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New Display Technology to Compete with LCDs?
NetRanger writes "C|Net's News.com has a really interesting article to a new display technology that is based on interference of light patterns. The company, Iridigm, has a very compelling case for why their display method is far superior to LCD, including far brighter displays, far less power consumption... but the cool this is that the display actually works like RAM (it retains its state until voltage is applied to reset it) -- so what do you see when the driver crashes?"
- so what do you see when the driver crashes?"
Porn Screen Of Death?
That's gonna make shutting off the monitor real fast to hide the porn from your (wife/boss/Priest/Teacher) a lot more difficult.
Therefore, this tech will never fly.
So, if we can project this trend out, when do I need to start wearing sunglasses while I'm in the office?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I've noticed that some frame buffers on laptops tend to retain images from other modes in memory till you go into that mode. So if I like crash my laptop looking at a pr0n site, reboot, when X starts, I will see what I saw till X redraws the screen... normally about half a second....
What speed? DDR? SDR? will it be adversely affected by magnetic fields? I know my LCD isn't phased by having my speaker right next to it, but my CRT sure as hell was... Will this thing be sensitive to EM?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
It seems like it would *look* beautiful, but would be costly to operate.
Of course, if you're going to shell out the cash for this, then you're probably not going to be worried about the electric bill.
Still sticking to my CRT for now...
If a and b in c, and a can create b, and a can create a, and b can create b, and b cannot create a, then a created c.
They're based on moving the membrane every time a pixel changes color. Wonder how many times you can do that before the membrane develops stress fractures.
Wonder if fractures would cause a failure, too.
I guess as long as it's at least as long as the expected useful life of an LCD backlight it's still a win.
The SCO lawsuit makes me wish my company were in Utah. We need a new building.
Hmm... No product displays at the website. Just some diagrams and a a photoshopped display.
That said, I'm currently tied to CRT technology because a lot of the media I have to deal with is color matched. Since color on a CRT screen is unreliable... it changes if you look at your screen from a different direction... this could offer a great deal of help to people like me who are tied to heavy, bulky displays rather than sweet flat-panels.
Of course the key here is that they have to deliver everything they promise in the way of omni-directional viewing and color-correctness.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
If my computer crashes, leaving something unpleasant on my screen, can I clear it by picking it up and shaking it?
Not so much a sig as a lack of one.
Only like SRAM, not DRAM.
SRAM is pretty much static until changes are made, DRAM you'll hear described like a leaky capacitor. When you give it a charge it will slowly loose it, so you need to refresh it... many many times per second.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
What I want is e-paper, paper that can be written on digitally, by people with the proper pens and machines with the proper hardware. This sounds a lot like a step in that direction.
My idea for the use of this paper is for notebook computers to be like scrolls. Initially just a tube, you pull out the screen which is rolled up inside (and has a rigid piece across the top), and unfold two braces (on both sides) to hold it in place.
They already have keyboards that you can roll up, why not screens? The scroll-book would do the same thing to store the keyboard as with the screen.
Persistence of images when the power goes off is a big requirement for digital paper. But I'm waiting for the scroll-book, which please note could double as a book and notebook if you could write on it with a digital pen. Don't unfurl the keyboard if you don't want to type into it.
Here's another second of thought...does anyone really think they'd announce a display technology that limits the user to a few femtometers of movement? Good lord...
The real potential comes when they can isolate sections of the screen to update. Since most screens remain, I would say, 80% the same, this could greatly increase the battery life of laptops since the screen is one of the largest power consumers. Isolating sections would allow only a small section to draw power when changed. The key would to make the sections as small as possible (pixel?) so that mouse movements don't cause un update to 1/4 the screen.
It certainly doesn't look like a dup of the story you posted
RTFA Genius
The iMoD elements are built upon two conductive layers--one a flexible metal membrane, the other is a thin film. These layers are held about 1 micron apart between two sheets of glass. When a voltage is applied to the element, the metal membrane layer becomes attracted to the thin film layer, turning the element black. Varying the voltage brings the layers closer and farther apart, and the distance between the layers determines what color--red, green or blue--the element displays.
Thus the only distance you have to control is between the membrane and film. Then unless you were moving at significant fraction of the speed of light the colors wouldn't change on your motion much.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
RTFA !
The display uses two plates on each pixel that can get closer or farther one from the other. The interference occur in the reflective part of the monitor, only to create the right frequency. Just like a spinning black and white thing can take any perceived color, depending on the rotation rate. In their case, the distance between the plates modulate the light color. Once a ray leaves the screen, it is of a given color and won't change anymore.
What I didn't see is the issue of lighting the surface. This needs a front light. Put the technology has one main advantage: it can emits any visible frequency. Hence, its gamut should be much larger.
J.
I don't quite think the poster understood the article. From the article:
Once a voltage has been applied to an iMoD element, it requires less power to hold the metallic layer in place than it does to move it.
Looks to me that *some* power is still required to keep the display going. If it loses power the layers would go back to their default state (which while the article does not state, it would appear its white when its off).
Likewise this statement:
but the cool this is that the display actually works like RAM (it retains its state until voltage is applied to reset it)
I'm no RAM expert but from my understanding (with current RAM), as soon as power is lost, so is the data. Unless you're talking about old magnetic RAM from the 50's and 60's, or IBM's upcoming MRAM, but I seriously doubt you were thinking of those.
//m
but the cool this is that the display actually works like RAM (it retains its state until voltage is applied to reset it)
Cool, some people will get to watch their BSOD's a few seconds more.
On a serious note, I wonder if this could actually cause video card makers to make cards that use memory that does not have to be dynamically refreshed, since the monitor pixels can hold the image. Might reduce memory latency for the frame buffers of the future.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
The power of Iridigm displays derives from the replication of some of Mother Nature's most beautiful creations: Butterflies.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
so what do you see when the driver crashes
You see me busting out a laptop and connecting via serial port
There are millions of CRTs out there helping businesses make money. Now these CRTs and to a lesser extent LCDs are also costing companies money through mainly power costs. There are also some health and safety issues that cost money through the running of lighting and cost of fixtures and fittings, but we'll let these out for now.
So, where do you have a CRT monitor and an application environment where high performance in the frame rate isn't an issue? Hmmm, how about every call centre in the world. If an IT manager sees the cost benefits of getting low power consumption monitors he or she will bite. If an accountant sees the numbers they'll bite the arm off the salesman. I can see these taking off in a big way with Call Centres and programming shops.
There's a market there for these things, I'd like to see how they do with CAD/CAM apps too.
sic transit biscuitus
This technology is great for displaying text (and pictures of butterflies) but it is very bad for games.
Look at the description of how it works. The colour is determined by the distance between glass layer and the metal plate. Big gap = red. Small gap = blue.
This is fine for static images, but it means that it takes 5 times as long for a red pixel to change state as it does a blue one.
When you have a quickly moving image, the result in severe ghosting for red objects. White objects will leave a rainbow trail - red at the far end, blue near the object. Blue objects are relatively unaffected.
If you do use this for playing Quake 3, just make sure you're on the blue team.
How does this compare to OLED displays, which are super cool. We've all been waiting for something without the pitfalls of LCD. This looks cool too. 400 - 1000 dpi? SWEET.
Resisting LCDs until OLEDs or this Iridigm thing is like resisting the tape cassette and listening to vinyl until CDs came out.
sig
You have to appreciate post-Dot.Com tech reporting:
provide breif overview of how new technology actually works - consult glossy side of start-up's brochure/PowerPoint presentation
Thank you c|net for providing us all with that fine peice of tech journalism. Too bad Richard Shim couldn't fill more copy space by staring at Maria Bartiromo on CNBC, and had to resort to describing technology halfway through the article.
credo quia absurdum
IANAEES....
Both SRAM and DRAM require constant power to reliably store data.
SRAM differs from DRAM because the cells that hold bits are always charged [howstuffworks has a diagram, basically its 5 logical gates in feedback]. As a result SRAM takes more power but has no refresh delays [and is bigger]
DRAM uses capacitors to store the data and requires refreshing. This makes DRAM smaller, less power instense but much slower.
For example, cache inside processors is a version of SRAM. If SRAM were as cheap as DRAM we'd be seeing 2MB caches common place nowadays...
Anyways... Peace out.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Overview and demonstrations of these are available here ->
Universal Display Corporation and Koda Research
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Dude, your analogy is weak...
"They already have keyboards that you can roll up, why not screens?"
A keyboard is a simple, physical, input device that has no output to the user, save the odd scroll lock / num lick / caps lock lights. It is based on well known, proven technologies. Press key -> key registered -> key stroke sent to computer. Simple.
A monitor or display device is an entirely different animal. It needs to reflect complex changes from the video subsystem at astonishing rates (60 Hz, 75 Hz, 80 Hz+) for over 1 million pixels / graphic elements (assuming 1024 x 768 or greater resolutions.) It is not a basic set of wires and simple chips like the keyboard can be made to be.
Your analogy is similar to:
"They already have cars that you can drive, why not blenders?"
"I can already write with my hands, why not my pancreas?"
"They already have beef that I can eat, why not granite?"
To solve the problem of undesired residue on the screen the manufacturer could add a slider on the bottom of the unit that the user would slide from one side to the other - erasing the content :).
-- &&
their primary focus is "mobile phones, Smart Phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), two-way pagers, game players, and other mobile appliances". It could be that these displays are impractical for some reason (perhaps fabrication) in larger sizes. As usual with technology like this, the real issue is scaling production.
If this tech can avoid dead pixels it would get my money. hell, I'd pay a premium for a flat display with no dead pixels. I just go a new computer that came with a LCD monitor and it has a dead pixel. I find it very distracting. I set the colors on my monitor dark to minimize eye strain and a bright white pixel glares at me. I loathe it. I use my CRT when I have serious work to do. Is there anything I can do about to minimize the distraction other than making my monitor look like I'm staring a lightbulb??
Reality is that which refuses to go away when I stop believing in it. --Phillip K. Dick (remove SPAM to email)
Actually, the hysteresis in the MEMS position suggests that a residual image might be maintained if power is lost. It just won't retain the original colors.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
... I'd settle for cheaper, better quality LCDs.
IIRC isn't this a property of Light Emitting Polymers? At least not the first incarnations, or the later revisions in that a charge is only needed to change the polymer state... so more power is used when viewing a constantly changing images (i.e. multimedia), whereas spreadsheet/office use would be on the lower end of the power scale.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Looks like each cell can only be fully on or off
Thus only primary and primary-composite colors can be displayed.
metals have an interesting characteristic, in that there is a certain amount of bending that can be done without damaging the crystal, in which case you can keep bending it back and forth forever.
It sounds more like "e-paper" than a LCD replacement. It doesn't produce it's own illumination.
If the light intensity coming from the source is bright enough it doesn't need a fron light, hence no front-light-issue.
We need a new moderation option: -1 Retard
The parent post is quite possibly the stupidest idea I've read in years.
Build boards not bombs
Then your display could be your framebuffer. Which means you could get really cool effects when doing 3D without dubbel buffering;) Especially if you disable the z-buffer ;)
ok, totally useless, really, but fun;)
actually today LCD is based on the movement of small molecules in the thin film of liquid. Apply voltage, molecules stretch (or rotate, depends on designs), light can go thru, no voltage, light can't go thru.
(I think LCD requires constant voltage to keep the molecules excited tho,unlike this new technology that clams to use less power to keep the state of each pixels than change it).
So, I think the lift time should be pretty about the same between LCD and this thing, since they both move some kinds of small molecules around.
IANAEES?
If you actually look through their site, it looks like they are aiming for the PDA market, not the desktop display. Perhaps a limitation of the technology, perhaps a really good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of their product.
Interesting that the site spouts off on touch screen technology. I've always loved the spontaneous change of LCD to LSD when you press on you LCD pannel, with these, you might just semi-permenantly change the pixel!
And they are showing progress, definitely beyond the "vaporware" that some commentors have said. It appears that they *have* a working product that they demo'ed in May of 2000.
Iridigm Demonstrates First Color iMoD Matrix(TM) Display
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - May 20, 2002 - - Iridigm(TM) Display Corporation, a developer of flat panel displays for mobile devices, will demonstrate its iMoD Matrix(TM) technology at the Society for Information Display (SID) International Symposium in Boston, Massachusetts. During the Exhibition portion of the conference held May 21-23, 2002, Iridigm will demonstrate the color iMoD Matrix(TM) display in its booth #1805/1807. This is world's first direct-view color flat panel display based on MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems).
Continued here
www.christopherlewis.com
It needs a front light but only in dark environments. Apparently, the reflectivity of the surface is sufficient for normal lighted environments
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
They claim years of operation. Of course, this is marketing literature.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
but it was good of you to think of the modulation rate based color method. BTW, did you know that modulation based color perception is a genetic trait? not all people percieve color from the spinning disk experiment. i am one that does not, and i was very frustrated when i was trying to get the experiment to work until i found out that some people are not sensitive in that way. folks in my computer club were programming their B&W monitors to show color using the technique before there were any color TV interaces.
The problem is that each time the metal is bent it does still go though some changes on a microscopic level. If you only bend it X% then it will last for a long time, but that doesn't mean it will last forever. You will still get changes in the atomic matrix (migration of the atoms, the atomic structure changing from one form to another, micro-fractures, introduction of foreign materials) at the points of stress, enough so that eventually the metal will break at those points.
Sapere aude!
How do they get color graduations? If the plates are bistable, how do they get more than 8 colors (with each of red, green, and blue being either on or off)? Or can they make the plates hover in-between stable states by applying a current?
The only problem with this over other new display technologies is that it still uses glass.
Too bad. It seems although Nokia could make a phone that has a batteries that last, the screen will still crack and break for no apparent reason. :(
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
If it were like RAM, voltage would have to be applied to maintain the display.. removal of voltage would mean loss of data. Did you mean EEPROM or Flash?
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Besides RTFA, the described interference pattern is the same principle that holograms are based on. They work.
I heard on NPR the other day an even neater sounding alternative that is about five years off.
_
It uses the fact that certain plastics when charged with electricity will emit light and certain colors. The screen would be flat and completely flexible.
Literally you would have a screen (a TV for example) that could be rolled up and put into your backpack.
Right now they are looking into small scale electronics applications of the technology in terms of putting in screens for car radios and such but they have the big plan of a flexible plastic tv or computer monitor.
Of course if you pay attention is the fact that it needs no backlighting and can be extremely thin. Very neat stuff.
_______________________________________________
ACK
In an iPod, sounds like a great idea!
And mod me up as Informative for pointing this out!
Thx !
reality timed out @ 11:11
Since this display relys on the interference of light, would it work in the dark? With no light to interact with it wouldn't display. A backlight wouldn't seem to do the trick since the refraction has to be toward the user? I'm not a display guru by any stretch of the imagination, so maybe someone can explain this to me.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
They claim that since the entire display is inorganic, it's insensitive to temperature variations. Looks like the marketing folks have gone a bit too far on this one. Metal and glass have very different coefficients of thermal expansion. That suggests that the metal layer will be under tension at cold temperatures and under compression at high temperatures. This should affect the interference layer thickness achieved at a particular voltage. I expect that this will, at the very least, affect the display colors since interference wavelength is very sensitive to the thickness of the interference layer.
Anyone care to do the math?
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
(I might take this time to note that screen savers don't really have a place on a modern desktop other than eye-candy. But hey, I like eye-candy too.)
You can't get a blue screen on a black and white monitor.
so what do you see when the driver crashes
In my best whispery-2001 voice: "My God, its full of stars".
no this is not funny, had to share anyway.
I'd really like to have some photographers chime in on this one.
...why?
I'm a photographer myself and "amateur" would be an understatement. I've always been vexed by the inability of the camera to record what I see. For example, I went to the Boston Aquarium a few months back and while my shots were acceptable, the colors were nothing like what I was seeing in-person. Brilliant blues and yellows look painfully muted and boring in my results. I'm told that is a shortcoming of the photography medium and photographers have to use tricks to get those wonderful colors you see in mags like National Geographic, Photo, etc. Well
So what I guess I'm asking is "can this technology be used to not only create and present colors in a 'natural' way but possibly capture them that way as well?"
My
Limekiller
I am not an electrical engineering senior? Something like that, probably. Not particularily funny or original. Rest of the post is okay, though. *shrug*
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
While this is likely true (I only did introductory materials engineering, but it makes sense), some (many? all?) metals have the interesting property that if you leave them long enough after bending, they will `heal' and you'll be able to bend them again. Of course, different metals have differing heal times, with lead and gold being quite fast (hours to days?) and most others being quite long (in the months to years range?).
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
If SRAM were as cheap as DRAM we'd be using it for system memory and might not even need cache at all (unless of course some newer even FASTER RAM were available).
University - a box of academia nuts.
SOunds like interesting tech. What I find interesting is that they have to join several of there elements together to make a "pixel" - presumably this is to avoid having to scrap every video driver in the known universe. BUT it also means they could run at much higher definition if each element is controled seperatley. Combien that with the more paper like look and you have somthing much much easier to read.
Question though - I may have missed htis but how efficient is the manufacturing process? Isnt the main problem with LCDs that the manufacturing process is incredably inefficient?
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
So, we'll see these used on billboards or other advertising, using less power than conventional billboards which require lighting at night. These can be lit from within and changed in a moments notice.
Looks like they might be giving up some of the lower voltage benefits in order to get higher pixel density. Hence their claims about glossy magazine appearance?
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
You bring up an interesting point: it's not clear how a device like this can produce different saturation levels for a pure hue. In other systems, a single subpixel has a single color but variable intensity, and subpixels of different colors can be combined to produce a range of colors. In this system, each subpixel is capable of producing any color, but only at an intensity defined by ambient light. Consider a three-subpixel unit where each subpixel can be either white, red, or black. This gives only the following possibilities: white, black, two shades of grey (BBW, BWW), and six kinds of red (RRR, RRB, RRW, RBB, RBW, RWW). Now, a single subpixel could be cyan or indigo all by itself, creating a different kind of flexibility, but I'm not sure if that's as useful as what we get with variable-intensity RGB subpixels.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Hope they salvaged some of those MSN butterfly stickers/posters. Those will be real handy when they release this product!
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
Does this mean someday you'll be able to query the monitor to determine what data is being displayed, rather than doing it through software?
We're going to need a new standard Fortran record number
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
Yeah, where did the parent say anything about power? Just about refresh.
IANAGR (I Am Not A Good Reader) would have been a more appropriate intro to your semi-literate repsonse.
'Much slower'? Fool. The amount has to do with die size.
Tell us why it's better then OLEDs.
Everyone knows LCDs are just a stop-gap, 10 years from now everyone is going to be using OLEDs.
I suppose the benefit of these things is that they are reflective, and thus probably don't require much power when they don't change... But the structure looks pretty complex compared to OLEDs.
If these guys have a very short timeframe to production, they might make out pretty well, but 5-10 years from now this tech won't really be all that relevant, IMO.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I'm just beginning to make the transition from completely clueless to slightly clueless. One of the first things I discovered is that flashes (at least the built-in kind on the sort of cheap digital camera I use) are horrible and evil, and you really want to do without a flash whenever you possibly can. Fortunately, CCDs are pretty fast, so all I have to do is forcibly disable the flash and hold the camera really steady.
But perhaps you are at a more advanced stage than I am, and having more interesting problems. I generally am quite happy with the quality of the colors I take outdoors. Are you?
Incidentally, National Geographic got in trouble for using tricks and doesn't anymore.
SRAMs can be designed for raw speed (CPU caches) or low power (CMOS memory in old PCs before flash). High speed SRAMs can suck down a lot of power due to all of the gates and frequent logic transitions.
OTOH, The low power SRAMs intended for nonvolatile storage use all CMOS FET transistors in their logic gates. These gates draw essentially zero current unless they are actually switching.
Thus, while low power SRAMs require a voltage (typically supplied by a battery) to retain their state, they draw no current when idle. Therefore, in a technical sense, they don't actually require "power" (voltage*current) to keep their state, just a static potential.
A hydraulic analogy would be rigging two toilet flush flap valves in series, then ensuring that they never open simultaneously. This setup could store one bit (1 - open/closed, 0 - closed/open) with just static water pressure and zero flow. (A little water would flow when the valves are actually flipped.)
(btw, IAAEE)
But not all (or at least multiple) visible frequencies at the same time, which is what white light is. How will they get around this? Coordinating neighboring pixels to combine to white? Might be possible since they're apparently able to get higher pixel densities using this technology.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
Yes, this does present a serious problem to the technology.
Although they may have many of these in each 'pixel' as mentioned earlier, the circuitry required to drive these sub elements to give each pixel even a modest pallette depth would be absurd (IMHO).
For good (24 bit) color (8 bits per gun), you'd need 768 (256x3) sub pixels driven with at least 768 times the number of connectors to the display and 768 times the bandwidth, or you'd need to have integrated decoder/driving circuitry for each element. You couldn't just send an analog signal as with an LCD. There IS NO ANALOG DRIVING in this device, period.
Now, if the the 'memory' of these devices is truely bistable, they may be able to achieve usable bandwidth using a good multiplexing, but the size of the sub elements along with the rediculous number of connectors per pixel is a SERIOUS issue and the fact that there is NO MENTION of driving levels gives me serious reservations.
IIRC Static ram is faster then then regular Dram, but requires a lot more hardware per bit. Static ram also retains its state when the power goes out. Maybe the framebuffer on the display uses SRAM?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Since the color is controlled by varying the distance between the plates how is gamma controlled? How do you make a dark red and light red? Or grayscale. The article doesn't seem to explain this.
the POWER OFF lamp.
Uh, no. Framerate in general has nothing to do with the actual display, although the image will look better if the two are in synch at some multiple.
Framerate, at least when you're talking about gaming, is how fast the game engine and graphics card can update memory. The refresh rate is how fast the electron beam is swept across a CRT. LCDs don't have refresh rates, but they do have response times And I would assume this thing would as well.
The "frame rate" on an LCD or one of these things is 1/response time.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If SRAM were as cheap as DRAM we'd be using it for system memory and might not even need cache at all.
Not necessarily. There's an inherent slow-down associated with large address spaces. Not to mention the heat decipation. Heck, why else do we have 3 to 5 layers caching? The practical approach is to have successive layers of cheaper, larger and slower memory.
Since we already have 8 meg caches (in some high end machines), there's little value in doing away with multi-gig low-power, low-cost memories. Theoretically some apps will achieve noticable performance gains, but at enormous costs (today at least).
Furthermore, DRAM with internally managed refresh logic is functionally identical to SRAM (but non-deterministically slower). For something like video memory which regularly touches every byte of memory, the refresh logic would be unnecessary; thereby speeding up the memory. Further, DRAM is sufficiently performant enough to handle refreshes. 4MB * 80fps (for true color 1280x1024) = 320MBps. DDR can handle 2.1GBps alone. This doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of interleaving/banking/segmentation or what-ever types of tricks they may utilize.
-Michael
hey. as long as it isn't the butterfly dude that microsoft is using. that is definately NOT a beautiful creation and definately NOT from Mother Nature.
the eye strain isn't caused by interference with 60hz the power circuits. Modern monitors have a lot of protection from things like that.
The problem is that you can see the image blinking on and off, and it's annoying. I can still see flicker at 70hz, and in general prefer something in the 80s.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This could be a real display revolution, and no I don't work for them. They are talking about print quality displays here. They don't mention frame rate or gamma, but my guess is that gamma is a function of how many subpixels remain black, and if the frame rate does turn out to be low give them some time. This is v0.
Ahem... basic physics:
Light behaves as waves AND particles....
(Sponsored by cheeseSource for President 2012)
Maybe you'll need to iron your screen every so often?
Well, an iron probably wouldn't get hot enough, and would likely scratch the screen. But some adaptation of that might work.(Probably built in, like a degauser.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
(isn't TV interlaced 50 FPS?)
NTSC TV, what we use here in the US is 60 feilds per second (a feild is half a frame, every other line)
HDTV has i and p modes, i modes are the same as NTSC as far as speed, and p modes redraw the same frame each time... IIRC
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I assume that this will all be done in hardware, on even smaller than the pixel level.
An XOR of the current state of the individual iMod element and of the desired next state is all you would need to know if you need to apply a voltage to switch it.
You can have a diffrence in voltage without constant power. I don't know if it would work for this type of thing.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Instead of innovating, they are trying to navigate a patent minefield. Ban all IP laws now. It will happen. I am from the future.
Uh-uh. Infinity Modulator display. Borg will run like hell.
My hat's off to the folks who put together their site. The front page is a little vague -- the link to the main info isn't obvious, but:
a) The technology is presented in a non-condescending, comprehensible manner
b) Images are clear and consise
c) No Flash used
So they're spending their money in the right places -- which is where I'd want to invest the VC money I don't have.
Design for Use, not Construction!
I Am An Electrical Engineer?
Blah Blah Blah.
So what I guess I'm asking is "can this technology be used to not only create and present colors in a 'natural' way but possibly capture them that way as well?"
This question is like asking if a new kind break technology for your car will make your car edible.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Most metals exist in more than one form of crystal matrix. These different types of crystals exist in almost every chunk of metal you find. You will usually end up with a small area of one form of crystal (with all atoms lined up in the same direction) which is surrounded by another form of crystal. These small areas are called grains. The smaller these grains are, the more easily the metal bends, due to the fact that the atoms on the edge of a grain do not bond well to the atoms outside the grain.
When you bend metal you tend to form more grains in it, due to the movement breaking up existing grains and splitting them into smaller pieces. The increase in grains causes the metal to weaken, even if it is a small amount every time. If the metal is allowed to "relax" for a period of time, there is the chance that two extremely close and aligned grains will convert the atoms between them into their crystaline form. This reduces the amount of grains and re-stiffens the material. This re-conversion is very slow under normal temperatures and pressures and thus is a minor effect.
You can increase the grain size and lower the number of grains by heating the metal at a certain temperature for a period of time. If you then quickly cool the metal (quench it in water, for example) you will end up with a harder material (but more brittle). This is how blades are made that hold an edge and stay sharp, the harder the blade is the better it will hold an edge. However, if you make the blade too hard then it will not bend at all and it will be brittle.
Sapere aude!
make these out of 'real' butterflies?
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
I guess I read that wrong. In that case, he's full of shit. For one thing, incandescent lights don't flicker, and for another, two signals at the same frequency won't cause other patterns.
It also wouldn't explain why monitors would flicker with the lights off, either.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
My understanding was that the "Static" in SRAM meant static ciruit design, meaning no current usage in the idle state, meaning static CMOS gates as you mention. But you say that this only holds true for the "Low Power SRAMS"
So how are the circuits set up in these "high speed SRAMS" so that they draw idle current?
I was under the impression that *all* SRAMS use static cmos circuitry.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
Thanks for the authoritative response Graff. I seem to remember a few things from my materials course: Work Hardening, Plastic Deformation, and Elastic Deformation.
Now I will assume that the device is operating within the elastic range of the material, but where does work hardening come in?
We work harden the cables in suspension bridges by tensioning the metal cables. How does this work? Do we bring the cables to the boundary of the elastic and plastic deformation range for the material? Maybe even into the plastic range?
Just curious,
Mike Agar
www.jmagar.com
-
"If SRAM were as cheap as DRAM we'd be seeing 2MB caches common place nowadays..."
:)
If SRAM were as cheap as DRAM I'd hope to see machines using it as system ram
Cost is the major factor.
Right now, PDA sized greyscale screens go for $5-$15, and color ones for $50-$100.
If all the other specs are decent, and they can cut the cost of the screens by half, then they have a winner.
Hmm, looks clever but I couldn't see how they'd encode brightness - the pixels can only be on or off. Did I miss something?
There may be an analog technique. They could use progressive resistance. Low voltage would cross the switching threshold for the first few sub-pixels, higher voltages would cause more pixels to switch.
What confuses me is their claim of "bi-stable" electrical states using an "air gap" that moves thoughout a range of motion. Again, a variable voltage could set the plate distance by balancing static force with some opposing phycical force, but to maintain that distance with a constant bias seems strange.
They use the SDRAM for comparison, but SDRAM is binary 0/1. This thing appears to claim that each storage bit takes on a broad range of values between 0 and 1, inclusive.
Hey, IANAEE. Maybe magic happens.
They are currently trying to prevent the noxious odours that usually result from this process.
Additionally using the display more than once has proved difficult - after the first run the display usually turns into a big black smoldering ball of goo.
While the method of color control was clearly explained, the article didn't explain where the actual source of light would be. Will it be behind the display? Will it be shone onto the display? You can't generate light by simply providing a resonating chamber, which is what they seem to be doing.
Light generation seems to me to be the biggest draw of current.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Well if you had looked at the technology at their web site, the subpixels CAN'T be White. Thay can be only Black or one specific color (eg. Red). The technology has the color of each subpixel fixed by it's physical properties. (ie. it's digital, not analog) so there are red/black, green/black, blue/black subpixel types. Same idea as the old CGA displays but without the intensity bit (ie. only one bit per gun.)
Sadly, no mention on the site of how they think they play to provide any INTENSITY information.
ECL was fast, but it was just about as opposite of CMOS as you can get. It works using bipolar transistors to continually shunt large currents through resistors even when the gate is idle. That single 1K chip I worked on probably drew several of watts of power. Nevertheless, it was considered to be a SRAM.
(The mainframe CPUs put a hundred or more ECL chips on a ceramic substrate, then used the mother of all water cooled heatsinks to pull out the massive heat that was generated.)
If iHear another name with some iPrefix, iThink iMGonna puke.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
As I understand it, the reason for sub-pixels isn't to avoid blowing the minds of video drivers, but to create better colors.
One difference between this and other display approaches, as other posters have pointed out, is that each 'element' must be set to a particular color AND intensity *during manufacture*.
In a CRT, you only have to choose the color, and can vary the intensity on the fly.
So, you need a group of pixels set at different colors in order to create the 'light purple' vs 'dark purple'.
This wasn't clear in the article, but I think its correct, based on what other posters are saying.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
Their time to production could be very short if their claims are true that the production process uses only a subset of the LCD process.
Hopefully its not the part that is really unreliable and time-consuming. Though now that I think about it, given their focus on PDAs rather than monitors, it probably is.
If I remember right, the hard part with LCDs is laying the 'stuff' on the glass right. Their site mentions that their stuff is built right on the glass substrate as well.
If they're quick to market and provide a low-power high-quality no-ghosting alternative to LCDs, they might be able to ignore the 'dead pixel' problem.
Unless the dead-pixel problem will be intensified for them since their 'elements' are much finer-grained than LCD pixels.
Ahh, speculation. Its what we're here for, I think.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
Even an all-optical solution to memory storage wouldn't eliminate the advantages of(or, for that matter, the need for) having on-CPU cache.
We use on-die cache because CPUs operate at a datarate high enough to justify keeping frequently-used data close at hand. It's justified for the same reason that you'd want to use one Athlon 2800+ CPU, instead of a multiprocessor system using the same level CPUs, but at half the clock speed.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Actually, from the technology brief on their site, it appears that these ARE driven in binary format and that the distance between plates is physically restricted to a max value. (ie. They can manufacture sub-pixels of ANY frequency, but once constructed they're fixed at ONE particular frequency). That's why they say talk about it as a being bi-stable.
Yes, the progressive switching would be the way to go, but it would still require a formidable abmount of sub-pixel electronics not found in mosts current display devices. I'm sure it'll eventually be possible, but I'm not holding my breath. :)
Yep. The typical strain curve of metals is a linear domain [Elastic domain], followed by a bell curve-ish part [Plastic domain], then destruction.
If you tension to bring the metal into the curve-ish part, before it breaks, and then you release it, then it will release with an elastic behaviour straight away (and the unloaded length will be longer). When you subsequently load the metal, until the previous strain load, it will exhibit an elastic behaviour (thus beyond the initial elastic limit). You cannot seriously move the plastic limit using this way.
Please note that the fatigue effects which have been mentioned previously can happen even when remaining in the linear/elastic domain. This has been modeled in particular by Wöhler (eg
http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~chas/node22.html)
That makes it even more limiting, doesn't it?
If you had read the web site, you'd know that the color of each pixel is determined by the size of the gap (that's why blue has a smaller gap than red) and the resulting interference. I'm also making an optimistic assumption that they'll figure out a way to make the gaps variable rather than strict on/off.
...which was exactly my point. Thanks for playing.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
From the site: "iMoD elements are minuscule, typically 25-60 microns on a side (400-1,000 dots per inch). Therefore, many iMoD elements are ganged and driven together as a pixel, or sub-pixel in a color display. "
So intensity is a function of the ratio of active vs total elements per pixel
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
Anybody else getting that stupid iPAQ pocket PC ad over the top of CONTENT on the page? I'm using Moz 1.1 in OSX 10.2
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
Since these are DIGITAL subpixels, for 24 bit color, you'd need 256 sub-pixels just for the 'red' to mimic the 256 intensity levels per gun, and 768 sub-pixels in total PER PIXEL!
For 32 bit color (assuming 10 bits per gun), you'd need 1024 red sub-pixels, 1024 green sub-pixels and 1024 blue sub-pixels just to make ONE regular pixel.
Each pixel requiring 3072 subpixels does NOT sound too feasable to me. ... at least not off the top of my head, but maybe that's just me. : )
Reading the company's overview of this, each element is still only capable of producing one color, so you would still have the sub-pixels, just alot smaller and less power-consuming. They say several of these elements are gathered together to create one sub-pixel, so I would assume the driver would turn different numbers of elements on to vary the brightness of a sub-pixel (on=color, off=black).
Im just wondering what happens if it gets shaken/bumped/dropped, do your pixels change colors if you blast your stereo too loud? Could make for an interesting display....Also Im guessing the display would be white (all pixels on) when the power is off for, since it is the black (pixel off) state that requires the power to pull the membrane up to turn it off.
TM
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
So, with a wider gap you should get infra-red,
and with a smaller gap - UV, right?
If this could be scaled to larger display sizes (not huge, just regular display size), then we could finally have a good sunlight-readable color dispay.
That would be very nice for those times I have to work outside with that big bright-ball-in-the-sky thingy overhead.
Then again, a backlit (or self-lit, when OLED arrives) display makes more sense for the dark, dank dungeon I toil in now...
You'll have to excuse me, I was shooting from the hip and didn't realize that I had made a mistake in my original discussion.
I originally said, "When you bend metal you tend to form more grains in it, due to the movement breaking up existing grains and splitting them into smaller pieces. The increase in grains causes the metal to weaken, even if it is a small amount every time."
This is not exactly true, it had been a while since I studied metallurgy and I didn't have any reference texts to consult. To clarify, the reason the metal weakens is not that the number of grains is increasing and making the material more ductile (easily bendable), but that the dislocations (areas of stress in the metal matrix) and impurities are getting moved to the edge of the grains and are collecting together. This means that less of the metal has flaws distorting its structure and is therefore harder. Since it is harder it is now less flexible and more brittle. This causes micro cracks to form during the bending. Eventually these cracks lengthen and the metal fails.
Work hardening occurs when the metal is plasticly deformed. These deformations cause impurities and other strains to gather together and less distort the structure of the metal. Since more of the metal is ordered, it is harder than it was originally.
One thing you should know is that metallurgy is very complex. There are many factors which enter into the equation, such as grain size, alloys, impurities, many different phases (crystal structures) of the metal, etc. Often simply how the metal is composed, heated, cooled, worked can vastly change its properties.
Here are some sites to study more about metallurgy:
PLANT MATERIAL PROBLEMS - a site on metal failure
Metallurgical Terms Made Simple - a site on the basics of steel metallurgy
The Metallurgy Of Carbon Steel - a more in-depth analysis of steel metallurgy
Sapere aude!
Take a real close look at your TV screen or LCD.
CRTs use a mask, which actually causes seperate red, green, & blue dots to be displayed very very close to each other. When these are all at full brightness, it looks white. LCDs also have subpixel elements which take advantage of the same phenomenon, that's what MS's ClearType uses to do a different form of antialiasing on LCDs.
So, in fact, not having a 'white' subpixel element is not a disadvantage.
As for intensity. Here's a simple method. Using the image on their own site (look for it yourself) we'll assume a 6x6 grid of subpixels, arranged into 2x6 red, 2x6 green, and 2x6 blue. I want a bright blue, I turn 'off' the red & green subpixels, and leave all of the blue subpixels turned 'on'. I want a dimmer blue, I start turning off some of the blue subpixels. Wow! I have Intensity information!!!!
So would you rather they called it an "Interferometric Modulator Display"? They've got a good reason to call it iMoD. It's what we call an "abbreviation". Quit yer whinin'.
no need to fear.. windows has a built in crash function (ironic at that, since it seems to do it rather well itself)! their is a registry key required to enable it. after you do that type "ctrl+pause|break" great stuff!!
I only have one problem: since this display works by changing the shape of a metallic film, I wonder how they have addressed the problem of fatigue. That is, a material can only undergo so many cycles to failure. In essence, you would only be able to get so many frame changes until the metal broke and would not be able to deform, displaying a picture.
Why Your Next Computer Display Might Be an Empty Box
By Robert X. Cringely
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Yeah, that's great when you can control brightness.
Have you done the math on this? If you want 24-bit color you'll need 768 subpixels per pixel (256 for each of red, green and blue). That drives up the manufacturing cost and drives down yield (as allowable stuck-pixel counts are exceeded, and there will be stuck pixels just as there are in LCDs) but that doesn't even matter. Those 768 subpixels will form a square 28 pixels on a side; at the stated (minimum) size of 25 microns that's a pixel 0.7mm across - a.k.a. 36dpi. Besides being a generally crappy resolution, that's coarse enough that the color variation within the pixel will be visible to the human eye. Dropping down to 16-bit color gets the pixel size to reasonable (though still not particularly good) levels, so it's possible to have a display that's fine for regular use but will still be shunned by many users. There's also no mention of color-change latency, which might also be a concern for many users.
I don't mean to be a nay-sayer. Personally I'd be happy with 12-bit color and a pretty high color-change latency. My point is really that taking full advantage of this technology will require a fundamentally different approach to color and not just a naive "throw more subpixels at the problem" approach.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
We shalt bow down to the almighty Google (unless we're a stupid company with a suit against it)...
The Google search, and some of the Google results Like this, and this one.
Although I'm still trying to find the actual strip image... DOH!, I underestimated the almighty Google and it's 'images' search!! Here is the image.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Do you really think holograms work? I got a little one that was being handed out in front of a strip club and let me tell you these thing lot absolutely nothing like the real thing.
Won't this result in the same problems the Game Boy Advanced has?
One of the major things I like about my laptop is I can use it at night...
What's this Submit thingy do?
Since this technology works on light interferance, it appears that it needs a light source. Something not mentioned on their web site.
It's pretty hard to see a butterfly in the dark, I'll bet these displays will have interesting color issues when the ambient light changes.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Are you a plumber too? =)
What I want is a button that can destroy a continent at random, preferabily back-lit.
My idea for the use of this button is to see big explosions on demand, at first just one explosion, but exterior explosions which could outline the main explosion or cause air pressure to make the main exploson create perdy pictures.
We already have Fruit roll-ups, why cant we have random giant thermonuclear weapons of mass distruction triggered by a backlit (blue) button in my control? It would be the same as making those funny designs on the roll-up stretch and warp when you pull on them, except instead of warping sugar and red dye #5 we explosively alter the landscape consisting of million of tons of earth and rock.
The backlit button is a big requirement for easy pressability and finding it in the dark for those times you wake up and can't find your wall switch and would rather get illumination from gamma rays from some random continent. But what I'm really waiting for is one that has a blue backlif button, which could double as a funny exploding trigger AND as a sign at k-mart's blue light specials. And the Batteries should be rechargeable.
Sometime in the near future, we'll be able to get a gig of DRAM-based memory for under $40. Even if SRAM takes *eight* times as much silicon real estate to produce, that's still 640MB of SRAM for under the standard-cost-of-computer-upgrade of $200, and with in mind that 640MB "should be enough for anyone".
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Your math is wrong. Where do you get this that you need 256 subpixels? Think about it. 256 subpixels would get you 65,536 combinations of flipped bits.
The TI micro-mirror-based video projectors also have tiny metal parts that bend back and forth very rapidly all the time. (These are also called "DLPs" for digital-light projectors.)
Each pixel color component is basically a tiny metal mirror, with two opposite corners extended outwards to form mounting points. Metal plates under the two other corners can be charged up to force the mirror to pivot.
The thing is, the mounting points are just thin solid metal that bends. There's no fancy joints there.
And since the pivot control is binary, you have to use pulse-width modulation techniques to get various color intensities out of it. This means the mirrors need to pivot full extent very rapidly.
Sometimes a signal device is multiplexed for displaying all 3 primary colors, so it's working 3 times as fast.
Yet somehow, I've not heard about lots of failures of these device. Usually the light bulbs go out first.
unless you're watching an action movie full-screen, huh?
"...so what do you see when the driver crashes?"
Hmm. Which operating system do YOU use?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Transistors involve movement but they're able to move billions of times--per second--for 24 hour days, 365 days a year, with no problems. I don't necessarily understand how this new screen technology works exactly, but tiny movement over a very small scale seems to be a prevalent concept when it comes to computing.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Sure, most of the image onscreen remains unchanged for business-class users, but the entire screen changes on a very rapid basis with any of today's 3D games. I would really like to see how this technology stacks up against LCDs and CRTs when it comes to image clarity in a game.
LCDs are currently unsuitable for high-speed 3D gaming because of the delays in lighting and un-lighting a pixel, and CRTs are the best because turning a pixel on and off involves literally no delay. Where does this new tech lie when compared to LCDs and CRTs, I wonder? Between the two, or more to one side? I long for the day when a laptop is all I need to take to a LANparty.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
They're actually not just spouting BS. The method used by iridigm displays to show colors actually is the same method used in things like butterfly wings, peacock feathers, and hummingbird feathers to achieve the iridescent look they have. It's a brilliant (no pun intended) idea. THIS is why we have a patent system. Now that iridigm has had the idea and spent the R&D money, they can support themselves for quite a while on the royalties, while everyone else gets their cool technology to use. At least that's how it should work.
My math is fine. You're just assuming that all sub-pixels differ exponentially in intensity. : )
Their technology preview shows HOMOGENIOUS sub-pixels which would indeed require that you have 256 sub-pixels to generate 256 levels. That's because they all have the same SIGNIFICANCE. If 50% are on, it doesn't matter which particular ones. The final perceived intensity is strictly calculated as on_elements / total_elements.
To have an effect where you could get 2^elements intensity levels as you're expecting, you'd have to have elements that were different sizes (1 unit, 2 units, 4 units, etc,) to give binary SIGNIFICANCE to your sub-pixels, but if you did that, your driver currents, would vary based on that. Layout would probably be a recursive design 16x16 units. The size ratio between the most significant element and the least significant one for a 24 bit display would be 128 times.
Now, if you add up the area of all those different size sub pixels, guess how many units you have? (1 unit + 2 units + 4 units + ... + 128 units) Well, what do you know! You get 255 units. The fact that you could turn them on/off in groups with only 8 bits of information should be obvious, but then the circuitry required to decode/drive these groups is another issue.
So, to clarify... YES, you can get the 256 intensity levels from 8 sub-pixels, but they'd have to be exponentially NON-HOMOGENIOUS. The way their technology is presented on their web site and the total lack of information about intensity control makes be doubt they've come up with such a design. But I could be wrong of course. :)
>> What do you see when the driver crashes?
The paramedics, I hope... %^P
I was inspired enough by the news of this new display technology so as to Google related information.
I encourage fellow Slashdotters to browse these two EE Times articles.
Both articles are very informative.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/97/941news/mems.html
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000717S0071
--MFInc
BEEF.com
Tobacco.comActually, although it may sound like BS, it seems like the R&D team is the one that may have ingested bodacious plants. Whatever works to spark creativity, technical or otherwise.
The movement in transistors is electrons, not atoms or molecules. So it's not a valid comparison.
Hmmm, How will it work in the dark being based on light reflection? Does it need a minimum amount of light?
Frankly, it all depends.
This sounds too good to be true. Lower power consumption, no blurs or trails with graphic frame rates, brighter colors, sharper images, thinner/smaller form factor, low radiation.
It also does your taxes, makes julian fries, and lowers your cholestoral! Never needs sharpening!!
okay, but that brings up the question.... what about PC-133 & DDRAM
According to the web site, the red, green, and
blue pixels differ in size of the gap between the two layers, when the pixel is in the non-black, or "on" state. I wonder if, rather than fabricating pixels that pop open to a fixed gap size in the "on" state, instead, the gap size could be "streched" by the bias voltage to control the color in the on state. This way,
any pixel could appear to be any color in the on
state. Not only would this increase the resolution or reduce the number of pixels needed, but it might increase the gamut of the monitor, since any frequency of light could be represented by varying the gap size.
Aside from the difficulties of fabricating a stretchy pixel, another drawback of my suggestion is that it would presumably require a lot more power to hold a gap stretched open, rather than having it be bistable, which they make a big deal about on the website.
On a separate topic, I would guess that for handheld devices, a certain degree of control over the intensity of a pixel could be acheived by flashing the pixel rapidly.
Transistor-based SRAM retains its state, capacitor-based DRAM loses its state unless you refresh it constantly.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Since these are DIGITAL subpixels, for 24 bit color, you'd need 256 sub-pixels just for the 'red' to mimic the 256 intensity levels per gun
indeed. on the other hand, most colour printing processes only have 1-bit colour depth; but at 720 DPI dithering can look very good -- and apparently they can pack these elements as densely as 1000 DPI, so a dithered display might work well. also, they might have the option of using pulse width modulation (blinking the display elements on and off very rapidly to get halftones).
the long and short is that although the digital nature of the display elements is a limitation, it probably isn't a killer given a little time and ingenuity.
what I'd like to know is, how do they get those lovely paper white images?
if the pixels switch between "colour" and "black", a straight red-green-blue display should never be able to achieve full-intensity paper white if the display is purely reflective.
(in fact, I thought the only way to get full gamut in a reflective display was to use 3 transmissive layers and do subtractive mixing -- can someone correct me if I'm wrong?)
since they're advertising paper white displays, I'm really curious what other tricks they've got that aren't described in the promotional material.
for what it's worth, a hi-res, highly reflective, thin, low power black-and-white display would be a dream come true for my PDA, even if there was no way to extend it to full colour.
Thanks for the suggestions. I hadn't thought of variable duty cycle as a means of intensity control, Althought it does make things worse bandwidth wise. I also agree that this technology shouldn't be capable of producing paper-white images. At most it could do 30% reflectivity in my estimate.
That was Bush Sr, not Jr. Not that it makes it any less appalling..
With this technology, I can get any color I want by varying the plate distance continuously! I can also get (visible) black by varying the plate distance to one extreme or the other. So the red-green-blue thing is a trichromatic herring: to get a given intensity of a given hue, I can just dither between pixels of that hue and black pixels. This doesn't require many bits. For pastels, I need four pixels to dither with, but they don't have to be rgb: I can play with colors that combine in the right proportion against the human eye response curve.
Better yet, humans don't distinguish colors that are very light or very dark pastel very well, so a lot of my dither space can be effectively fudged.
The upshot of all this? I can get a lot higher effective bpp by dithering with this thing than I can from dithering with a fixed RGB color palette, and that means that I can use fewer bits of dither per pixel to get a wide range of colors. In principle.
... I guess you get to see lots of broken glass, bent metal and loose tires... and you might actually get to see God :)
Cool. So now in addition to FlashRAM, we also have FlUshRAM! Yeehaw!
Where's my data? Sorry dude, I courtesy flushed.
The is technology uses a phosphor-based inorganic electroluminescent process to create a bright, crisp image that uses less power than any display tech on the market. Check it out at http://www.ifire.com
What's wrong with "IMD"? It's a proper acronym, and doesn't look like 90's ELiTE h4xx0r scr1p7 in print:
iT hAs SaNe CaPiTaLiZaTiOn.
And it fits right in these with LCD, CRT, VGA, CPU, AGP, PCI, ISA, AXP, USB, and all those other fun unpronouncible 3-letter acronyms.
If one must abbreviate instead of acronymalize, at least "IMoD" would presents consistant case.
Kid-proof tablet..
Light reflects off two surfaces, one just beneath the other. If the distance between the surfaces is such that the reflected light waves are perfectly out of phase, the waves will cancel eachother out, making it look like the surface actually absorbs that frequency range, producing color. That means that the distance the light travels between the plates is absolutely crucial in producing the right color. That's why butterfly wings shimmer. Your eyes are each viewing the wing at a different angle, each seeing a different color.
When light hits the plates striaght on, the light travels a certain distace between the plates. But when light hits at an angle, it travels slightly farther, depending on the angle. So, for example, instead of being out of phase at 600nm, light at 620nm will be out of phase, making a different color appear if you look at a different angle.
So unless I missed something, what we'll end up with is a display that "shimmers" like a butterfly wing. The hue of the display will shift when the screen is angled. That means that the effective viewable angle will suck a lot more than it does for LCDs, and it will be almost impossible to be perfectly sure what color you're looking at (particularly important for desktop publishing).
Perhaps someone who knows more about physics can explain how they intend to make this actually work. For now, though, I'm going to wait till I see a working prototype before I sell the farm to invest in their product.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
but the cool this is that the display actually works like RAM (it retains its state until voltage is applied to reset it)
:-)
So it works like RAM, except for the way it works.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
doing your homework.
look according to them, the screen does not use power when a pixel does not change.
coupled with that it is flat.
well how about instant wallpaper for your house which you can clean with a hos
(if they made it out of polymer i suppose)
but seriously folks, in a large screen or synchronised pannel formation this could mean big money to some creep for billboards,( dont have to pay that bloke to change the damn things any more, just one touch of a button and wow . nu billboard.)
there are uses for this thing i just suspect that i am too poor to ever touch one much less own one and use it
btw. thats even if they get it into production,
there is no product avalible, and it seems that no group is producing the technology according to their website.
this is despite the 20 millino or so invested by a gigantic array of wealthy investor types,(intel etal)
ok correct any errors are belong to us.
What, were you asleep when we went over that? A single subpixel can only be a pure hue or black. Right now that subpixel is limited to a single hue, on or off. Maybe - maybe - some day a single subpixel can vary its hue by varying the gap, but there'll still be no way to vary its intensity. You have one axis of variation (the gap); varying both hue and intensity would require two axes.
Do the math. I just did, and another poster did, and we both came to the exact same conclusion, and yes it does require a lot of bits if you're dithering between pure hues and black. If you could vary a subpixel's hue and you were willing to display only darker shades but not lighter, you could make do with a lot fewer pixels, but that's simply not going to be satisfactory for general use.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
on a tangent though, if the iMoD display retains state with the power off, why not use it as nonvolatile memory?
To a human it looks like it's displaying snow... but to a high res camera (or some hardware that can read the pixel's state without resetting them) that's actually some of the the data in your hard drive.
I remember that flash harddrives are said to only have a million or so read write cycles, even with wear leveling. since the marketing flacks say that the iMoD can survive years of rapid pixel flicking, using a derivative of its technology for semi-optical or electrostatic harddrives might be a better option.
you seem to have your terms mixed... the previous poster (before you) was comparing SD to DDR, not S to D. There is a very large difference here.
Real S RAM has no transistors, therefore making it much faster than traditional types of RAM because there are no gateways to slow it down. Be sure not to confuse this with the so-called "1T-S RAM" in Nintendo's GameCube, as it works like S RAM with the speed and all but has 1 transistor in it. They did this so the voltage wasn't on a constant leak, like in real S RAM, therefore requiring less power and generating less heat (you can run a GameCube inside a pile of clothes for a few hours and it still won't be as hot as the original NES was, don't even get me started on what kind of fire the XBox will start under those conditions).
Both SD and DDR are filled with transistors to retain the data, and are slower due to this (DDR has less transistors, though). Remember that SD stands for Synchronous Data and DDR stands for Double Data Rate. DDR is simply a faster version of SD.
Your comparison of SD and DDR is pretty much acurate, just using the wrong terms.
I am responding here at the top level instead of in response to one of the comments, because many threads commented on this.
/. regarding its possible use with VR.
/. apply to both versions.
There seems to be some big misunderstandings. I was investigating OLEDs (for myself a few years ago while working at Intel), and even posted some comments on
There was a comment regarding OLEDs taking more power because they are not passive. That is not true. There are active AND passive OLEDs -- it just depends on where you get them (XEROX, KODAK, Cambridge, eMagin, et al). There are many different technologies that are all being help under the same umbrella. Passive OLEDs would have all of the benefits people claim this would have over OLED.
From what I remember, passive OLEDs were being used in JC Pennys for signs. I don't remember whether Pioneer car stereos were using active or passive, but I would guess active.
Generally, I think active displays would be more likely to be mass-marketed, because they can use normal LCD drivers. However, passive OLEDs do not require ANY refresh when idle. They keep their image until power is supplied to change the image. If I remember right, it had to do with polarization from the spray-on transistors.
The reason they are not extremely popular right now is that the current LCD and CRT manufacturers have a vested interest in the status quo. Until OLEDs are mass-produced, they will cost more. In the long run however, they are cheaper, easier, and faster to make using an ink-jet type of technology.
As far as resolution... I have not looked around in about a year, but eMagin had an expensive 1024x768 full-color OLED monitor at 2". Though small, 2 of them would be nice for VR headset, eh?
So, the moral of the story is this... If you are going to let all comments from an emerging technology be taken at face value, at least find out what DIFFERENT versions exists (ie: active or passive OLED). None of the comments against OLEDs here on
Malachi
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
You can produce 256 shades of a color with just 8 "digital" subpixels, by having 8 subpixels of size 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128. A subpixel of size n is n times as bright as a subpixel of size 1. To produce a lightness of 69 (max=255), for example, you switch on subpixels 1, 4, and 64.
Also, you can produce shades with only 1 digital pixel, by turning it on and off and on and off, etc., and controlling the on-off time ratios. For example, to produce a 69 lightness, you can turning it on for 69 microseconds and off for 255-69=186 microseconds. But this constant switching of states probably consumes a lot of energy.
I picture 250Mhz DDR sram (as used as PowerMac L3 cache)
half a gig of that stuff... damn
Not very portable compared to the book-sized SIMM-eating wonders of today, but potentially very bright and certainly a damn sight cheaper. Advertisers would love it; now you can afford to have your logo take up the entire side of your building, at least at night.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"Light travels as waves, right? When two waves cross or meet at the same place, interference occurs. The interference can create light or dark spots if the light is monochromatic. If there are different wavelengths (==colors) involved the light and dark spots may be different colors depending one which waves interfered in what way at a particular point. This must be the idea they are basing their display on."
I dont know why you were modded as troll. You have a good question. The answer is simple, though. The interference happens just nanometers away from the light source. Once the interfered-with light travels just a few more nanometers, I believe it must his a "projection screen". True enough, if the light just travelled out, it would not make an image until it hit something. Looking at the device without some sort of screen would be about as useful as looking into a movie projector.
>I believe it must his a "projection screen".
Oops. Of course, I meant to say "must hit"
With a CRT running at a refresh rate of 72Hz, no matter how many frames your video card can draw per second, you're only going to see 72 frames per second; having a video card that can draw 90 frames a second on the simple scenes only means that you can lose 18 fps due to scene complexity before you see any frame rate loss. With an iMoD display, if your video card can render 90 frames per second, you would be able to see all of them. On the other hand, since the display updates would be matched to the video card's frame rate, degradation of your frame rate due to scene complexity would be immediately visible (subject to the response of the human eye).
Say your video card can normally do 150 fps, but complex scenes slow it down to 40 fps. And one of these iMoD displays faithfully renders these frame rate (unlike a CRT). I doubt that the human eye could perceive this 110 fps slowdown.
I base this on the fact that NTSC television runs at only 30 fps, and nobody complains that NTSC video is too "jerky." I suspect you get fast-diminishing returns when you raise the frame rate above 30.
Does anybody want to take issue with me and claim that they could tell the difference between 40 and 150 fps?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Keep in mind that even a 1600x1200x24bit display is only holding 5.5MB raw.
While the physical media remains in one state under a low-power mode, I highly doubt that much effort has been put towards reading the state of the physical media.
Interesting, though, that this technology could very easily be scaled to a much deeper bpp range. Say 16 bits per color, and you're now sporting 11MB raw.
But face it; do you really want someone to be able to walk up and photograph your 5.5MB of your data?
Though you might be able to store some data in the least significant bits, though. Say you have 16 bits per color; You can get 8 bits per color quality even if you dedicate the lower 8 bits to data storage.
I'd be interested to see some links on the flash data, though.
What's this Submit thingy do?
These are also called "DLPs" for digital-light projectors.
:D
I hate to be anal... oh, wait, no I don't.
DLP stands for "digital light processor". We're using these in our new HP projectors; which, incidentally, kick a$$!
Now, it we had this sort of thing: ...you'd have a lot of dead people at intersections, and traffic jams you
yield -a for yield to all traffic
yield -t for yield to trucks
yield -f for yield to people walking (yield foot)
yield -d t* for yield on days starting with t
wouldn't believe...
-- Discussion on the intuitiveness of commands
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