The 264ppi True Tone displays on this year’s iPad Pro are really, really good. There’s always room for improvement, though. Semiconductor Energy Laboratory thinks there’s enough room for another 27 million or so pixels.

SEL has just unveiled the industry’s first tablet-sized 8K OLED displays. They’re bringing two different models to market, measuring 8.3 and 13.3 inches.

At 7680 x 4320 pixels, the 13.3-inch display has a pixel density of 663ppi. Like Apple’s iPad Pro displays, SEL’s 13.3 incher refreshes at 120Hz.

As crazy as that 663ppi display seems, things get even crazier with the 8.3-inch model. Naturally, it packs the same 7680 x 4320 in an area that’s 5 inches smaller. Crunch the numbers and you’ll come up with a density of 1062ppi.

When the pixels get crammed that close together something has to give. In this case it’s the refresh rate. The 8.3-inch display can only hit 60Hz.

These new displays are built with c-axis aligned crystalline indium gallium zinc oxide (CAAC-IGZO) technology, which SEL and Sharp first teamed up on back in 2012.

Compared to previous IGZO panels, CAAC-IGZO panels can handle higher resolutions while drawing less power. They also offer better touch performance and allows for narrower bezels — presumably much thinner than what you see around this particular display model.

SEL showed off a couple other innovative new designs as well. One was a bendable 8.3-inch 1080p display. According to the company it can handle around 10,000 folds (just over 27 per day for an entire year). They’d no doubt like to improve on that figure.

Sure, there’s plenty of excitement about foldable devices right now. It’s just tough to imagine that a device with a screen that may only work reliably for a year would be a hit with consumers.

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Lee Mathews

Computer tech, blogger, husband, father, and avid MSI U100 user.

6 replies on “8K OLED tablet displays are now a real thing”

  1. 8K tablets are no more a “real thing” than 4K tablets are a real thing.
    They’ve been announced since 2014 and it is still impossible to find a proper 4K (not 4K compliant) tablet.
    It probably has to do with power consumption because it makes sense to show 4K HDR movies in native resolution, 8k not so much.

  2. The Oculus Rift could do with screens of 1062ppi. That would be a big improvement over the 456ppi screens it currently uses

  3. I can understand the applications in VR, but these are too large for VR.

    Maybe this is just to showcase the manufacturing abilities for the next gen of pixel density?

  4. It’s useless technology, unless its utilised for VR.
    And even then, VR doesn’t need a high resolution, it only needs high pixel density.

    If you can saturate the fovea, ie focal point of vision, you need very few ambient pixels to fill the blurry surroundings. John Carmack alluded to the same thing, about having AI and eye tracking, so that you don’t need to push out 16K in 30fps Medium Settings but get a richer experience with simply 2K in 120fps Ultra Settings. We don’t quite have the technology yet, but we may achieve it depending if funding doesn’t evaporate from the VR Market.

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