Panasonic pitches Ultra HD 4K x 2K monster tablet
Pixeltastic, and makes your hands look really dainty
CES 2013 Asus has an 18.4-inch tablet-cum-all-in-one-desktop-PC on display this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), but Panasonic has it beat: the Japanese giant is showing off a Windows 8 slate that not only packs a 20-inch display but sports an Ultra HD resolution.
Yes, Panasonic’s mammoth fondleslab contains 9.8 million pixels arranged in a 3840 x 2560 grid, all driven by an Nvidia GeForce GPU underneath. It’s big enough - almost - to show an A3 image at full size.
Its 230ppi pixel density isn’t quite up there with the iPad’s 264ppi, but it's close enough. Not that Panasonic configures it the way Apple does its “retina” displays: treat the screen as if it had a quarter of its native resolution in order to present regular sized but smooth text rather than tiny writing.
But if you use Windows 8’s Display control panel to render text and UI furniture at 200 per cent of their usual size, as website Liliputing did, then “text an graphics look pretty good”.
Big enough?
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Panasonic colossus is no mere ARM job. It contains a 1.8GHz Intel Core i5-3427U processor, 4GB of Ram - with room to take 16GB in total - and a 128GB SSD.
Buried beneath the IPS LCD is Bluetooth 4 and dual-band 802.11n connectivity. There’s a battery too, of course, but backlighting that 4K display and keeping the CPU and GPU running will drain it in a mere two hours, Panasonic admitted.
It’s no handheld, of course. The substantial slate weighs 2.4kg so while you might not want to hold in your hand for long, it’s no more difficult to carry around than a regular notebook computer.
Panasonic said it will “strive to commercialise” the 4k tablet, which it hopes to bring to market “later this year”. ®
COMMENTS
Re: Dump the Windoze
7 it would seem. Maybe they just think it's a stupid comment.
I want one to use on the train. iPad's are just too boring these days. Also, watching video on the go is finally sensible without having to put up with piddly screen sizes. Now can someone produce a portable 7.1 surround sound system, beer fridge and popcorn maker combined?
Next time some little scrote starts listening to their tinny 'music' on their tinny mobile phone speakers, I can whip out my portable home cinema, and drown them out properly...
Looks good for photographers or medical imgaers if they don't need a Wacom level of digitiser accuracy... but seems more a vehicle to show off the screen.
I know lots of poeple who want one...
I would love a large-screen tablet. I play in a big band, and have to lug around two huge ring-binders of charts to rehearsals. Before each gig I have to pull out the charts we are playing and put them in order in another binder, and then put then all back afterwards. Plus if there are any changes to the set list on the fly it involves flicking around and potentially diving into my bag for additional music.
A few guys in the band have put their music onto ipads / android tablets, and from a practical perspective it's ideal - easy to carry, easy to manage, great for gigs etc. I know a lot of musicians who have done the same, both for gigs and also for practise purposes, especially musos who travel.
But the big drawback is the screen size. Regular tablet screens are just too small to be comfortable to read music from.
Something this big that would allow two pages to be seen at once at A4 size would be absolutely perfect.
Of course, a muso tablet would also need to be cheap, in order that poor struggling artistes could afford one...
Stick four legs on ...
... and it could be your coffee table =)
