a one by one grill pattern. What the heck is contrast modulation? Well, LG actually had a contrast modulation demo at their booth back at IFA 2019, that was in September, where they showed their 2019 8K TV squaring off against an other 8K display, which many people thought to be from Samsung. In the demo, a microscope panned over both TVs showing the clarity, or lack thereof, of the displays from super close up. The obviously worse competing brand was only capable of a contrast modulation of about 12%, far below the CTA 8K Ultra HD threshold of 50%, and not even close to the 90% level of LG's 8K TVs. And I mean, if these pixels look blurry, then doesn't it even matter how many of them you have? Is your TV still 8K? Then on January 1st, 2020, Samsung made the eyebrow-raising announcement that there would be a different sticker on the box of their 8K TVs. A certification from a group called the 8K Association, a group that has Samsung as a founding member, but LG isn't involved at all. And critically, a certification spec that, as far as anyone knows, does not include any targets for contrast modulation. And the funny thing is, almost the exact same thing happened just a couple of years ago, except it was Samsung taking shots at LG for having blurry screens. Check out this Samsung blog from 2016, where they amplify the ICDM's, that's the International Committee for Display Metrology, conclusion that contrast modulation is, quoting, the optimal criterion for display resolution measurement, and that reporting contrast modulation numbers would be mandatory. In other words, instead of defining resolution by raw pixel count, we should be using the perception of clarity. And right now, contrast modulation seems to be the best way to quantify that. The reason that Samsung was trumpeting contrast modulation back in 2016 was because back then, it was LG who was putting out displays with suspicious 4K performance. So on those ones, rather than using an RGB sub-pixel arrangement, this lineup of entry to mid-level TVs used RGBW panels, meaning that every fourth pixel simply shone white. While this increased the brightness of the screen, these LCDs could not achieve full UHD resolution in color because 25% of the pixels weren't contributing to that. So in a sense, they could only pull off 4K with monochromatic resolution test patterns. Fast forward to the current 8K battle, and all of LG's new LCDs use RGB screens, and it's a completely separate issue that's hurting Samsung. Basically, the contrast modulation of their 2019 8K, the one that LG likely had in their microscope demo, was being lowered in exchange for increasing viewing angles. Everyone knows that IPS panels have awesome 178 degree viewing angles, right? That's one reason everyone's buying IPS PC monitors instead of faster TNs. But remember, IPS is proprietary to LG, and in the past, LG has even sued Samsung for infringing on their IPS patents. So the reason why Samsung's 2019 8K had viewing angle issues while LG's did not was because Samsung's panels are VA, which are known to have deeper blacks, but narrower viewing angles. Therefore, Samsung decided to employ a couple of techniques to widen their viewing angles. Subpixel dithering, and more importantly, a film that scattered light horizontally, but degraded clarity. Now, none of this means that Samsung went out and started its own consortium to bypass the all-important contrast modulation spec. Doesn't mean that. While it is true that Samsung is a founding member of the 8K Association, and that the group believes its certification criteria should be determined by its members, the group's been around since 2018. It has a lot of really big companies in it that aren't Samsung, and there isn't any reason why LG couldn't join the 8K Association now. But here's a better indicator than any of those. Samsung says that for 2020, they've sorted out their priorities, and all their 8K TVs will have contrast modulation figures in excess of the 50% target. All this hullabaloo about them not having real 8K only applied to their 2019 8Ks, which I hope no one bought anyway. Samsung even went as far as to tell me that consumers will see both the CTA and 8K Association logos on their packaging. Two different stickers. However, that little tidbit has been known for almost a week already. Yet just two days ago, LG uploaded this video, which still has real 8K in the title. So is LG deliberately spreading disinformation, or did some lowly social media manager just not get the memo or care enough to edit their scheduled YouTube post? Yeah, probably that. Hold on, I'm getting a remote command from Linus. 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