Ultra HD displays will arrive on both TV sets and mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones in 2013.
Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs speaks at the Qualcomm pre-show keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, in Las Vegas, on Jan. 7, 2013. Qualcomm is introducing a new line of 800 chips capable of supporting so-called 'ultra HD' video playback.
Reuters
Forget regular old HD. The name of the game at CES, the annual electronics confab in Las Vegas, is "ultra HD" – a video resolution approximately quadruple that of current television sets.
In a keynote address yesterday, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs unveiled a new line of smart phone chips, including the Snapdragon 800, which he said would be fast enough to record and playback ultra-HD video.
So exactly what kind of screen clarity are we talking about here? Well, Ars Technica reports the chips could support resolutions as high as 4096×2304. (To put that in perspective, the new iPad, with retina display, boasts a resolution of 2048x1536.) Crystal clear, in other words – so much so that we wonder if the less hawk-eyed among us will even notice the difference.