Just As 4K Mainstreaming, And 8K On Far Horizon, 16K Displays Showing Up
August 24, 2018 by Dave Haynes
If you are still trying to wrap your head around the rationale for using 8K resolution in digital signage, you’ll be tickled pink to learn display manufacturers are starting to show large format 16K product.
The Taiwan-based display firm Innolux will be showing off a 100-inch 16K S-UHD display at the end of the month at Touch Taiwan Display International 2018.
The beast has 15,360 by 8,640 resolution – an image so tight and crisp the company says no pixel dot would be detected at even as close as 50 cm (less than 20 inches).
Apart from medical and seismic imaging, I’m not sure what the use-case for this much resolution might be, but it is MORE!!!, which is fairly central to how most electronics seem to be marketed. More pixels. More speed. More RAM. More whatever.
Most digital signage is viewed from several feet away, so people with normal vision wouldn’t be able to see any tangible difference between 4K, 8K and 16K.
What will be different is all the stuff that delivers all those pixels and makes them move. 16K means way more bandwidth to deliver files. Way more storage. Way more rendering demands. Way more graphics power. And so on.
Also, it was hard, for a long time, to find much 4K material. Same thing now for 8K. It will probably be a long, long time before 16K is a production norm.
So if you are an end-user, and excited by the idea of 16K, there’s a reason your integrator, solutions provider or consultant is far less excited. 16K is a demo product right now, and even when/if it gets mainstreamed, the arguments for it being a digital signage product are dubious.
PS – Some day, hopefully, Asian electronics manufacturers will stop using pretty young women as baubles in front of their shiny displays … sigh.
It might be time to employ the Buckminster Fuller philosophy of less is more. Pixels need to die. Vectors should reign. Oops, sorry, I’m not holding the social line of more.
There’s even more more. More power and more cooling, too.