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Panasonic is showing off a 20 inch Windows 8 tablet prototype with a 3840 x 2560 pixel display. This 5.3 pound tablet may never be released as a real product, but the demo model on display at the Consumer Electronics Show works pretty well… most of the time.

The 4K tablet has an Intel Core i5-3427U Ivy Bride processor, NVIDIA GeForce graphics, 4GB of memory, and a 128GB solid state disk.

It runs Windows 8 Pro, and supports both Metro-style full-screen apps and desktop style apps.

I had worried that text on a 20 inch, 4k display would look ridiculously small in desktop mode. But it turns out that if you set the Windows 8 “change the size of all items” tool to 200 percent, text an graphics look pretty good on the Panasonic tablet.

On the other hands, things start to slow down when you run software that can seriously tax the CPU and GPU cores. For instance, Panasonic is showing off a Blueprint app for creating, viewing, and editing very high resolution images for architects and other designers. It took a really long time for the graphics to fully load in that app.

Basic tasks like switching windows, viewing images, and navigating Windows 8 worked pretty well in the demo though.

The prototype measures 18.7″ x 13.1″ x 0.4″, gets about 2 hours of battery life, has a front-facing 720p camera, and features a USB 2.0 port, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, and Bluetooth 4.0.

You can theoretically pick up the tablet and carry it around — but it’s clearly just a little too heavy for comfortable one-handed use. This isn’t a tablet designed for light reading or web surfing. But it could be great for multi-player gaming, serious artwork (it works with a digital pen), or other niche activities.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7qRdjiwJuc]