The race for ever higher resolution screens seems like it should have slowed down some time ago, with 1080p panels seemingly drawing a line in the sand between image quality and performance of mobile devices. Regardless of this invisible wall manufacturers pushed harder towards Quad-HD, or QHD, displays that feature 2560 x 1440 pixels on the display on smartphones shortly after 1080p became a more common resolution. This year we’ve seen a number of high profile flagship phones, like the Galaxy S6 and the rumored upcoming Galaxy S6 Edge+ and Galaxy Note 5, feature a Quad HD display for an incredible looking screen that’s hard to match.
Beginning with Android M it looks like Google is going to officially support 4K resolution, or 3840 x 2160 pixels, on the displays of upcoming Android-powered devices. To make sure that dream becomes a reality display manufacturers have been hard at work figuring out a way to cram all those pixels into a small screen, and now Everdisplay has demonstrated the display that crams all 8,294,400 pixels into a relatively small 6-inch panel. Just looking at the numbers themselves you might be asking yourself why in the world someone would do this, if for no other reason than “just because they can” of course. Besides crushing our batteries and processors with the amount of power this would take to run, we’re likely not looking at these sorts of displays to go in mainstream phones just yet, rather they might go somewhere else where resolution is the most critical: virtual reality headsets.
It’s no secret that 2015 is the year of VR, with Oculus finally making its retail debut and manufacturers like HTC and software developer Valve teaming up to bring the HTC Vive to the market. Holding a screen just a few inches from your face makes resolution paramount to a good experience, not to mention the importance of refresh rate in keeping headaches and motion sickness at bay. At 734 Pixels-Per-Inch (PPI) it’s looking like this could be the finest display tech for VR we’ve seen yet, and this panel isn’t just any regular panel either, it’s an AMOLED panel which traditionally delivers deep blacks and punchy colors. Compared to the next most dense display on the Galaxy S6, which is 577 PPI, we’re talking something seriously incredible that could serve all sorts of niche applications. Look for this to make its way into products likely closer to 2016 than sometime this year though.