Display Resolution Race to 4K: Retina-like Displays of the Future

Although we wrote about it all the way back in January, Intel reiterated the fact that the company wants to push up the resolution of the displays we're using, no matter the device. Now it appears that Sharp might be the first display maker to actually meet Intel's 2013 target resolution of 3840x2160 thanks to its new indium gallium zinc oxide, or IGZO LCD panels.

Rather than using traditional thin-film transistor technology in its LCD displays, Sharp has found a way to use indium gallium zinc oxide semiconductors which enabled the company not only to build higher resolution displays, but also thinner and lighter displays with slimmer bezels and increased pixel transparency. In the latter case this is said to lead to lower power consumption, as not only can a less powerful backlight can be employed, but the panel driver also uses less power.

Sharp is ready for Intel's 3840x2160 displays by VR-Zone.com

What are your thoughts?

 

holy crap...

 

And so it begins:

 

Hello 2012 MacBooks and probably 2013 everything else

 

Thoughts:
1.How much?
2.Can your intel HD4000 drive anything that high resolution except desktop and word document.
3. Visual difference, 200dpi vs 400dpi, can your naked eye really see the difference? (Color print is like 300dpi)

 

Where is my 1440x2560???


Didn't IBM have some super res 15in screen 5-6 years ago???

 

Only issue there is with games and 3D performance in general. Either they need to quadruple the power of current notebook GPU's or they need to find a way for them to look good at reduced game resolutions on the higher resolution screens. I notice that mainstream notebooks are going back to 16:10.

 

The more pixels the better

 

You can half the resolution in each direction. Perfect scaling.

 

Pixels pixels pixels pixelssssss!! pixelsssssssssssssssss!!!!!!!!

 

One can never have too many pixels.

 

YES YES YES yes yes yes yes yes.


PS: Why does intel care?
And where is my 2560x1440 display for 11-17 mentioned in the table for 2012????????

 

LOVE that picture

 

*loads up eBay in another tab...*

Anyone want to buy a MBP? lols.

If anyone is going to have a super high-res display panel in a notebook first, it'll be Apple. They'll move Retina Displays over to the MacBook Pro family... and since there's a pending refresh of the MBP's I pretty much expect this.

 

Somehow small resolution scale pretty well when you have a Retina display

 

I bet the current MBP's will be the last 16:10 display panels for Mac's. 3840x2160 is just 1920x1080*2. Just like Apple is doing with all their other stuff... multiplying the pixels.

I'll go ahead and make my prediction...

The 17" MBP with 1920x1200 panel will become 3840x2160 Retina.
The 13" MBP/MBA will have a BTO option of 2560x1440.

 

I don't care until I see sit and am able to make a definitive opinion. Because 1080p on a 15" display or below is already quite crowded with pixels and I don't think we need more for a better image quality, we need better contrast and colors.

Also in games you can forget about it, you'll have to half the resolution to make it playable so it makes no difference. The only nice thing is the perspective for lower power consumption (or is it consumption per pixel ? Because don't forget with double the horizontal and vertical res, you have 4x as many pixels to feed).

So to summarize : yayyy my OS desktop is going to look super shiny and the fonts will be more defined than ever. I CAN'T WAIT 1!11! /sarcasm

 

While I'm all-in for better colour reproduction and contrast, it is proven that non-pixelated fonts cause less eye strain. So I don't think that your sarcasm fits here, but that's just me. I'm all-in for higher DPi screens, Retina on the iPhone and the iPad is just awesome.

 

if when everything are vector/size based(and there are still lots of application designed with pixels and 96dpi in mind), it is true. So retina while may work on iPad/iPhone, it would be a little while before it can appear on OS X, same goes for Windows. We are getting there(W7 is much better than XP for example).

 

I hadn't noticed.

 

Yes, I do realize it. I tried to see if I can "fix" the higher dpi on my brother's m15x (15,4" 1920x1200), to fit my needs, but everything end-up ugly, so I'll stick with 1280x800 for now. There are hints that the new Mountain Lion is Retina ready, but then again, it's not vector based, just double set of icons, as it's with the current iOS devices. We'll see pretty soon.

 

Sounds like Intel misses the clock speed race era and wants to start another pointless "bigger numbers are better" game. I guess they didn't learn any lessons from the Pentium 4.

Given how virtually all laptops use TN panels - crappy ones, mind you - I'd like to see actual problems like viewing angles, color gamut and contrast being addressed before we start talking about nice to have things like higher resolutions.

 

Who says IGZO panels don't address all of that? Higher resolution usually comes with, at least, marginally better contrast. Viewing angles are a different story, but since IGZO is replacing TFT... it may not suffer from those issues much, if any. Color gamut, IDK. I'm guessing that gamut was factored into the development of the technology, and there will be varying grades of these panels. Higher grade, more contrast/brightness/gamut. They should all be an improvement over current TN TFT panels.

Sharp started producing IGZO panels in bulk in April, so I'm guessing there's going to be a LOT of devices coming this fall with them.

 

How much do IGZO panels cost? New display technologies are introduced all the time, but they rarely catch on in any meaningful way - for example, Samsung introduced PLS last year, but it's still only available in a handful of Samsung monitors.

Sharp would either have to bribe everyone the way Microsoft bribed Nokia, or the technology would have to be both amazing and amazingly cheap in order for third parties to even show any interest within 6 months.

 

IGZO replaces the expensive amorphous silicon backplane that TFT's use, so I'm guessing it's the future of LCD. It should be slightly more expensive to begin with, but it should turn out to be cheaper to produce in bulk than TFT displays... especially the high-end IPS displays.

 

The new iPad was supposed to have IGZO panels from Sharp. They couldn't make enough on-time, hence the dual-lamp and slightly overheating solution. Anyway I'm pretty certain that not-as-much mass production products as MacBooks would end-up getting them. The first couple of reviews would tell us what to expect from those panels.

 

Don't blame Intel for that. The numbers race was invented long before they came along. Besides, people like numbers; it gives them a way to compare one product to another. Its just too bad the numbers don't always add up.

Incidentally, Intel pretty much eschewed the numbers game when they moved to multi core. Nevertheless, it always has a way of coming back.

 

Bigger is always better for the human race somehow...

 

yes like this http://www.pcworld.com/article/8055/ibm_readies_thinkpad_with_highresolution_screen.html why do you ask?

 

I wonder if this screen morphed into the IBM T221 monitor that had a res of 3480x2400, around 2001. To date, the highest pixel density of any commercially available monitor. Original MSRP was about $19,000(!). Can be had on ebay for $1000+- these days.

 

Gonna take monster video cards and a lot of bandwidth to make these new monitors work. Gaming on a high res screen would be a real video hog.

 

I was referring to the 15in QXGA screens on the R50...

1536 x 2048...

 

We have the technology

Same as could have been said of 1080p just ten years ago. What a difference a day makes?

 

your chart is off on so many levels 2011 and earlier screens are 2560x1600 tabelts in 2011 were 1980x1200 with the asus prime. Notebooks in 2011 are 1920x1200 and cell phone sin 2011 were 720p...your chart blows

EDIT: Also what is up with using this Retina display moniker? Absolutely retarded. Also who cars about DPI...only thing that matters is total res....retarded I hate hearing this well the iphone has 300dpi and the glaxy nexus only has 200dpi or whatever....the nexus has a better res by miles who cares about dpi

 

Panasonic outs 'world's smallest and thinnest' 4K x 2K IPS LCD monitor

The world's smallest and thinnest? Unfortunately the company conveniently left out its actual size, but what looks to our eyes like a 15 or 17-inch display that's also only 3.5mm thin? Alright, we'll bite. For those that can do math, that's an array of 8 million pixels and vibrant from all angles thanks to IPS-Pro technology. That's great Panasonic, but put it in a tablet or a laptop and we'll show you the greenbacks. Turns out it's 20.4-inches.

2012 - Panasonic Corporation, a leader in high-definition display technology, has developed a 20-inch 4K2K (3,840 x 2,160 resolution, approx. 8.29 million pixels) IPS Alpha LCD panel, the smallest(*1) as a 4K2K-resolution display. The new panel has the world's highest pixel density of 216 pixels per inch (ppi) and the thickness of only 3.5 mm, the thinnest in the world(*1) .

The 4K2K IPS Alpha LCD panel employs two new technologies, "Pixel structure with ultra-high aperture ration structure" and "New liquid-crystal molecular orientation process technology".

Panasonic's new technologies enable viewers to enjoy, from any angle, ultra-high definition videos that show fine lines and texts crisp and clear on the screen and faithfully reproduce lifelike images with subtle textures and even a sense of depth.

 

Except with mobile phones, where guys compare together who has the smallest...

 

Have you seen phones lately? 4.3"/4.5"/4.7"/5.3"...

"Who has the smallest phone" ended in like 2005, I think.

 

smallest phone race will be back when they get projection on the eye thing right.
Even smaller is wanted if they can stimulate optic nerve w/o the eyes ~~

Human naked eye is bottleneck

 

that is true but we also can't process that much information effectively I love how in movies they have displays displaying like a million things and they act like they understand and can read it all at once and can act on it

 

I like the idea of that chart. I don't like the fact that there's no real evidence of those rapidly-increasing resolutions in notebooks.

I can see jaggies in 11 point text on my Envy 14's 1600x900 screen from 3 feet away. When I do simple image editing, it's even worse, and that's a good screen. As long as color, contrast, and brightness don't suffer as DPI increases, I'm totally for it. As others have said, if you're multiplying the pixels in each axis, then all you have to do is divide them back down for what should be a flawless reproduction of gaming at the original resolution - i.e. 1920x1080 gaming on a 3840x2160 screen should look exactly the same as on a 1920x1080 screen, but, with proper scaling, everything else will look better.

 

my question is why qare we still on a 16x9 with the better res screens...it should switch to 16:10...why do we keep using a crappy formate? Also ym other worry is...what are the response times for pixels?

 

Different technology, different characteristics.

 

high res screens would be so sick... if they didnt ahve other problems with them =\

 

No, what a difference a $dollar$ makes. Having the technology is not the same as producing & selling it for mass market consumption.

Like it or not, $$$ matters as much or more so than laboratory results.

 

Sharp is for sure doing mass production for IGZO displays... Well, any side effects known, anyone?

 

States that IGZO production has been underway for quite some time, but demand outstrips supply.
Current iPad was actually 'Plan B' by VR-Zone.com

 

More information on IGZO. I hope the Macbooks will get these.

New iPad 3: Did Apple Settle for Second Grade Tablet? - Mobile & Apps

 

Just saw it a coups days ago at eBay, for 200euros. It's a CCFL IPS screen. From the review I read, its display quality is not very good.

I thought about buy it, but then I realize what I can do with it? The r50 is too slow for today's software. Maybe just for collection

 

So we are just getting back to what was previously available, albeit in a newer form.

 

simply, Apple will release this, laptop manufacturers will then try make cheap high res screens but vary in quality.

Why does Apple always have to raise the bar and the other oems simply lag behind. I prefer windows but its just annoying.