Sharp acquired Toshiba’s computer business last year for four billion yen ($36 million). A new all-in-one (AIO) computer with a serious display, something Sharp is known for, was shown off with the Dynabook branding on it and features a 32-inch 8K 120Hz.
On April 10, Sharp Corporation held an exhibition of new technologies and products at the Sharp Tokyo Building in Shibaura, Tokyo, and disclosed the contents to the press. The new computer wasn’t spotted with any specific name, but it got the Dynabook branding that Toshiba recently shifted towards.
The new Dynabook system wields a large 31-5-inch display with an IGZO panel sporting a 7680×4320 resolution and fast 120Hz refresh rate. It also supports HDR visuals. It doesn’t quite reach the 1,000 nits brightness level that is ideal for HDR content but gets fairly close at 800 nits, which is twice as bright as lower-end HDR displays that only crank out 400 nits (the minimum requirement for VESA’s entry-level DisplayHDR 400 certification).
In its presentation, Sharp said that the 8K AiO PC is a high-performance machine that displays 16x the detail of a standard tablet or PC screen and “uses AI-optimized screen division technology“. This might be required to intelligently keep up with the data transfer demands of an 8K monitor (7680 x 4320 pixels) with 10-bit visuals and 120Hz refresh, which could need up to 4x inputs working in concert to deliver the bandwidth of 120Gbps or 15GB/s. Even if the AIO were packing four Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards, they wouldn’t be enough to push many new games in 8K at 120Hz.
Sharp says that its AiO PC will offer a mechanism for user upgrading of video cards, memory and so on. It is good to hear of such accessibility in an AiO. Lastly, it is possible Apple will be devising a new iMac Pro based upon this same screen.
Expanding its 8K product portfolio, Sharp also showed off a compact 8K video camera, which it had previously revealed at CES 2019 and noted that its AiO could be a good match for editing the video.
Since we haven’t seen what the part of the Dynabook housing the actual hardware looks like, it’s hard to say just what Sharp has in store. Housing upgradable memory in a compact form factor is one thing, but swap-able desktop graphics cards is another entirely