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

Just one problem

[Locke2005]

Human eyes can't discern more than about 4000x4000 pixels in their field of vision.

Re: Just one problem

[meerling]

At approximately 120,000,000 rods, which do not sense color, if it were a convenient square arrangement, that would be a bit less than 11k x 11k.
Cones, which do detect color are only around 6 or 7 million in quantity. Using the 7 million number, that would make a matrix of a bit less than 2.65k x 2.65k.

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

Looks like the anonymous coward had no idea how crappy the resolution of human eyes actually are.

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.