LCD Screens Almost Paper-thin

DarklordSatin writes "Nature.com has an article up about new LCDs that are thin enough to roll up and can display black and white at 96 dpi. More coverage by Wired and Scientific American. Thanks go to Arstechnica for the heads up." Wow. Let the speculation for new uses begin! Update: 05/10 14:59 GMT by CN : Whoops, this is really a dupe of an older story that slipped through because I only searched for LCDs. Ah well, it's still cool.

Comments

Cool

[Hadur]

Not a flame here, but I would rther see the price of LCD screens go down than their size.

Re:Cool

[Chicane-UK]

Agreed..

I work in a job as a Computer Technician, and people keep saying to me they really want to get an LCD screen 'because it looks cool' - fair enough I suppose, but why pay for a 17" mid range LCD screen over a 21" Natural Flat top of the line CRT monitor? Ok, it saves on some desk space..

Its a no brainer for me.. i'd still put my money on CRT every time.

Re:Cool

[Squareball]

Well with advancments like this, the price will go down. One day LCDs will be paper thin high resolution color that are like $20.

As to uses.. well thank god that I won't have to have all the pr0n mags laying around any more! ;) Soon we'll just subscribe and it'll be accessed on our paper thin LCDs! w00t ;)

Re:Cool

[Eevee]

Funny. I have people asking for flat panals because they want their desks back. That 'desk space' it saves is important because we don't get much of it.

In a large organization, you often have more control over what computer equipment you buy than you do over how the office space is arranged. In a cube farm, a 21" monitor often takes up too much space--particularly if management has never heard of ergonomics so you're forced to balance the keyboard on the little strip of desk right in front of the monitor.

Re:Cool

[geeber]

Advancements like this won't help LCDs at all. E-ink NOT an LCD. LCD stands for liquid crystal display. This has nothing to do with liquid crystals; it works by rotating small particles with light and dark colored sides.

Uses

[darkov]

At a refresh rate of 4Hz, it's not much use as a monitor, I think they currently use this stuff for signage displays and the like. It might be useful for a e-book sort of thing, where it's unlikely you'll be reading faster than four pages a second.

The big question is how much does it cost and how durable/stable is it?

Obvious...?

[m00nun1t]

"Let the speculation for new uses begin!"

Isn't the first use for every new technology a new way of accessing, displaying or making pr0n?

Is it just me?

[alwsn]

Maybe it's just me, but I've been visiting slashdot for 3+ years now, and I keep seeing articles about new, paper thing, cheap displays that will revolutionize everything, and really small, cheap, huge(storage capacity), solid state storage devices.

I look forward to new stuff as much as anyone, but in those 3 years, hard drive storage and monitors keep making slower (in comparison to what is mentioned in articles such as these), but steady process.

I no longer trust articles saying 'everything will be different in a year.' From my experience, it won't be different and revolutionary, it will just be slightly better.

Re:Is it just me?

[roseblood]

Funny didn't I see a story
recently about how hard drives
where leaving CPUs in dust when it comes to capacity/price ratios?

Cheap enough to use as?

[unfortunateson]

The two goals, which in my mind are separate directions, are speed and independence from wires.

If I can 'print' an e-book, I don't care about refresh rate. But is a 300-page e-paperback cheaper than buying, say 50 paperbacks? 20 paperbacks? Or is it silly to even think of having 300 pages of this stuff, and I'd just 'leaf' through pages like I do on my PDA currently? Maybe I'm old, but I still like the page-flipping aspect of books, especially if I want to flip back to find when a character that just stepped out of the wings first showed up.

If this stuff is as durable, and as cheap, power-friendly and fast as LCDs, I'd be happy to drop a fair chunk of my PDA's weight. Cell-phone screens sound like another perfect application.

Now for the more far-out stuff:
How about rewritable MTG cards?
Medical 'patches' that tell you when they need replacing, or can monitor glucose or other body functions.
Devices when you need to measure bend

Re:Cheap enough to use as?

[Hanji]

I still like the page-flipping aspect of books, especially if I want to flip back to find when a character that just stepped out of the wings first showed up.
I think that's a really good point. Getting a good, intuitive, interface is going to be really important to getting e-books adopted, IMO. With a paperback, you can mark a page with a finger, and flip back to find something earlier. If you have an idea of where something was earlier in the book, you can flip through and find it pretty quickly, just by reading little snippets of pages to figure out where you are in the story. E-books are going to need some kind of nice, easy-to-understand-and-learn interface that offers equivalent functionality if e-books are ever to become common.

Interesting

[A Proud American]

From Webopedia.com:

LCD displays utilize two sheets of polarizing material with a liquid crystal solution between them. An electric current passed through the liquid causes the crystals to align so that light cannot pass through them. Each crystal, therefore, is like a shutter, either allowing light to pass through or blocking the light.

So, how will this end up affecting LCD technologies as screens get increasingly thin, increasingly more mass-produced, and forced to endure more wear-and-tear as a part of being on everyday devices now (even kids' toys)?

Folding, bending.

[j1mmy]

The point of these displays (as stated in the article) is to create a one-page newspaper. They can currently roll it up pretty well, but it can't be folded. What I want to know is why you would fold it.

If it's a one-page newspaper, you've only got one page. It can be the size of an 8.5x11 piece of paper. It's an entirely different presentation medium and they're still thinking in terms of traditional papers. The biggest failure of the traditional newspaper (as an interface) is that you have to do all the folding and whatnot. Most papers can't be held with one hand without folding them up a bit. It's a hassle, plain and simple.

If you've got one sheet of electronic paper, of a reasonable size, you can hold it in one hand and just read it.

I can see how folding would be useful for storing the paper, but I don't see that as a critical issue.

Re:Folding, bending.

[Unregistered]

i would hate this if it couldn't be forlded. it' would be too easy to break. what if someone sits on the roll, or bumps in to it. I think it's more of a durability thing. would you want to carry something that fragile on the subway?

Re:Sorry, slashdot editors are total fu*king idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

"I've HAD IT."

Then leave. Seriously. Understand the fact that the reason there may be a lack of "journalistic integrity", as you call it, is because they aren't journalists. Relaying news does not make you a journalist just as telling you what the weather is like doesn't make you a meterologist.

Besides, I don't think you've "HAD IT". The fact that you responded to your post because of some moderation proves that not only have you not "HAD IT", but you stick around and reload over-and-over again just to see if your comments get responded to or moderated. Get a fucking life. Sitting here and pointing out mistakes, as they are bound to appear on this site, no matter who the editors are, is useless.

Re:But you were paper thin...

[Blaine Hilton]

Now they are going to start considering books weapons and banning them from planes.

--
Have something to calculate?

Re:Sorry, slashdot editors are total fu*king idiot

[MikeFM]

If you can do better then go forth and do so and make yourself some cash and get a little fame. If not then get over it. You don't have to pay to read - if you want to bitch then subscribe.

Paper thin LCDs

[Overly Critical Guy]

Paper thin LCDs?

Oh, that's right; you didn't read the article. And everyone making their lame LCD jokes didn't either. A quick glance at the article will reveal to you Slashbots that it's not LCD.

Okay, so it was a dupe and the editor points it out. But did he even read the article? The headline is completely wrong. Slashdot has been quite bad this year.

I'll either be ignored, modded down, or the self-righteous Slashbot defenders will jump on me, declaring it a-okay for Slashdot to post incorrect headlines and misleading summaries because I can go somewhere else. Most of those people are actually subscribers attempting to justify their payment of money to these people.

Next.

First, laptop screens

[Otto-matic]

Before we postulate on the sci-fi products that will be available in a decade, why not implement this technology into current portable units? A laptop computer with a screen that actually folds out or extends horizontally when the lid is opened would make for great, expansive portable computing. It seems this is imminently more immediate than a producing auto-updating newspapers and the like. Imagine a 12-inch Powerbook G4 with a wide-screen cinema display based on this paper-thin technology. I understand that this requires waiting for a 24-bit version of this 2-bit display, but i think it's worth considering. I wonder what would be the possibility of making this technology interactive? Developing a touch screen version of the same display would open up a world of possibilities. I also seem to remember a fantastic implementation of similar tech in the movie "Red Planet." The computers, voice and touch activated were built like scrolls. The screen was retractable from within a small cylinder. I know we all agree that the possibilities are seemingly endless... Wow. Otto