Sharp and NHK may be bringing us the 33-million pixel HDTV but Samsung’s 8-million pixel, 70-inch HDTV sounds impressive in its own right.
Photo: samsungtomorrow.com
Samsung showed off its 4000-by-2000-pixel resolution 3DTV (so-called 4k-by-2k) at the Society for Information Display conference in Los Angeles just last week, according to MIT Technology Review. Now you’re probably asking what sort of physics trickery Samsung is pulling, where the company can multiply the number of typical pixels by a factor of 100,000 times.
The answer lies in shrinking pixels and using better transistors. In most cases, manufactures can’t miniaturize pixels because the current silicon transistors can’t conduct electrons fast enough to work with miniaturized parts. Luckily Samsung has metal oxide transistors, which can and do very well at conducting electrons quickly. Also the implementation of these metal oxide backplanes is inexpensive and is one of the few mixes—IGZO: indium, gallium, and zinc—that work with current technology.
Current HDTV video comes in 1920-by-1080- or 1280-by-720-pixel resolutions, depending on whether it’s 720p or 1080i/1080p, so presumably 4k-by-2k will be the next step. A 1080p TV has a bit over 2 million pixels, so 4k-by-2k would be quite a step up. Other vendors have toyed with 4k-by-2k,, includingToshiba and its “Cell TV”. This might be the first time we here at GeekTech have heard about a 3D 4k-by-2k TV, though.
Technology Review had an interesting interview with Paul Semenza, a senior analyst at Display Search, who speculated that Sharp might be implementing the same technology to develop high-resolution displays for smartphones and tablets. Be sure to check it out.
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