Streaming services and TV makers are slowly moving towards an 8K future, but Chinese display company BOE has just introduced a 16K TV, with no less than 132 million pixels.
On the occasion of the Society for Information Displays (SID) 2023 conference currently being held in Los Angeles, the Chinese BOE has just presented a 110-inch 16K LCD screen. The slab therefore offers a resolution of 15,360 x 8,640 pixels, a total of 132,710,400 pixels (160 pixels per inch). This is therefore much more than the 33.2 million pixels of 8K, and 16 times more than the 8.3 million pixels of 4K.
According to visitors to the show who shared the news on social media, the pixels are impossible to distinguish with the naked eye, even when approaching a few centimeters from the television. However, despite such technological prowess, the rest of the technical sheet will probably discourage more than one from taking the plunge.
What technical characteristics for this 16K television?
Some aspects of the TV’s spec sheet are disappointing to say the least. BOE’s 16K display offers maximum brightness of only 400 nits. We know many LCD televisions that today exceed 2000 nits peak, including the Samsung QN95B Neo QLED, which reaches 2900 nits. If there are many more pixels on the BOE screen, they are all much less bright.
We are also entitled to a report of 1,200:1 contrast, which is standard for an IPS panel, but we were expecting an OLED screen instead. The refresh rate is also only 60Hzwhich makes the screen not suitable for gaming.
Besides, no graphics card currently supports 16K resolution. The closest thing is the recently released AMD Radeon Pro W7900, which is the first of its kind to support DisplayPort 2.1, a new standard that enables 16K resolution, but has been downgraded to “only” 12K by AMD, presumably for performance reasons.
It is recalled that BOE obviously does not intend to impose such television on consumers, since such a definition has no interest for individuals for the moment. For now, it’s just a technological feat that shows what the industry is capable of, and which could soon be used by some advertisers on gigantic screens. Already in 2019, Sony unveiled a 16K TV longer than a bus.