BOE demos impressive 110-inch 16K screen

8K TVs will probably not see mainstream adoption too soon even though Samsung has been trying to push its 8K models for a few years now. At least huge screens like that make for impressive showcase demos at display events, but, for leading panel makers such as BOE, 8K is old news. The Chinese display maker has higher ambitions now, as it is showcasing an impressive 16K display measuring 110 inches at the Display Week 2023 event in Los Angeles.

Vincent Teoh, renowned color grader and YouTube TV reviewer, is attending the Display Week 2023 event and recently tweeted about BOE’s 16K display. There is a spec sheet that pompously claims that the 15360 x 8640 resolution is “beyond the retina.” Granted, 16K is actually 16x higher than 4K, not just 4X, and, sure, you cannot really see the pixels even up close, as Teoh reports. Still, 16K or ~132.7 MP is not even half of the estimated 576 MP resolution of the human vision.

This is not the first 16K display by any means, but it is the first to measure 110 inches (2.79 m) with a 60 Hz refresh rate. Maximum brightness is supposed to be 400 nits, which is quite low for an LCD this size, but it probably needed to be toned down to match energy regulations. The 1200:1 contrast ratio and the 99% DCI-P3 color gamut are standard for a LED-based LCD.

While 16K is well beyond consumer GPUs right now, 16K @ 60 Hz with 10-bit depth and HDR is already supported by the DisplayPort 2.1 standard featured on AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 cards, but it requires Display Screen Compression. If 8K makes it to the mainstream this decade, maybe 16K could be a thing for the 2030s.

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