If we can make 4K resolution phone screen, why can’t we “stack” those smaller screens to make a much higher resolution tv screen?
In: Technology
The costs would be enormous. Given the lack of content, very few people would be willing to pay thousands of dollars for such high resolution screens.
We can, but no one would buy it since a ton of phones costs a lot, and there’s nothing to watch that requires it since no one is releasing anything in a resolution only available to crazy rich people.
Because if you think buying an iPhone is expensive, wait until you see how much it costs to buy the 90x iPhone 12s that it would take to form a 60″ screen.
Nothing is *technically* stopping that from being done. However, there’s little reason to do so.
I’d have to look it up again as I don’t remember the exact figures, but due to limitations of the human eye there is a maximum resolution we *need* to achieve the best possible quality of a screen (in terms of resolution).
As a rough example, for a phone that’s 6-12″ from your face 4k (or maybe even higher) is pretty close to that limit. If you move it 8ft away (such as with a tv) you only need 8k over a full 50″ TV or so to reach that same limit. So if you were to pack a 50″ TV with pixel density equal to a 4k smart phone, you would have to sit with your face about a foot away from that TV to make the jump to 8k noticeable.
In short, the *farther* something is from your face, the less detail it needs to look maximum quality because your eyes aren’t physically capable of picking out the same level of detail at 1ft as they are at 8ft. So, you could make a 50″ TV at some absurd resolution with the same pixel density as a smart phone, but you could also make one with 1/10th the pixel density (and price!) and at typical viewing distances nobody would be able to see a difference in them.
You could. But you wouldn’t have anything to display on it that could make use of that high resolution. And you’d need seriously intense electronics to process it if you did. And you could never stream that much data in real time. And after all that you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference anyway at a normal viewing distance.
There are a few things to consider here:
1) You need to find a way to make sure each screen gets its part of the image, and updates / refreshes at exactly the same rate, perfectly in sync with all the other screens. Otherwise it won’t function like a single large display.
2) You need to create a video output device that can physically connect to this many screens in the first place. These do exist, for sure, but they’re not exactly common.
3) You need to have the graphics processing power to actually… do things on such a high resolution display. It’s one thing to show a home screen or desktop wallpaper, and another completely to play native-resolution video, interact with software in a smooth and responsive way, and play video games. All of this gets harder the higher the resolution.
4) Even if you solve the other problems, the result will be ludicrously expensive and probably won’t look any better than an 8K TV. There does come a point where more resolution doesn’t give you any more visible detail so long as the distance to the observer is reasonable.
You can see all of these problems in action in [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Toft6fMvByA) by LinusTechTips on YouTube.
There are 8K screens and even higher. The problem is that these are very expensive currently to construct and there really isn’t much use or need for them. There is only even a tiny bit of content being made above 4K, so even if you had a better screen, there’s nothing to use it for. Now on a final point, there’s a lot of diminishing returns. 4K isn’t that much better than 1080p, better yes, and we’re going to it, but its a incremental increase, not a leap. From 4K to 8K, the gain isn’t even very much (outside of some special cases). So we really don’t have a lot of need to deal with 8K or greater screens now, even though, we can make them without issue.
Yes and no.
Those very large LCD displays you see at stadiums are really a lot of smaller LCDs stacked. This works because those displays are big. Easy to manipulate with your hands.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dpQ9K8E0LM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dpQ9K8E0LM)
When the little display gets really small, it is easier just to make a one display as apposed to a lot of smaller ones all stack together. You could stack.
There’s no point. Your eyes can only see detail so fine, and anything smaller is overkill.
A phone is meant to be viewed from maybe one foot, so pixels must be very small for you to not see them. A TV is viewed from several feet, so pixels can be larger and still be too small to see. For example, there’s no point in having 4K resolution on a 50″ TV when viewed from ten feet because 1080P already has pixels too small for you to see.
Such a screen would be beyond the resolution of human vision. Why would anyone want to pay a lot of money for such a screen?
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