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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'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....
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.
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.
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
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.
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