Did you enjoy that hot minute of thinking 4K was the end-all, be-all for the living room TV?

If you’ve been to an electronics store in the past few months, you’ve seen the candy-colored, crystalline images of 4K televisions, with four times the resolution of the 1080p HD set you have at home. The difference is stunning.

SEE ALSO: Everything You Need to Know About 4K Video in Less Than 2 Minutes

4K TVs are getting within reach now: A 55” Sony goes from upwards of $2500. There’s precious little content for it outside some 4K-mastered Blu-rays from Sony and a specialty YouTube channel, but more stuff to watch will arrive soon enough, just as it did with 1080pi.

Now along comes Japan’s public broadcasting organization NHK with 8K, a format so dense with detail that the human eye will not detect additional resolution — a claim I've heard made for 4K. I guess now we can be doubly sure there's no way to make it look better.

After the third or fourth time someone asked me whether I'd seen NHK's display I went down Wednesday to find, during an otherwise quiet late-morning moment on the convention floor, people were already lining up around the enclosure 20 minutes before what would be a packed showtime.

NHK showed about 30 minutes of footage, including a Japanese fireworks display, a whimsical short film by a performing arts troupe, a fashion show in a large arena and footage from a soccer match between Brazil and Spain.

Oh it looks real. And it is spectacular.

The clarity and depth of field truly is uncanny, yet the picture had none of the harsh edges, strange light and “video” vibe of other super-HD displays and high frame-rate demos I've seen. It’s somehow cinematic; yet you can focus in on any face in a large crowd and make out every feature at varying distances. It really is like being there.

Even the smaller TV screens give objects a more present look – a space shuttle launch contrail looked like you could just wave your hand and blow it away, and I felt like I could reach in and pluck a colorful banner from a field of charging horsemen.

3D is already wobbling off to international markets, and if something like 8K ever catches on here, it won’t help it. During the fireworks display footage, birds that fly into the shot had me thinking some sparrows had gotten into the place. Stereovision would be overkill.

Though both Samsung and Sharp also put on 8K displays back at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, you won’t see screens in stores anytime soon; some don't even see the data-guzzler as a viable format. If 8K screens ever do arrive, surely it will be ahead of pipelines fully equipped to handle them, as the NHK's first test broadcasts don't come until 2016.

Sports will lead the first broadcast yet again, this time with the Tokyo Olympics, which NHK has pledged to cover and broadcast throughout much of Japan. NHK is also filming the World Cup in Brazil this summer with its 8K Cube camera, a breadbox-sized unit which a spokeswoman held up for us to see with her left hand.

Shooting with this will be a breeze. It'll be fun to see whether NHK can get enough traction for a rich content pipeline.

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