At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show in Las Vegas, Sony announced the world’s largest high-resolution display featuring a “16k” resolution, as well as Sony’s ‘Crystal LED’ display based on microLED technology.
Sony's 16k Crystal LED Display
Sony’s 16k display has a diagonal measurement of 783” and has four times as many pixels as an 8K TV, but the company didn’t give details on the vertical resolution. The larger-than-life screen is 19.2 meters (63 feet) long and 5.4 meters (17 feet) high, so the vertical resolution likely isn't very high. This makes some sense, as walls can only be so tall, but it ultimately means Sony uses a non-standard resolution that is not a direct upscaling of 4K and 8K.
Sony has started before that its modular and bezel-less Crystal LED screens can be arranged in any shape, even ones that don’t look like a typical TV, as we can see in Sony’s promotional image below:
The Crystal LED screen Sony unveiled in Las Vegas is currently being installed at a new research center in Japan. These 16K screens will likely remain a high-end product for the corporate world for now, but Sony intends to sell smaller variations to offices, cinemas, and even consumers in the near future.
MicroLED Technology
MicroLED technology is basically OLED tech that doesn’t have burn-in issues because it doesn’t use any organic material to create the self-emitting diodes that don’t require a backlight (as LCDs do). This translates to a longer life for the microLED displays as opposed to OLED displays, and it also has other advantages such as better efficiency and higher brightness.
Sony’s new Crystal LED screens promise a brightness level of up to 1000 cd/m2, a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1, as well as support for HDR, 10-bit color processing, and a wide color gamut that is 140% of sRGB.
