Photos: Looking Sharp at Ceatec

Is everyone zoning out here? No, they are just looking at a monitor from Sharp that provides four times the resolution of a standard high-definition TV screen. The monitor is on display this week at the Ceatec consumer-technology trade fair in Japan. Sharp's new screen will be made available first to film and television producers as well as medical researchers.

Are you Mega Resolution, or what? The screen on the left sports a new technology that provides a higher contrast ratio than that offered by a standard high-definition screen. The photo of the sceen image doesn't do it justice, but you can pick out more stars and other space bits on the Mega screen than are visible on the normal one.

The size of the glass matters. The bigger piece of glass, used in eighth-generation LCD plants, can yield more screens, or larger ones, than glass from sixth- and seventh-generation plants. The glass shown here, which is so thin it would bend if held up at the corners, comes from Sharp's latest Kameyama plant. The plant, along with processing big pieces of glass, is also somewhat green. Solar energy, fuel cells and other alternative-energy technologies provide a third of its electrical power.