How About $85k For A Billion Pixels?

Ken Werner in the Display Daily newsletter reported Friday ^[1] that Sears will be taking orders starting today for Seiki’s 39″ 4k (3840×2180) TV.

Doing the math, that works out to be under $85k for a billion pixels! That’s MSRP. Quantity one.

Doing a bit more math, the pixel size works out to be about 0.22 mm. That’s just a tiny bit larger than the 0.15mm that I believe is the ideal size for up-close, interactive DOOH displays (see my presentation at the Video Walls Unplugged Thought Leadership Summit in London here ^[2]). It means that a viewer could be closer than a meter away from the screen and get an ‘iPad retina-like’ viewing experience … at least for pixel resolvability!

Werner points out that the TV is barebones – no Internet TV, no wifi, no 3D BUT as DOOH doesn’t need those features that’s obviously not a drawback.

However, a bit more worrisome are some of his comments about color accuracy, image quality details and up-conversion AND of course, Seiki’s TV is consumer quality so bezels will be large and they won’t be rugged enough for large tiled display installations.

Remember that this is just one element of the full cost of a practical gigapixel display: structures, power, wiring, players, tile management all need to be considered as well – in case you’re wondering, a gigapixel using this display would cover 773 square meters (ignoring bezels), Ed.

But consider this: this is just the leading edge of a wave. Displays will get better. And if this is now feasible for consumer displays, it will certainly be feasible very soon for commercial tiled displays.