Performance of ExtensionArray display in DataFrame/Series
When printing a DataFrame/Series that is backed by an ExtensionArray the values are first converted to a numpy array:

https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/blob/c03ee857f880f94461d3344c11bfb703885fde00/pandas/io/formats/format.py#L1561-L1574

This is problematic for ExtensionArrays that are very expensive to convert to numpy arrays. i.e. converting an extremely large ExtensionArray to a numpy array to ultimately print ~10 values.

Can this be overcome or worked around? There is a already a special case for categorical here.