Tiny 4K displays and beyond

It seems that 4K is coming to smart phones no matter if that makes sense or not in those small screen. In my Mobile Trends 2015 posting I said that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 can power devices that drive 4K (3840 x 2160) TV, take 4K videos, run AAA games and connect to 5-inch HD display. Now things seem that 4K display in smart phone seems to be realizing as Sharp announces 5.5″ 4K (2160 x 3840) IGZO display with 806 ppi, in mass production from 2016. It is the world’s sharpest display, a 5.5″ IGZO screen with a 4K/UHD 3840 x 2160 resolution. Samsung is another company that promised to smartphones with 4K displays: Samsung has hinted on 4K AMOLED displays coming to some future products. It’s not known yet which smartphone makers will build devices with these Sharp screens, bit it is expected that those 4K display device hit the market in 2016. Also Samsung has hinted on 4K AMOLED displays coming to some future products.

Not long ago, even the prospect of having a Full HD resolution on an ~5″ display seemed quite unbelievable, but now they are available in many high end smart phones. And products are going beyond it as Galaxy S6 has matching the 2,560 x 1,440 Quad HD resolution. It’s 2015, and flagships increasingly look like a vanity exercise. Based on those trends s it seems that like it or not, 4K smartphone displays are heading towards us, and there’s nobody left to stop them!

Sometimes the competition among OEMs to “one-up” each other causes some monotony in the market. Consumers like to have “better” components every year. Is this just a crazy who has best specifications competition going on (like in many other tech field earlier), or do those new very high resolutions on tiny screens offer real benefits?

Although devices that are 1440p or even 4K will look even more stunning, there are indeed diminishing returns benefits-wise as the cost, the power consumption, or the GPU resources required to handle such high resolutions are significantly higher than the previous generations. Let’s see when products with those displays become available what they look, what they cost and are they worth of the hype.

One positive development for budget phone buyer’s could follow: Higher-resolution displays will also help lower the cost of lower resolution panels. If 4K displays become popular in high-end flagship devices, then 1440p and 1080p panels will be an even more common occurrence at the mid-range, while HD 720p displays should soon become the norm at the low-end.

And if we are looking for few years in the future, the display resolution might not even stop at 4K. Looking a little ahead, the announcement is made even crazier by the perspective of a non-too distant future, where smartphone displays have reached 8K (4320 x 7680) resolution – that’s 16 times as many pixels as ye olde 1080p display, as well as the resolution employed for top-end full dome theater projections! Keep in mind that  LG is allegedly making an 8K 27-inch display for Apple, so shrinking it down to phablet-size is a matter of time and technological progress.