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Potential for 1000dpi Flat Screens
nvf writes "The Economist has a story about Iridigm's new technology that uses wavelength interference between two tiny mirrors to create a pixel of the appropriate color. The article does say it will be years before a commercial product is out, I hope it's worth the wait." I s'pose when these come into service, I might care less about anti-aliased text *Grin*
For the record, Nintendo uses relflective LCD's specifically to keep power consumption low. That's why a single pair of AA batteries lasts me WEEKS. But I'd opt for rechargeables and a backlit screen in a heartbeat.
The dynamic range is poor. If you have 100 'subpixels' of blue in the area that would normally be a pixel on an LCD display, you can only get 100 levels of blue intensity in that pixel.
The example of 100 subpixels is actually better than the modern colour TFT displays, which are usually 3 x 6bpp or 18bpp and give great-looking colour to my eye.
Also, the pixels' colour components can be pulse-width modulated, ie, using the time domain; if they are refreshed at, say, 75kHz then you can have 1,000 shades of each colour without flicker.
-Andy
I noticed a change when the printers went from
200dpi to 300dpi, barely when they went to 600dpi.
I doubt if we can really see much more beyond 300dpi.
(see The Register and Silicon.com)
Iridigm's technology, which sounds to me too much like a satellite business, call their tech "I-mod"
I'd post a link to the Trademarks Office if the server was not down (business UK hours only) but British Telecom just tried all the related names to annoy NTT DoCoMO with their 'phone kit :
Once you have a trademark registration, btw, you have a good claim against "confusingly similar" marques.
and once you've filed you have a superior claim in Madrid Treaty countries (US recognises this) from date of application of registered trademark Not the actual first use of a name.
you have to see an excerpt of the class descriptions for the application to believe this :
I had to cut the actual text because of Lameness Filter. But you can search for yourself tomorrow :-)
an excerpt from class 9 of the application: transmission, reception, processing, retrieval, reproduction, manipulation, analysis, display and print-out of sound, images and/or data; computer hardware and firmware; computer software; digital communications apparatus and instruments
the names : Status: Pending Mark Text: I-MODE Mark Text: i-mode Mark Text: i-MODE Mark Text: I-mode Mark Text: I.MODE Mark Text: i.mode Mark Text: I.mode Mark Text: i.MODE Mark Text: I MODE Mark Text: i mode Mark Text: i MODE Mark Text: I mode M
To get other colors, the device can scissilate a pixel between the three primaries several hundred times a second, leaving each color turned on for the proportionally appropriate time. To get variable intensity, add the black setting to the equation.
Pfft. We'll be ready in plenty of time. Do you really think in 5 years we'll still be tooling around with some dinky 128 meg video card. RAM is ultra-cheap these days; 3 gigs will be nothing in 5 years.
That female mutant who can see extra colors (article from 2 weeks ago) STILL won't like it!
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Let me give you the lowdown
Looks a lot like GLV technology, which I think was covered on slashdot this month.
/ glvmainframeset.html
D =3772
http://www.siliconlight.com/htmlpgs/glvtechframes
http://www.e-town.com/news/article.jhtml?articleI
One of the hot topics on the various projectionists and film collectors forums is digital projection -- and how much resolution is enough.
There are at least two limiting factors.
The first is the size of the film grain. Once you reach a certain resolution, any further increase in resolution goes towards clarifying the individual film grains instead of contributing more picture information. This starts to happen at around a 4K vertical resolution.
The second is the resolution of the human vision system. Again, there isn't much point in having higher resolution than the resolution of the cones in your eye. Again, your visual resolution is approximately reached at 4K resolution over a 60 degree field.
Another advantages of these digital micro-mirror based interference systems is that they can handle tremendous amounts of light, much more than can be passed through motion picture film without melting it.
I'm not surprised that display technology has tended to stagnate -- in order to effectively utilize high resolution (6Kx4K or so) technology, you need to be able to move data fast enough to keep the video pipeline full. I'll bet that in five years, tube monitors and televisions will go the way of tube radios.
When you choose to use 100 dpi fonts, do you think it refers to the dot pitch of your CRT? I don't think so, it means 100 pixels/inch. Besides that what's the point of having 1000 physical dots per inch if you only got 100 pixels per inch.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
They have a device that separate mirrors to cause interference in light.
Q1. Where's the light from?!! The light is the big power draw in LCD's not the LCD itself.
The interference depends on the wavelength so the light has to be defined wavelengths i.e. artificially generated. So all that talk of low power is BS?
Q2. Its electrostatic with a mirror on a springy base, so if I switch off the voltage presumably the pixel changes back to some neutral state?
So does this mean they have to keep the voltage there all the time? I.e. several transistors per pixel and a wire to each individual pixel? Ahhh!
Q3. How fast do these mirrors move?
Maybe if they put in a treacle thick liquid, they could make the mirrors move slowly, multiplex the display. Kind of like they do with LCDs now.
Q4. Does the light come out of the side?
I mean they have 2 plates that form a gap, the story makes it sound like the front and back plates of an LCD, but doesn't the light have to come out of the side of that pixel? Doesn't it come out along the gap (or slightly off centre)?
This story sounds like they're fishing for research funding.
[Skeptic Mode off]
Sounds cool, you could make a continuosly changing colour discreet 'LED' like indicator with that.
my porn collection will look like a stamp collection
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
Now we know the answer to this question.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
While I'm dubious about desktop applications of this anytime soon, this could be the holy grail of medical imaging and remote surgery. One of the greatest problems they came up with in the Army's tele-surgery experiments was the unexpected time sink of having to constantly magnify everything. The resolutions of the screens used was too course to see many blood vessels and the like at a glance.
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Encrypt Everything
With their apparent (probably soon-to-be-patented) method for making screens *really* flat: drop them from outerspace into the ocean.
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Reflective screens are so sensitive to where the light source is coming from, and are SO prone to glare as to be absolutely useless outside of the aforementioned Gameboy application. Even so, not a single Color Gameboy user has ever said, "Hey, this screen is great! Who needs a backlight?"
I rest my case.
It's doubtful that these would ever become "full size" displays. 1000 dpi is overkill. On a 300 dpi laser printer, if you take a second to look, you'll "jaggies" around the curves of type, but do you notice the jaggies on type that's been printed from a 600 dpi laser printer? No... Our eyes can only handle so much resolution before it's just overkill.
The future for this technology rests most likely in head mounted displays for things like surgery and engineering tasks where there aren't any free hands... Maybe some ultra high end cell phone or PDA may one day opt for a "scaled back" version of it.
Anyhow, so far as gaming goes, you'll probably be able to make due with a far less powerful card than you're envisioning... For starters, the textures won't *need* to be 100 times larger, and really, your eyes wouldn't know the difference between a 150 or 200 dpi texture versus a 1000 dpi texture... The only issue will be that the cards will have to keep track of a lot more pixels. But it doesn't matter, because none of us will ever see this display resting on a desk anywhere...
Well, a 1000 dpi display would be nice, but it would unfortunatly require 100 times more pixels (hence RAM, processing, ...) then a current 100 dpi display. That means instead of a 32 Meg video card, your card will need 3 GB of memory (textures will also be 100x larger). On the fastest machines available you'd be getting almost 1 fps in Quake... do I need to continue?
We're not ready for 1000 dpi displays and won't be for at least as much time it'll take to have those displays available commercially.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
When I got to reading the linked article it got me to thinking about a story that ran in Wired's print magazine called "Bright Switch".
Either in this article, or one of the others in this same issue, they get into talking about using this optical filtering technique to be used for things like clothing, replacement for paint, and even a way to stop earthquakes.
Mind you, a lot of this is theoretical stuff about using this crystaline stuff as a filtering mechanism. It still makes for an interesting read, and it appears to be a similar concept to what this thread is supposed to be talking about.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
The pixels can be be only one of 4 states? Let's do the math: 2^4 = 16 color display. You need to have brightness control on the pixels before you can get into 32 bit color (or 64 bit for those lucky female tetrachromats out there)
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
That could be taken care of with enough of a pixel density.
As is stated in many other posts, we cannot see resolutions over a certain DPI. A black pixel next to a red one should just make the red pixel seem darker.
I have a feeling that this tech might just be able to have better color/intensity differentiation than anything we have now.
Different colors of paint are just multimple colored molecules mixed together.
Dan
As described, the system is purely reflective - unlike a CRT or a backlit LCD, which actually produce light.
The colours will not be very pure. Each pixel is effectively a coloured mirror. It will have maximum reflectivity at one wavelength (say, red) slowly falling to zero reflectivity at twice that wavelength (infrared) and at 2/3 the peak wavelength (yellow perhaps?) then reaching a maximum again at half the peak wavelength (blueish).
While you can change the colour that a given pixel reflects, you can't change the intensity with which it reflects it - i.e. they are on or off, not half-on.
The colour purity problem might be solvable with coloured filters in front of the pixels - but this would make the display much dimmer, and unless you use a remarkable filter, would restrict each pixel to just one colour 9according to the colour of the filter in front of it)
Some possible solutions to the on-or-off problem are to use many very small pixels so you can control intensity according to how many are on, or to use an LCD in front of the pixels to control intensity (at which point, why not just use a colour LCD display?)
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We're not talking about viewing angle (although the GBC is hampered by this as well). It's speicifically low-light and glare issues that concern me. You NEED to have a light-source with reflective screens, and that light is likely to cause glare, reducing readability significantly.