Sony Creates Colossal 16K Screen In Japan (bbc.com)

Sony has unveiled a display that contains 16 times as many pixels as a 4K TV and 64 times as many as a regular 1080p high definition TV. "This will let viewers stand close to the unit -- which is longer than a bus -- without its image looking blurred," report the BBC. From the report: The 63ft by 17ft (19.2m by 5.4m) screen is currently being installed at a new research center that has been built for the Japanese cosmetics group Shiseido in the city of Yokohama, south of Tokyo. It is so large it will stretch between the first and second floors. The development was announced by Sony at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show, which is currently being held in Las Vegas.

Sony had previously designed a separate 16K display that went on show at Tokyo's Haneda Airport in 2014, but that looked like it was made up of dozens of smaller screens rather than presenting a single seamless picture. The new "super-size" installation has in fact been created out of several modular panels, but because they do not have bezels they can be fitted together without any visible gaps to create the impression of being a single screen. The innovation does not require a backlight, but goes much brighter than OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screens while still delivering similar deep blacks. At present, however, the high manufacturing costs involved make it too expensive for widespread use.

Comments

Re: Just one problem

[pz]

Yeah, except that the rods and cones are NOT packed evenly. Your assumption that they lay in a nice uniform grid does not reflect reality.

In reality, the number of photosensitive cells are between 100 and 1000 times higher in the centralmost part of vision, the fovea, than in the periphery.

Our eyes and brains do an exceptional job of integrating information across different visual glances to give us a deep, persistent illusion of uniformly high-resolution vision. And while the resolution at the center of our vision is really quite good (about 60 cycles per degree of visual angle), it gets rather poor rather quickly.

There's a nice parlor trick to convince yourself of the existence of this illusion: take a paragraph of printed material. Printed material works well, but the exact text does not matter so much. Place your finger under a word in the middle of a paragraph. Using your finger as a guide to hold your gaze fixed, look at that word and try to read left and right WITHOUT moving your eyes. Use your finger as a guide. You should find that for most text you can read at most one or two words to the left or right, and perhaps the word immediately above. Beyond that, vision is too low resolution.

So, back to the original point, counting the number of photosensitive cells underestimates the effective resolution of human vision by at least a factor of 10 once you take into account that we move our eyes.

Re: Just one problem

[Kjella]

Locke2005s statement is in between those numbers, so he's not exactly right or wrong, but it's not bullshit at all.

Counting that way is wonky because we have a very small, high density area in the center of our vision and much lower in the rest. The standard measure of visual acuity (20/20) is resolving one arc minute (1/60th of a degree) of resolution. If you sit really close to the screen you get a ~50 degrees field of view so 3000 pixel horizontal resolution. But we know some people have down to 20/8 vision, so for them 3000*20/8 = 7500 pixel resolution.

However if you're viewing parallel lines you can get a kind of hyper-acuity called Vernier acuity that even in untrained people go down to 10 arc seconds and 2-3 arc seconds with training. Now 2 arc seconds (1/3600 of a degree) * 50 degrees = 90K, obviously we don't have that many photo receptors but if you want to make a screen of uniform density that's where you're at. It's pretty much irrelevant for viewing normal content though.

With all that said, you'll be hard pressed to find anyone claiming a razor sharp 4K movie is fuzzy, unless you're staring at a Snellen chart the main reason they want to go beyond 4K is to be able to crop and re-frame in post. There's lots of other things like dynamic range, color space, color fidelity, frame rate etc. you should work on before going beyond 4K as an end point. Probably the biggest thing is if they can finally manage to make CMOS sensors work with global shutter - that is to say, reading out all the pixels at once instead of line by line, which creates all kinds of distortions when things are in rapid motion.