BOE's insane 16k display humbles the TV market – Matthew Griffin

By Matthew Griffin Industrial Revolution 16th March 2025

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

If you thought 8k resolution was as good as it gets displays have so much more to offer.

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4K monitors are commonplace these days, and 8K monitors are readily available — albeit with exorbitant price tags like the Dell UltraSharp 32 8K Monitor which costs just over $4,000. But, of course, we can’t be happy with “just” an 8K resolution display, as witnessed by the latest creation from BOE. The Chinese display giant was on-hand at Display Week and showcased a massive 110-inch display with a staggering 16K resolution.

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To put that resolution in perspective, 8K is 7680 x 4320, while 16K boosts that to 15360 × 8640. So we’re looking at 132.7 million pixels compared to 33.2 million pixels for 8K and 8.3 million pixels for 4K resolution. With that many pixels to push, you won’t be surprised to learn that BOE’s display only has a 60Hz refresh rate.

If you could find the space for a 110-inch display on your living room wall, BOE says that you’ll be subject to a maximum of 400 nits brightness and a 1,200:1 contrast ratio, which is about average for an IPS panel. In addition, the 16K display covers 99 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut.

While reporters didn’t have hands-on experience with the BOE’s display, Vincent_Teoh, said that pixels were not visible even when peering close to the display. That would mesh with BOE’s claim that its 16K display offers “Extremely high resolution beyond the retina.”

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Now before you get any ideas about hooking this monitor up to your bodacious AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor backed by an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, you’d likely be unable to push any serious fps at a 16K resolution in games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Microsoft Flight Simulator. Considering that you’re shovelling 16 times more pixels at 16K than 4K resolution, those previously fluid frame rates would likely drop into slideshow territory.

And I must also point out that BOE’s 16K is just a prototype unit built to wow the crowds, we’re still years away from such a product being viable for large-scale production.

Matthew Griffin / About Author

Described by NASA as a "Walking Encyclopaedia of the Future" and one of the world’s most in demand keynote speakers Matthew Griffin, Founder and Futurist in Chief of the 311 Institute, a global Futures and Deep Futures advisory firm, is a multi-award winning Futurist and strategic foresight expert, author, lecturer, mentor, podcast and YouTube host.

With a distinguished career running global business units at Atos, EMC, and IBM today Matthew helps leaders and titans of industry from all over the world explore the impact of the inter sections of technology, culture, and leadership, then helps them create high performance organisations that can continuously disrupt, outpace, and outthink their competition.

15 times author of the hit series the Codex of the Future series Matthew's ability to identify, track, and explain the impacts of hundreds of emerging technologies and trends on global business, culture, and society has earned him a powerful reputation and a roster of clients that include royal households, world leaders across the G7, G20, and G77, and many of the world's most recognised and exceptional organisations including ABB, Accenture, ABN Amro, Adidas, AON, ARM, BCG, Centrica, Citi Group, Coca Cola, Deloitte, Dentons, Disney, Dow, EY, Google, KPMG, Lego, Microsoft, Legal & General, LinkedIn, Nokia, Paramount, PepsiCo, PWC, Qualcomm, RWE, Samsung, T-Mobile, UBS, Visa, WIRED, WPP and hundreds of others.

Matthew is regularly featured in the global media including the AP, BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, Discovery, Forbes, Khaleej Times, Telegraph, TIME, ViacomCBS, WIRED, and the WSJ, and his mission is to help organisations create a fair and sustainable future whose benefits are shared by everyone irrespective of their ability, background, or circumstances.