Over the weekend I saw a post over at Tom’s Hardware that made my jaw drop. Panasonic and Japanese TV broadcaster NHK have managed to create a 145” plasma with an 8K resolution(!). The massive television’s 7,680 x 4,320 pixel resolution conforms to the Ultra High Definition specification.

Other specifications of the TV include an RGB vertical stripe phosphor array, 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio, and 60Hz refresh rate. Pixel pitch is .417mm horizontal and .417mm vertical. In a video demonstration by DigInfo (seen below), the companies reported that the TV uses a new method for updating the pixels that eliminates flickering. Such flicker would be caused by the TV updating the picture at 60Hz and having to update 4,320 vertical lines of pixels! Panasonic has developed a new way of driving the pixels that scans and updates multiple lines in each frame at a time.

Panasonic will be showing off the 8K plasma at the SID International Symposium from June 3 to June 8, and Institute of Technology from May 24 to May 27. Consumers have heavily invested in 1080p televisions and now 4K is starting to be common on the content side of things. This 8K resolution is a neat proof of concept but it will likely be quite a while before content creators move to recording in 8K and consumers get their hands on it. Even so, that doesn’t stop me from drooling over this TV (and dreading how much the video card that can drive such a display at native resolution will cost)!