Gimmick or godsend? Panasonic’s 4K ‘Ultra HD’ 20-inch tablet
Allan Swann
January 11, 2013
Panasonic has used CES to unveil a massive 20-inch tablet running a 4K HD screen – the first of its kind.
In an event flooded with mediocre at best tablet offerings, Panasonic’s hi resolution tablet has been garnering some keen interest from attendees, with hour long queues. But is it a gimmick piece of prototype technology or a product that will actually be released?
The screen boasts a 3820×2560 (known as 4K HD, Ultra HD and various other monikers) on a 20-inch screen – nearly large enough for a coffee table.
This gives it a pixel per inch resolution of 230PPI, a bit less than the iPad 4’s 2048×1536 (264PPI) – but still unprecedented for its size.
Plenty of 4K TVs have been unveiled by companies such as Samsung and Sony at the show, but not in tablet form, nor in this size.
Panasonic believes the device could be useful for photographers, architects and other creatives – its hardly a tablet that is likely to be portable, weighing in at 2.4kg and with a poor 2 hour battery life.
The demo unit on show was a 10mm-thick chassis, with an Intel Core i5 processor running at 1.8GHz, 16GB of RAM and a 128GB solid state hard drive – it also boasts Nvidia GeForce graphics and runs Windows 8 Pro. The as-yet-unnamed tablet also supports digital pens, as well as up to ten simultaneous touches by users – boosting potential for some social collaboration perhaps?
As you can see from this video, it is an absolute finger print nightmare.
High concept products like this tend to turn up at every CES in prototype form, but Panasonic has said that it intends to release the product sometime toward the end of 2013.
