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New Display Technology to Compete with LCDs?

Posted by michael on from the unwelcome-comparisons-to-iridium dept.

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?"

2 of 368 comments (clear)

  1. Temperature Insensitivity? by theduck · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    --
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  2. Re:Bad for games by blakestah · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.