A couple of days ago, I teased you with Sharp’s announcement of the world’s first 8K video screen. Today, I got the chance to see it with my own eyes on Sharp’s 85in (7ft!) LCD screen. I can summarise the following blog post in one word: wow.

A little recap: 8K video means 33 million pixels of high definition loveliness. They’re going to need to invent a new definition superlative, because high, super-high or ultra-high won’t do it justice. The screen has a resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 – 16 times as many pixels as a Full HD screen.

The picture quality is gobsmacking. There’s no point in me even trying to take photos of the screen because my DSLR sensor hasn’t got the resolution to do it justice. You’ll have to take my word for it.

The demo video shows a close up of a man’s face that delivers the kind of detail a dermatologist would kill his mother for

The demo video shows a close up of a man’s face that delivers the kind of detail a dermatologist would kill his mother for. Every pore, every bristle in the man’s beard, every eyelash is captured. I stood staring at the man’s face for so long it was getting a little homoerotic…

Another of the demo clips shows a frankly insane Japanese game, where hundreds of men chase a tree trunk down a ludicrously steep hill. As the tree trunk gathers speed, it starts sending dust billowing into the air, and it feels like you can see every last lunatic-choking particle when the camera zooms in.

I could have sat watching all day, but Sharp has a couple of employees on hand to keep the crowd moving and mop up the saliva. If this is what the future of television looks like, I may never leave the house again.

At the end of its CES press conference, the company revealed that its stand at CES will include an 85in 8K display containing no fewer than 32 million pixels.

To put that in perspective, that’s the equivalent of 16 Full HD screens.

We’ll be sure to drop by the stand when it opens tomorrow (Tuesday).

I’m lucky enough to be in Tokyo courtesy of Sony’s VAIO division for a whistle-stop tour of its HQ and design centre, and hopefully to get an early sighting of some new products. The tour doesn’t kick off until later today, so – with my body having decided to wake me up at 5am – I browsed through the local edition of the Herald Tribune and meandered across this story.

In the UK, we’ve quite correctly focused on the fact the Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two are Microsoft’s first own-brand phones, with any mention of the fact they’re made by Sharp shoved down into the “by the way” category – indeed, in the PC Pro news story we don’t mention the fact it’s made by Sharp at all.

But this appears to be big news for Japanese phone makers, and if the story’s to be believed then we could be set for a new wave of phones from a country that’s essentially obsessed by them. If you think the phones we buy now are feature-packed, get ready for built-in pedometers, ubiquitous video-on-demand and the ability to pay for things by swiping your phone.

Even worse, we might succumb to the trend for personalisation through Hello Kitty wallpapers and hand straps.

So why haven’t we seen Japanese phone makers in Europe before? To quote the article, “It [the joint venture between Microsoft and Sharp] appears to mark a decisive break with the restrictive partnerships which have tended to bind Japanese cellphone makers to domestic networks.”

It goes on to describe the Japanese phone market as suffering from “Galapagos syndrome”, where “technology evolves in complete isolation from international standards”.

As far as I’m concerned, it would be superb to see some Japanese innovation added to the smartphone market. Right now, all the handset makers seem to be rushing headlong into producing me-too rivals to the iPhone, when arguably what we need is something revolutionary to shake things up.

If the reports are anything to go by, the Kin One could be a very welcome first step. But if you see me brandishing a phone covered in cute cartoon characters, feel free to have a quiet word in my ear.

Don’t tell Sharp that the MID is dead, though – it’s just introduced a brand-new MID device at this week’s IFA Berlin trade show: the PC-Z1.

Weighing in at just 409g and measuring a mere 161mm and 24mm deep, the PC-Z1 feels feather-light in the hand and surprisingly sturdy: the 5in screen barely flexed, there was no hint of desktop distortion and the rest of the unit felt surprisingly durable.

Sharp dresser?

We’re less keen on its design, though, which is something of an acquired taste. Every sample model Sharp has bought to IFA is finished in an off-white colour that doesn’t go particularly well with the glittery, pink-hued hinges and, while we’re assured that the PC-Z1 will also be available in black, we’ll reserve judgement until we see one of those models in the flesh.

This is one of the first devices we’ve seen using the MID-specific version of Ubuntu 9.04 and, while it looks broadly similar to the desktop versions of the open-source OS, there are links to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube directly on the desktop. Firefox and a cut-down version of OpenOffice 3.0 are included, too.

Inside, Sharp has ignored Intel’s MID-specific Atom Z series in favour of an 800MHz ARM-based Freescale i.MX515 processor, which has a mighty 256kb of L2 cache and a 32kb instruction cache. It’s not the most sensible, choice, though – when we tested the PC-Z1, we found that OpenOffice took almost a minute to open and the rest of the system felt sluggish.

The rest of the specification is weak, too. 512MB of RAM is soldered onto the motherboard, and the 4GB of flash memory results in only 2GB of user storage once Ubuntu has been loaded onto the machine. 802.11b/b wireless and a card reader are also included and, although Freescale’s website boasts that the integrated graphics chip can decode 720p video, we’re not holding our breath.

This meagre specification does mean that the PC-Z1 should have pretty decent battery life, with Sharp claiming up to ten hours before you’ll have to head back to the mains.

Ergonomic Issues

Unfortunately, the Sharp’s keyboard is one of the worst we’ve ever used. The buttons, which are smaller than those on the average netbook, rock from side-to-side when touched, and their diminutive size means that it’s impossible to peck at the keyboard even slowly – and touch-typing is totally out of the question.

The slow components don’t help, either, with many of our button presses taking an age to register or simply not appearing on the screen at all. Typing a couple of sentences took an age, and we’re not sure that we’d manage to finish a whole page – by that time, the PC-Z1 surely would have been flung through the nearest window.

Mouse control is handled by a small Blackberry Storm-style touchpoint that lurks above the right-hand side of the keyboard. It’s not quite as disastrous as the keyboard, but it’s not a total success, either: small movements often went unnoticed and it’s all too easy to slip a finger beyond its parameters and have to re-adjust. The pair of mouse buttons, which sit on the left-hand side, felt about as weak as the keyboard did – and liable to failing sooner rather than later.

The 5in screen offers a surprisingly good resolution of 1,024 x 600 – the equal of many a netbook – but quality, sadly, is lacking. Our brief time with the PC-Z1 revealed a grainy, pale panel that struggled to do web pages justice.

We’ve got bad news if you’re looking to buy one of these unique machines, too – at the moment, Sharp only plans to release the PC-Z1 in Japan, where it’ll be hitting shelves in around two weeks. We’ve been reassured that Sharp is looking to bring the device to Europe, pending customer demand – and, if it does make it to these shores, it’ll cost around €360.

Although, when you can buy an A-Listed netbook for less cash, why on earth would you want to?

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