A while ago you may have heard that Foxconn and RED were going to team up to make “affordable” 8K cameras. Well, that hasn’t happened yet, but Foxconn has started making 8K TVs. At BIRTV in Beijing, Foxconn was showing the World’s first 8K + miniLED television.
The 65″8K (7680 x 3840) 10-bit screen uses RGB miniLED backlight technology. The panel has 1000 nits of brightness and a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1.
So what is miniLED? Mini LED backlights come into their own when displaying HDR content, as they are able to produce finer HDR local dimming zones. Mini LEDs replace edge-type backlight’s which are typically found in most of today’s LED screens. Edge-type backlights usually only number in the dozens, but miniLED’s consist of tens of thousands of high luminance LEDs. In the case of these new Foxconn TV, there are 1296 individual HDR dimming zones.
Foxconn (who are actually called Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd.) makes the BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Kindle, Nintendo 3DS, Nokia devices, Xiaomi devices, Sony Playstation, Wii U, and Xbox One just to name a few.
Back in 2015, Foxconn bought 2/3 of Sharp’s stock in a $3.8 billion USD deal. They also own a proportion of Innolux, as well as having a significant investments in Vizio. Foxconn is now the World’s largest LCD panel manufacturer. Earlier this year Foxconn also bought into a company called Epileds. Epileds is a Taiwanese based company and the reason Foxconn has acquired shares is because Epileds makes Micro LED chips. By leveraging technology from all of these companies Foxconn has considerable resources moving forward in the development of 8K screens.
Foxconn is currently building a $10 billion USD LCD panel manufacturing plant in Wisconsin, US. Foxconn is already the World’s largest electronics manufacturer and they certainly have the resources to make a digital cinema camera. Just when, or if they do, is something we will have to wait to find out.
