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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?"
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.
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...
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
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.
The distance we are talking here is nanometers. How long does it take to move something that far?
Besides your logic is flawed. What happens if you put the rest state in the middle of the spectrum, say green? Then it has to move an equal distance to get to blue or red.
However if you go from red to blue or blue to red, this would be the transition with the greatest delay. But again we are talking nanometers, how great can the delay be?
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
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
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.
Have you tried "rubbing it out"? Sometimes pixels aren't totally dead, just "stuck". I have had this happen a couple of times on my LCD.
You can press hard, but not too hard and massage the area where the stuck pixel is, and sometimes it will become "unstuck" and start working.
Might be worth a try...
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
The distance moved is going to be on the order of the wavelength of light - 100 nanometers or so. In fact, this slide pretty much says so - less than a micron.
But what does that say about time ? I don't think there is a real concern. As long as one of these babies can flip in less than 10 milliseconds (and it surely can), there will be no issue wrt speed. In fact, it can very likely be a LOT LOT faster than a CRT, because you merely need to change voltages on transistors, whereas a CRT has a scanning beam that has to traverse the whole screen.
The other thing I found REALLY interesting is that such a display could be run native in a HSB (hue-saturation-brightness) mode. Instead of three colors, each pixel could be ANY hue, since you only have to change a voltage to a new value to change the color. Way cool (they are planning initially for full RGB compat). But in the future it could be a new sort of color scheme entirely.
Of course, it's all vaporware until there are production models.
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.
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.
Iridigm's displays, on the other hand, are reflective -- that is, not emitting (or generating) their own light. That's why they can claim zero power for a static display.
pretty cool for a framed picture of grandkids that gets updated once a week, I'd say!
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...
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.