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*

Comments

great

[KevinMS]

my porn collection will look like a stamp collection

Possible problems

[Michael Woodhams]

A few thoughts arise:

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?)