Slashdot Mirror
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'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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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
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)
I think this really depends on how much more/less power is needed to change the pixels compared to how much power it takes to display a pixel with other technologies. As for sticking with your CRT for now... it's not like you can go out and buy an iMoD display today... so I'm with ya there ;)
Maybe once a third-party actually does a real comparison between the varying screen technologies, we can make an informed decision about the future of iMoD in the marketplace. Once again, PR's rule the day...
All Your Memory Are Belong To Java
They are refering to the fact that with DRAM, once the bit has been set, you do not have to keep rewriting the actual value to that address every x seconds, you must merely reapply a smaller amount of voltage(in comparison to actually setting a value) every x (nano? mili?) seconds to keep the value in place.
This is why it is possible to have motherboards that support STR - Suspend to RAM, wherein the system shuts off, but all data is still in memory because a very low voltage is used to refresh the values. Its kinda cool, cause when I turn my PC on, right after the BIOS is finished posting and the hard disk is spun up, I am instantly in windows, with any programs up that I left running when I turned the PC off. If I turned the PC off mid-song, that song will instantly continue playing right where it left off. Maybe I'm just easily impressed.
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
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?
er...
dere's around 100 cells per pixel, so you night get significantly more than 8 colours...
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
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
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.
Hook it up to a cellular network and they can download new ads into it....or even better, the states could have an emergency warning/traffic system to take over the billboards when needed...endless possibilities.
//m
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.
LCDs don't produce their own light either. They need backlights. Since these new screens are *much* more reflective than existing LCD screens, they have a reduced need for illumination anyway.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
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