BOE Shows 110-inch 16K MicroLED Monitor At Display Week

May 25, 2023 by Dave Haynes

Image via Twitter – credit Vincent_Teoh

The Society for Information Display’s annual display nerd fest – called Display Week – is on this week in Los Angeles, and I have been reading over press reports and news releases and, well, generally going cross-eyed. It is a trade show and conference best suited to people with electrical engineering degrees.

Random example – You can go to a lecture at Display Week on: Novel a-IGZO TFT MicroLED Circuit with Improved Stability and Area Efficiency

But there are reports coming out of the event here and there that have taken the hard core display nerd stuff and converted it to something the rest of us might understand – like word that the Chinese display manufacturing giant BOE was showing a 110-inch, 16K information display.

That’s 15,360 by 8,640 resolution, for a total of 133 million pixels. By comparison, an 8K display has 33 million pixels and a 4K has 8.3 million. Somehow, computer graphics are expected to drive that many pixels, and the net result is the display only does a max 400 nits (OK for living rooms) and just has a 60Hz refresh rate (way to slow for serious gamers).

Tom’s Hardware has a post up about the display, questioning who might actually need this and why, but also noting this – like a lot of things demo’d at Display Week – is still an R&D product and could be years from being availability (if there’s a market for it).

Full HD is more than enough for a lot of digital signage jobs, like menu displays, and 4K is now common because that’s what display manufacturers are making and shipping. There aren’t going to be a whole bunch of rational use-cases for 8K and I don’t see a lot of opportunities for 16K screens, other than in endowment-backed places that have names like Labs or Institute.

Interestingly, BOE’s Display Week PR doesn’t even mention the 16K display, detailing instead advances like flexible OLED, chip on glass LED tech (saw that at ISE) and something called UB Cell, which BOE says rivals OLED for image quality and has crazy-fast refresh rates.

Also at Display Week, Samsung showed flexible, rollable OLED screens (below), similar to LG but different underlying tech and form factors.