Westinghouse's 56-inch D56QX1 Quad HD display on sale for $50,000

Bargain alert! No need to liquidate every asset you own to bring home (wherever "home" would end up being) one of Sharp's 108-inch LCD HDTVs, as Westinghouse has just announced that its 56-inch D56QX1 Quad HD display will be on sale as of this month for half of that. Yeah, we've seen it (along with its 52-inch sibling) around forever, but we're thrilled to hear that a handful of affluent aficionados will finally have the pleasure of watching one in their 4,800 square foot den.

[Via TG Daily]

[ReD-DaWg-OnE @ Jun 21st 2008 5:37AM]

And I'll watch what... my low rez. blu-ray?

[LondonConsultant @ Jun 21st 2008 6:07AM]

Just use Toshiba's new super-upconvertering technology - the press release says it upconverts VHS to this 3840x2160 resolution with quad-cubic Everett interpolation by combining hidden detail data from parallel universes.

[gad get @ Jun 21st 2008 10:20PM]

@ LondonConsultant

You had me there for a moment!

[iEye @ Jun 22nd 2008 7:03AM]

Can I return it if there is one dead Pixel?

[Gav @ Jun 21st 2008 5:47AM]

Westinghouse 56" - 3840x2160 (8,294,400pix)

Dell 30" - 2560x1600 (4,096,000pix)

Twice the pixels of a Dell 30". That's something to brag about :P

Talk about ultra-immersive gaming!

Oh and for anyone who's going to say 'Can it play Crysis?', no, it can't, and probably won't be able to for a good few years yet :P

[chickenator @ Jun 21st 2008 7:11AM]

but will it blend?

[Ethren @ Jun 21st 2008 10:14AM]

It'll blend in the Army's TGER!

[wickedpheonix @ Jun 21st 2008 12:48PM]

it wouldn't matter, there isn't a single modern graphics card that supports outputting at that resolution.

[giuliop @ Jun 21st 2008 6:13AM]

Hm, a 56-inch screen is a quarter of a 108-inch screen, so this costs twice as much compared to the Sharp.

[Will @ Jun 21st 2008 7:11AM]

Actually if you do the math I think a 56" screen is 31.4% of a 100" screen, assuming both are using a 16:9 aspect ratio. =P

[Will @ Jun 21st 2008 7:12AM]

Woopsie I did it based on a 100 incher, not a 108. It's 26.9%, so you're about right

[KilgoreTrout @ Jun 21st 2008 6:29AM]

@ giuliop
Math is not your strong suit uh?

[giuliop @ Jun 21st 2008 6:37AM]

I really hope yours is stronger than your use of the reply button.

But please, go on and explain.

[trillionandone @ Jun 21st 2008 4:58PM]

@kilgoretrout
It appears that you are having difficulty with the math... ;)

(Hint: Think AREA)

[Hellios @ Jun 21st 2008 6:35AM]

Oh yay, I can totally watch raw footage from the RED ONE camera in its native resolution on this thing. Too bad it costs twice as much as the RED ONE.

[r3loaded @ Jun 21st 2008 6:52AM]

@LondonConsultant

You brightened up my day :)

[Yevon @ Jun 21st 2008 10:21AM]

So, how many replacement sets of retinas does this come with?

[james @ Jun 21st 2008 10:52AM]

soooooooooooooooooooooo stupid. The only real benefits for any resolution above 1080p is for medical imaging and stuff. This is for 2 reasons:

1. They view the screen from like 3 inches away.

2. They can actually feed it native sources in Quad HD.

If you bought this, you would notice ABSOLUTELY no difference from a 1080p panel unless you do one of the above things, which you won't. No one watches TV 3 inches away (usually 8-12 ft) and there are no consumer Quad HD sources (unless you think watching someone's liver is enticing and you are willing to steal it from a hospital).

In fact, I would guess that since this is a Westinghouse (good, but not great panels normally), it would be inferior to a Pioneer reference display, of which you could buy 5 or 6 for $50,000.

[Striker @ Jun 21st 2008 2:09PM]

I DO watch TV from 3 inches away, it blows my mind, not really, more like it blows my eyes.

[Shinigami @ Jun 21st 2008 7:49PM]

There are other uses - like in advertising something and putting this screen up in a public place so people would see something other than...uh...pixels xD And guess what? With Quad-HD screen you can put up 4 ADs at the same time, each in Full-HD! Or lots of small ADs xD

If these things go on sale from Toshiba and other companies, it means there are those who buy such products.

[jamesf @ Jun 21st 2008 10:54AM]

soooooooooooooooooooooo stupid. The only real benefits for any resolution above 1080p is for medical imaging and stuff. This is for 2 reasons:

1. They view the screen from like 3 inches away.

2. They can actually feed it native sources in Quad HD.

If you bought this, you would notice ABSOLUTELY no difference from a 1080p panel unless you do one of the above things, which you won't. No one watches TV 3 inches away (usually 8-12 ft) and there are no consumer Quad HD sources (unless you think watching someone's liver is enticing and you are willing to steal it from a hospital).

In fact, I would guess that since this is a Westinghouse (good, but not great panels normally), it would be inferior to a Pioneer reference display, of which you could buy 5 or 6 for $50,000.

[Maestro @ Jun 21st 2008 10:58AM]

I think I have an old Westinghouse transistor radio in my garage. Can I get something like 50k for it too?

[NineT9 @ Jun 21st 2008 11:36AM]

No game can play in this resolution, and no movie

This would be great for basically 3 things:

1) Viewing pictures from your 10+ megapixel camera
2) Using it as a PC Monitor, which always takes advantage of high res
3) Music Visualizations beauty :D Milkedrop 2.0 anyone?

[Hellios @ Jun 21st 2008 11:47AM]

About your 2. and 3. points:
What kind of graphics card would you use with it, most I know go only up to 2650*1600.
Secondly, that would seriously stress your CPUs to render an image that big (As far as I know, winamp visualizations are done on a cpu basis)

[Bill @ Jun 21st 2008 12:34PM]

Hellios,

2. Ultra High-end professional graphics cards - Nvidia Quadro FX and ATI FireGL - will handle such resolutions just fine.

3. MilkDrop 2.0 visualization plugin for Winamp uses Direct X9. Therefore, any graphics card capable Direct X9 acceleration will offload the visualization task from the CPU.

[Rofl @ Jun 21st 2008 12:57PM]

They've had monitors like IBM's T220 for several years. You would drive them using multiple DVI connections from a Nvidia Quadro. Today, you can probably drive these Quad HD panels using just 2 dual link connectors from a Geforce in span mode. And the T220 looked great, QUWXGA at 22" with ppi like staring at dye sub prints, or a bigger version of a Nokia N770 tablet, the pixels aren't too small to see at a couple feet when used for text and icons. Blow that up to 56" and it's sharp, but not much better PPI than most notebook LCDs.

[Grant @ Jun 21st 2008 12:28PM]

I"ve had a Westinghouse 42" for over a year near, the picture quality is comparable to pretty much any other big brand vanilla HDTV, and 1/4-1/2 the price.

While i would agree with you that 1080i and 720p are hard to differentiate, 1080p against either of those is fairly obvious if you know what you are looking at. I would say the difference is noticeable on 32". If you don't know what you are looking at, don't even bother to get anything over 720p, cause you won't notice the difference after the first day and it'll save money.

[tekdemon @ Jun 21st 2008 1:20PM]

I suppose if you were an insanely rich radiologist or something you could get a few just for show as well, since they already use super-high resolution LCDs to look at MRIs and CTs and X-rays and whatnot.

[luc @ Jun 21st 2008 5:25PM]

If you haven't seen a 4K cinema demonstration, don't say it's useless.

[David Lawrence @ Jun 21st 2008 10:38PM]

@luc is right. 4K cinema is kick-ass. At the demo I saw at Calit2, the audience was encouraged to sit as close to the screen as they could because in 4K, the closer you get, the more detail you see. It looks awesome. I'm currently working on piece that will be part of those Calit2 4K demos and I can say that at least with our imagery, the extra resolution brings out *amazing* levels of detail that is simply not there in 1080p. Is this display overkill for the average consumer? At this point, absolutely. But wait a few years and you may be surprised. 4K is a viable format that you'll be seeing more and more of.