The Chinese screen specialist BOE has shown a laptop with a 16-inch 600Hz screen (opens in new tab) at the 2022 World Display Industry Conference in Chengdu, China. The new panel uses BOE’s panel-accelerating oxide backplane technology, first seen in the 500 Hz 27-inch desktop panel.
While not exactly a household name, BOE is in fact one of the world’s largest display panel manufacturers. The LCD panels are used by a wide variety of desktop monitor and laptop manufacturers. If you have a laptop from one of the big boys like Dell or HP, chances are it has a BOE panel.
Anyway, there’s no release date for the 600Hz 16-inch panel and for now further specs like resolution, brightness and response remain a mystery. What we can say is that 600Hz means a new frame is displayed every 1.67ms. That’s a lot of frames.
The immediate question, of course, is how relevant such a panel would be in the real world, especially in a laptop. It’s hard enough to think of a desktop GPU that’s going to hit the required 600fps in modern games, let alone a laptop chip. Even if such GPUs existed, it is also questionable whether the difference between, say, 480 Hz and 600 Hz is something that the human eye and reflexes can really appreciate.
Undoubtedly more interesting will be the response time of such a fast LCD panel. While IPS panels with claimed 1ms response times are now common, that metric is typical of the gray-to-gray rise/fall time, which only covers a portion of the panels’ actual pixel transition time. For an LCD panel to truly deliver 600 Hz, it will probably need to get much closer to delivering true 1 ms performance.
BOE also showed off a number of other new panels at the event, including a new 34-inch 165Hz mini-LED ultra-wide model and a 17.3-inch foldable OLED panel.