"Just imagine the size of the box it'll come in too..."

Remember how much fun it was playing with the box when Dad bought a new telly? Now, thanks to Panasonic, you can recreate that feeling as an adult!

(If Panasonic wish to use this in their advertising, my fee is one of those tellies delivered to my Dad's house for full retro nostalgia potential.)

I used to think that inside the tv box there were little people running around but as they get bigger pretty soon we'll find that we are the ones who are inside the telly and the real world is outside. Or has this already happened?

The next generation of HDTV is UHDTV which is around 4360p, not this 2000p crap.

I will get my coat, the one with the time machine remote in the pocket.

150" = 381cm = 3.81m, however this is the diagonal, not the height of the screen. The ratio of the diagonal to the height on a 16:9 screen is approximately 18.36:9 (which you can work out using Pythagoras's Theorem), so the height of the 150" screen will be around the 187cm mark.

Won't somebody think of the pr0n? The humanity!

It's only about 30 dpi and the resolution is just high enought to display a HDTV image. That's hardly something spectacular.

...go and see a show at a theatre.

...people would just run a composite RCA connection to it anyway.

Regardless, you could almost certainly set up a quad blend/stack of extremely bright HD projectors aimed at an ambient-light-rejecting screen for far less. I'm not sure why the focus on huge panels when high quality front projection is getting so ludicrously cheap...

what's the point?

What kind of source are you going to use that can generate this kind of resolution without fudges?

Upscaling Blu-Player required next, will it never end?

I'm off to read a book.

...to make terrestrial TV look any cop.

Actually it seems that the screen has got twice the horizontal or vertical resolution on a screen 4 times the size. So when you look at the actual pixels per square inch it'd be a pretty appalling figure in comparison with normal HD screens.

In other words, up close, this screen would look shit, and would only start to make sense once you were standing 20ft+ away.

I'd be much more impressed if they managed to get that sort of resolution into a 'normal' (sub 48") screen, at a 'reasonable' price.

"we were forced to sit some way back from the screen"

Just how far back exactly? 30'? 40'? More?

Great for exhibitions and the like then, but not your average livingroom.

Likes 'em big! (Allegedly)

It doesn't look very high resolution in that picture.

I'm no hippy - I grew up in the 1980s - but this race to create the largest and presumably most expensive television comes across as a little out of touch with the contemporary economic situation. Albeit that it's really just for the shops on Tottenham Court Road to draw in extra punters. When I see screens like this, I think of all those films from the 1980s and 1990s where the characters - rich yuppies and corporate drones etc - own tiny-looking old-fashioned televisions that were state of the art at the time, but look silly nowadays (e.g. Robocop, Strange Days etc).

... are the TV screens that appear in places like Hyde Park and on TV sets ?

Bigger, I suspect.

And you just know, some muppet is gonna try and collect one from the shops in his convertable...............

{{memories of 'helping' some git, get his midlife crisis TV into his mid life crisis car.......}}

Just a gnat's too big for our front room, then.

...of a Telly that has no broadcasters or Blue-Ray presenting in such a high resolution is???????

Surely Frank's 2000" TV must be coming soon?

Infinite definition? You've been going to some new kind of cinema then -- film is equivalent to double-figures in megapixels (can't be bothered googling the figure).

Theatre != Cinema

Obviously, they were measuring it in portrait orientation. And the extra ~.5m is the framing around the screen. (3.81*16/18.69~=3.32)

Who's going to be able to afford the leccy to run this beast?

amanfromMars will be able to watch our TV from over there, without having to scoot over here in his saucer and mix it with the little green men of Gaia.

Sure the display has a killer resolution but at that size it has a lower dpi than my 42" 1080p screen.

I could stack a 3x3 grid of 50" 1080p displays together and get a 150" 5760x3240 display.

She's been on me about buying the fourth wallscreen for the viewing room. Says it will make her soaps more immersive. Apparently she's gotten the new script in and would really like that fourth screen before the new season starts.

Oops, got to go - Captain's calling me in. Got another customer that needs to be liberated from his books.

Mine's the glossy black one with the salamander on it.

Hm, hope we can teleport ourselves through this thing. Gonna try when I see one at our friendly mom & pop electronix hyperstore.

(P. cos she'll be on when I try)

"Resolution" is usually measured in number of pixels per some FIXED unit, like the inch. So to compare total number of pixels on a large screen to total number of pixels on a smaller screen, then claim that the resolution is "better" on the large screen, is out and out misleading bullshit.

The resolution of this beast compared to other screens is actually pretty abysmal compared to other screens, not "better" as claimed by the author (whether the author is simply regurgitating press releases or not).

Will it fit in the back of a Smart Car?

About resolution being a square function because it is an area! This is only twice the resolution of a 1080 HDTV. Resolution is not linear!!! It is really annoying when people claim it is for marketing or any other reason.

Argh!

The pixel resolution exactly matches that for Digital Cinema and not HDTV (which is 3840*2160). So the aim might be for small cinema theatres rather than the home. Then again, nothing was said about the frame rates supported (25/30/50/60 v 24/48) so maybe that's a red herring.

"I'd be much more impressed if they managed to get that sort of resolution into a 'normal' (sub 48") screen"

sub 48"??? could you come up with a more arbitrary size? Well, OK, 47 and 15/16ths would be more arbitrary, but really.....

That's quite right. No grain visible at a play whatsoever!

Say it quietly, but I also hear some invention called the 35mm Arriflex is in the pipeline, which produces fairly dot-free moving pictures also. Allegedly the images are stored on celluloid. Celluloid! Who'd have thought it! Next thing you'll hear, is of projections in big rooms open to the public! OK, ok, just fantasising there.

Paris because, like many beautiful things, she's completely analogue. No offence meant to fellow Reg-enjoying readers.

""Resolution" is usually measured in number of pixels per some FIXED unit, like the inch."

If they were selling a *printer*, you would be absolutely right. However, they are not selling a printer. They're selling a *display*, where resolution does indeed refer to the number of pixels available on the display itself.

The current willy-waving over TV size reminds me of the time, years ago, when PC magazines used to breathlessly announce, month after month, "THIS IS THE ***FASTEST*** PC WE HAVE ***EVER*** TESTED", as if it were amazing that specs were improving with time.

We are having the same issue with megapixels in digital cameras, where people are deceived into thinking that there is a single metric by which they can compare devices.

Oh, hold on, it's happening with education and health too :-)

Pixels per inch/per cm is a rather abstract concept when referring to visual displays, something many of you keep harping on about as if it is one of the 4 fundamental quantities of matter ( excuse my gibberish).

If you digitise an image, the more pixels there are on a display device, the more pixels you can use to display the digitised image. There might be a debate over whether to call it image or spatial resolution, I've heard arguments either way, but fundamentally the more pixels used to display the digitised image ( in total, not per unit area ) the more information in the displayed image, and the higher the pixel resolution.

there is now a screen I can see without needing glasses?

...is only meaningful for "picture quality" once you specify the viewing distance and quote it in steradians.

I see none of that here, but that's hardly surprising. We're talking about an industry that traditionally measures screen size by the long diagonal. Compared to telly makers, even disc manufacturers with their metric gigabytes look pretty honest.

Well yes, you can display more physical information on this but I think the point is that the amount of extra physical information you can display doesn't scale proportionally with the screen size.

Put it this way, 576p on a 20" telly, when you're sat several metres away on your sofa, looks fine, no problem, not many people would get any benefit from starting to watch higher definitions as the increased pixels/inch ratio would start to become more than the eye could pick up.

Now go and buy a bigger TV say, a 50" screen. 576p suddenly looks dreadful so you start watching from a HD source. Imagine said HD source is limited to 720p. Now, even though it's got more physical information in it, the 720p picture on the 50" TV won't actually looks as clear as the 576p picture on the 20" TV, as for every inch of viewing space, you haven't got as much information as you had before with your 20" TV.

So pixels per inch is actually quite important for me (as for many others I would imagine). I'd be surprised if someone hadn't done a study on what the peak value is.

A significant attribute of this telly is that 1080p and 720p pictures will scale to this display with no loss of detail ie 1080/2 and 720/3.

A wall sized telly? Of course it will sell

Usually I'd have no doubt it'd sell, but one does wonder who the target market is.

Having said that, the single, non-married part of me would find a way to justify it.

The non-single, married part of me would find a way to justify it and be politely (for a given definition of politeness) reminded that he can't afford it due to needing to replace the blinds, carpets, repaint, redecorate and even then, it just wouldn't fit in with the rest of the living room.

The non-single, married part of me sometimes envies that single, non-married part of me...

One of the local stores here in Auckland (New Zealand in case you were wondering) was showing a 100+" plasma. The pixels were pretty vast even though it was 1080p. You don't want to be anywhere near one of these things to appreciate it. Of course, the funniest bit about this is that they were driving it off a standard def signal over composite!

Frankly, I'm not interested in housing something so large that permanently takes up a whole wall. My day to day watching TV is a 27" LCD and that is fine. It accepts the output of my HD Freeview box and so on and doesn't look too bad running SD material. I also have a 720p DLP projector currently running on a 70" screen but I have run it at 120" at another house. The picture is excellent and you cannot see the pixels from a normal seating distance (about 3-4m). Anything higher res might be nice but 'willy waving' over 1080p or more is silly for any screen you might want in a domestic environment and any display that is only 50" or less that looks worse with a 720p source than a 1080p one most likely has some horrible scaling issues.

Hmmmmmmmmm. Moores Law and all that - just wait for the fantastic looking, ultralslim, UUUUUHD analog version - only £500 from Argos (in the next 18 months!).............. jeeezzz, do they think we are so bloody blind............

Paris, because she can't see UHD as her eyes have a gloopy sort of residue on them!

"The next generation of HDTV is UHDTV which is around 4360p, not this 2000p crap."

Ah yes, UHDTV, where the programs last much longer but are of very poor taste!

The one with the notebook. 2 pints tomorrow Madam?