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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*
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
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.
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.
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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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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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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.
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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.