Will Anime Ever Be in 4K?

As advanced tv sets and settings become more affordable than ever, high quality is becoming the norm, and you don't expect to see your favorite shows in a less than impeccable resolution. 4K, in particular, has been popularized in many new devices, but is it suitable for anything other than live-action, including anime and video games? Will anime ever be in 4K?

What Is 4K?

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According to a simple Wikipedia definition, 4K images have a horizontal resolution of about four thousand pixels. Different types of 4K are applied to digital television meant for home-viewing and to digital cinema.

While digital television is becoming the norm, the new technologies associated with 4K haven't been entirely controversy-free.

To avoid unnecessary jargon here, it's enough to know that 4K means very high resolution, resulting in great-looking digital tv.

Are There Any 4K Anime?

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There is a very limited number of anime that are available in 4K Blue- Rays. These include Your Name, Gundam Thunderbolt, Weathering with You,Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, and Perfect Blue. Users who have a 4K screen confirm that these two look stunning if you have a 4K tv, but if all you watch is anime, a 4K tv is definitely not necessary, since making more 4K anime isn't a priority right now.

Will Anime Ever Be in 4K?

While those few anime with a 4K remastering look beautiful, 1080p is still the anime norm, and likely to remain so for some time. Truth be told, with anime becoming visually more and more visually stunning anyway, 4K anime wouldn't be that much different, and the 1080p experience is still adequate for hand-drawn works.

For anime to retain their character, it's important that they remain hand-drawn, so the only real difference would be that 4K anime would be scanned in much higher resolution. This means that loss of detail would be less likely, but most anime are detailed enough as it is.

Veteran animators, such as Noriyuki Fukuda, who has worked with Detective Conan movies, Hajime no Ippo, Baccano! and other titles, have expressed concerns about 4K anime becoming the norm. While 4K works well with the appropriate technology, it's believed that this would compromise hand-drawn media.

Moreover, if most anime were to be made 4K, this would require new, more expensive equipment, and would likely mark new training needs and more work from the animators' part. Unless it was certain that animators would be compensated appropriately for their additional effort, they would likely hesitate to give the green light to the widespread creation of 4K anime.

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