4K monitors are commonplace these days, and 8K monitors are readily available — albeit with exorbitant price tags (the Dell UltraSharp 32 8K Monitor costs just over $4,000). But, of course, we can't be happy with "just" an 8K resolution display, as witnessed by the latest creation from BOE. The Chinese display giant was on-hand at Display Week 2023 and showcased a massive 110-inch display with a staggering 16K resolution.
To put that resolution in perspective, 8K is 7680 x 4320, while 16K boosts that to 15360 × 8640. So we're looking at 132.7 million pixels compared to 33.2 million pixels for 8K and 8.3 million pixels for 4K resolution. With that many pixels to push, you won't be surprised to learn that BOE's display only has a 60Hz refresh rate.
If you could find the space for a 110-inch display on your living room wall, BOE says that you'll be subject to a maximum of 400 nits brightness and a 1,200:1 contrast ratio, which is about average for an IPS panel. In addition, the 16K display covers 99 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut.
While we didn't have hands-on experience with the BOE's display, Vincent_Teoh, who captured the image at the top of the page, said that pixels were not visible even when peering close to the display. That would mesh with BOE's claim that its 16K display offers "Extremely high resolution beyond the retina."
Now before you get any ideas about hooking this monitor up to your bodacious AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor backed by an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, you'd likely be unable to push any serious fps at a 16K resolution in games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Microsoft Flight Simulator. Considering that you're shoveling 16 times more pixels at 16K than 4K resolution, those previously fluid frame rates would likely drop into slideshow territory.
We must also point out that BOE's 16K is just a prototype unit built to wow the crowds at Display Week 2023 — we're still years away from such a product being viable for large-scale production.
