Now that even cell phones have the graphical oomph to render things in gorgeous 1080p, the 4k leap will be the next big milestone. Tom’s has spoken quite about it before, particularly what it’ll take to render all the pretty modern games with almost 8 million pixels, and while it’s a hefty drain on system resources even for a desktop, the tripartite Japan Display partnership is already trying to cram all that detail into a tablet.
Engadget reports that the coalition between Sony, Toshiba and Hitachi have announced that they have a fully functional 12.1-nch 4k TFT package. It’s a stunning achievement, and while one might think it’d be a huge drain on battery power and need a killer set of hardware to push all that additional detail, the Japan Display group maintains the module is power-efficient and fairly thin, given the real complexity of it.
The full report is linked here, and it’s not too hard to make sense of with the help of Google. Some other things to note, the viewing angle and contrast ration are a fair bit lower than what is standard these days, especially for portable electronics, sitting at 160 degrees and 1000:1 respectively. Curiously, the screen brightness is also remarkably high at 500 nits. Crunching the numbers for the power draw of the panel itself and looking at standard battery sizes results in something in the neighborhood of twelve hours, though that’s only for the display.
If this comes to market within the next year, I’d be shocked, but it’s definitely something that’s fun to think about as we toss around bigger and bigger numbers and look to up the prettiness factor on the electronics we use every day.
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