On March 15th Display Daily discussed SVGA projectors and how SVGA (0.5 Mpixel) and 720p (0.9 Mpixel) provide all the pixels most people can see. In computer graphics however, "too much is never enough," according to Jon Peddie. Today we will look at a few recent announcements in the ultra-high resolution display field. These high-resolution displays are definitely not consumer formats… not today at least.

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

The highest resolution electronic display you can easily see today is a 2K digital cinema projector with about 2 Mpixels, only slightly better than a 1080P HDTV set. This seems ho-hum compared to the 5 Mpixels you can get in a cell phone camera. The Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) format allows 4K broadcasts with about 8 Mpixels. Microspace recently transmitted the Sony feature film The Da Vinci Code via satellite to a theater in a test of 4K DCI transmission technology. While Microspace first tested 4K DCI transmission in 2004, this is the first transmission of the very large data set required for a feature film. Neal Page of Inlet Technologies, the company that provided the encoding solutions to Microspace, commented in an interview with Rick Smith of WRAL.com, "To some degree, the 4K format provides a ‘wow experience’ that is analogous to what most users experience with IMAX."

If 4K isn’t enough for you, how about 8K with 32 Mpixels? NHK has been experimenting with this for some time and as I mentioned in DD on March 14th NHK and the Metropolitan Opera are considering a live 8K broadcast.

If 32 Mpixels still aren’t enough, consider the recent progress at Iowa State University. They have upgraded their C6 6-sided VR environment so instead of 6 high-resolution projectors, it now uses 24 projectors for a total of 100Mpixels. The system is not just high-resolution, it is 3D as well. According to Muthukkumar Kadavasal, an Iowa State doctoral student, Iowa State’s C6 now provides virtual reality at the world’s highest resolution. If you want to see it, go to Iowa on April 26th when they are having public tours.

If 100 Mpixels doesn’t satisfy you, the highest resolution display Insight Media knows of is the 204 Mpixel array at the University of California at Irvine. This is a tiled display created from multiple Apple 30" monitors.

Not everyone is likely to be satisfied with a mere 204 Mpixels, so we can expect to see still higher resolution displays, if they aren’t out there already. As part of the research for the Insight Media/USDC 3D report, I came across datasets that included terabytes to petabytes of time-varying data, with gigabytes per time step. The average consumer may not be able to afford a giga-pixel display, but the Los Alamos National Laboratory that generated these data sets may find one within reach either now or in the near future.