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Digital Ink On Billboards
cdneng2 writes "The New York Times has this article on
a revolutionary new billboard. It uses digital ink, versus the typical CRT,
LCD, Neon, or Plasma displays that are so prominent on the newer billboards that
wastes electricity. From the article: 'By creating a paste made of tiny helix-shaped particles that can be minutely manipulated with electric charges to
reflect light in highly specific ways, Magink
can produce surfaces that look like paper but behave like electronic screens,
rendering high-resolution, full-color images without ink - or, as Magink
executives like to refer to the process, with digital ink.' The billboard
can display images at 70 frames per second." You can find more articles on the billboard technology on the Magink website.
Print quality image
Combining 5mm pixel pitch, an RGB color model with 4096 colors, and a superior contrast ratio of 14:1, magink digital ink technology achieves an extremely natural look that very much resembles the look of printed images on paper.
Compatibility to outdoor lighting environment
magink's digital ink display billboard is reflective of incident light and requires no integrated illumination. Light that falls on the display from either the sun or external light sources is actually beneficial to the visibility of the image. A beautiful image is maintainable under the full range of daylight conditions.
Low energy consumption
magink display does not require any power to maintain an image: the image is held under power-off conditions. Only when replacing one image with another does the display require punctual application of power in order to set the new image.
Since energy is needed only for refreshing the image and since magink's digital ink reflective display does not require back lighting, power consumption is low yielding less energy consumption, less heat dissipation and a longer mean time between failure (MTBF).
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Sorry to burst your bubble but its been like this for sometime now.
Your Message Here, in a Flash
By MICHEL MARRIOTT
IN an industrial building on the Jersey City waterfront, workers busily printed supersize images for building facades and billboards intended to paper even the most casual viewer with brand awareness. Suspended near the rafters were full-color images of the youth tribes of Gap and giant emblems of National Basketball Association teams; on a far wall a portrait of a Seagram's vodka bottle hung two stories high.
In another corner, near the executive offices of Nomad Worldwide - one of the world's biggest large-format printers of the images that adorn billboards and those vinyl advertisements that wrap around entire buildings - was a different kind of ad, one that Keyvan Ebrahimi, the company's general manager, said might well represent the future of his industry.
"I think it's revolutionary," he said. "It certainly can replace billboards."
Standing on four metal legs, under two banks of fluorescent lights, was what appeared to be a modest-size billboard, measuring about 9 feet wide by 4 feet in height. Across its face, which looks like paper under glass, was a full-color advertisement for a soft drink maker. A few moments later the ad disappeared and was digitally replaced with a different one, and then another, like a screensaver cycling through images on a laptop computer screen.
But the surface of this billboard is not a liquid crystal diode screen - the energy-hungry display common to laptops and increasingly to cellphones, digital cameras, digital organizers and flat-screen computer monitors and television sets. Neither does this billboard share the light-emitting-diode technology that makes million-dollar-plus video screens light up the night in Times Square, Las Vegas and sports arenas around the world.
What makes the electronic billboard in Jersey City possible (and those installed for trials in London, Tokyo, Toronto and Panama City, among other locations) is an innovation by a New York-based display technology company whose name, Magink, is a combination of the words magic and ink. Its approach to imaging departs from the way most text, graphics and images are electronically presented, including the way expensive plasma screens work, as well as cathode-ray tubes, the old workhorses still found in most television sets and desktop computer monitors.
By creating a paste made of tiny helix-shaped particles that can be minutely manipulated with electric charges to reflect light in highly specific ways, Magink can produce surfaces that look like paper but behave like electronic screens, rendering high-resolution, full-color images without ink - or, as Magink executives like to refer to the process, with digital ink.
Ran Poliakine, chief executive of Magink, said the idea was to create visually compelling ads that could be replaced frequently - perhaps hourly, based on consumer response - and could be controlled remotely, all with far less energy and at a far lower cost than a video billboard.
Mr. Poliakine said Magink, which has research operations in England and Israel, was the first company to bring full-color digital ink displays to the marketplace. And soon, he said, its creation will begin competing more directly with traditional billboards in the $19 billion worldwide outdoor-advertising market. Nomad Worldwide, at its Jersey City plant, is among those evaluating the technology's potential.
"The last revolution was computer printing, and we believe the next revolution is digital ink on billboards," Mr. Poliakine said, comparing his company's advances to the first digital printing of billboard images more than a decade ago. Now, he added, his three-year-old company is also studying ways to expand the application of its core technology to personal electronics, including cellular telephones, cameras, hand-held computers and general video displays for laptops and televisions.
Magink prototype screens are capable of displaying video images at more than 70 frames a second, twice th
10-bit color (4096 colors)
10 bit equals 1024 colors
12 bit equals 4096 colors
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
>> Would it work as a large TV monitor? The frame rate is up to 70/sec, so the question, again, is resolution.
This link mentions resolutions in the range 120-150 dpi, but AFAIR one of the first EInk demo screens had about 300 dpi resolution (as a laser printer)
Whitepaper mentions approx. 2 second refresh rate. That's a loooooong way from 70 fps. Sounds like some person in the marketing department had a little too much faith in their product.
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
response time is different from refresh, i'll explain. If you take a normal LCD they usually have a 60Hz refresh and say 25-30ms response. What this means is that the LCD can show 60 different frams every second. However, the response time measures how long it takes for the LCD to change frames, the longer the time the longer the last image that was on the LCD is displayed, so if you have a high response time (25ms is considered normal but not good) then you will get "streaking" effects, where the previous frames overlap with the new frames. This can cause a horrible image and is very noticeable when the frames are very different e.g. fast motion graphics (films, games). Newer LCDs report a 16ms response, which makes streaking almost invisible in most cases. So you see, this is why I wanted to know what the response of the ink is.
Also you may be wondering about TVs and their response time, T.Vs and Monitors (CRT) don't have a response time (or more to the point its the same as the refresh) because on a CRT screen the previous frame is not remembered as the "pixels" on a CRT so to speak, need to be constatly energised to display anything, so the second that the cathode ray stops hitting the phosphor the image dissapears, thus no reponse time.
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
Yes, you can shine a flashlight through paper from behind. But the losses are horrendous - I woudl ahve though >95%. Consider how close you have to bring the flashlight to see the picture from behind, vs how far away you can take the same flashlight if you are shining from the front. You woudl be much better spending your energy shining a light from the front - and a floodlight is probably much cheaper than an equivalent area of computer backlight.
Horses for courses - if you really want an emissive display, go for the current technologies of LCD or plama. This is something difffernt and, potentially, better. I took my laptop into the garden yesterday - and had great difficulty reading it because of sunlight. This would get easier to read with more light.
Humans are creatures of light; emissive displays are creatures of dark. Putting the two together requires compromises: avoid directt light sources, fear reflections. Turn the light down and your screen becomes more readable but fine print documentation becomes less readable. Turn lhe light up and the screen washes out as the fine print comes into focus. With absorbtive displays, the two become visible together. And reduced power consumption has got to be good. This might make e-books worth having. Battery life greatly increased, because power only consumed when you move the page (system can completely power down between button pushes), readable in a bright light.
Remember LED watches, as mocked in Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy? LCDs (non-lit) wiped those out almost overnight, because using power for a continuous, slowly changing display is ridiculous.
Don't expect new displays to be identical to old - evaluate and exploit their differences. If you analyse them, both CRTs and LCDs are rotten displays - but they are the best we have got, so we use them everywhere. Sometime soon someone is going to come out with a good absorbtive display - maybe this one, maybe another - and that will spread like wildfire.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
It is made from two pannels with particals between them.
This is essentially the paper.
The particals are coloured Red/Green/Blue on one side and Black on the other.
A static charge can cause a partical to rotate in it's position between the layers and show for instance either red or black.
Now just think of these as pixels and you get the idea.
If you get modded down for a first post... What do you get for a last post?
See Don't Touch that Radio Button, You're on Billboard Detection for a freely accessible version of this story. It sounds like the system can detect leakage from car radio antennas, although some people are skeptical of its accuracy.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
What I think you meant to say was that the response time of a CRT is much smaller than the response time of an LCD.
The way a CRT works is that the electron beam hits the phosphorous (that doesn't actually contain any phosporous) which is excited and emits the desired component of light for some time after having been energized.
So there's a definite response time, there has to be otherwise you'd see a very flickery screen, and it's actually shorter than the time to next refresh. If we had faster eyes we'd see it, and with suitable detectors you can actually recover the CRT image (pdf) from the diffuse reflection (TV glow), since the phosphoruous doesn't glow nearly long enough to smear the picture in the time domain. (Cool bit of research that).
Stefan Axelsson
they actually run short, animated commercials outside the holand tunnel entrance (coming from the east side) in new york. luckily for the advertiser, there's usually enough traffic that a viewer can actually see the whole thing.