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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?"
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
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?
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
You do in most FPS games- modern games have a lot of grayscale and textures, dynamic lighting etc. Therefore if you turn even a tiny bit, practically every pixel needs to change, or potentially can do anyway.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.