New LCD Flatscreen Concept: A Wedge of Plastic

SimianOverlord writes "The Register reports on an innovation in the field of flat panel LCD screens that promises cheaper screens with the same quality using existing manufacturing technology. A Flat Projection Display is created by bouncing light into a thin wedge of plastic from the bottom of the screen, at just the correct angle to allow the rebounded light to escape at the correct pixel. "We have to play around with the image to make sure that the pixels don't bunch up" explained Prof. Travis, the inventor. "If you don't do that the image can appear a little like an image reflected off water" The new technology has already attracted interest from a major TV maker, but don't expect them in your laptop until projector minaturization catches up."

Comments

HUD / glasses

[old_unicorn]

I wonder if this could work with HUD or for display injection into a pair of glasses? That would be neat - to have the image in your glasses / windscreen!

Re:HUD / glasses

[JamesD_UK]

Don't expect them in your laptop until projector minaturization catches up.

The display still requires a traditional projector to transmit the image through the display. I suppose that having two projectors attached to your glasses may induce a small amounts of neck strain.

Re:HUD / glasses

[DarkMantle]

But those bulbs will keep you warm during the winter time. Here in Canada that idea just may sell.

Re:HUD / glasses

[Archibald Buttle]

The display requires a projector, but it doesn't have to be "traditional". You just need to use a little imagination...

Lasers can be built onto a chip, so why not build a laser-based projection device and use optical fibers to route the light to the screen?

First stage of this though would be to build a laser-based projector to couple with this technology for laptop displays.

Slippery pixels

[welshwaterloo]

"We have to play around with the image to make sure that the pixels don't bunch up"

Anyone else picturing all their pixels sliding down to the corner of the screen in a pink mess..?

TV Windows?

[Blue_Nile]

Eventually then you'd be able to put these at the bottom of you window to use it as a tv then?

official site:

[yruf]

The video on their website is crap. Don't try it...

Re:official site:

[Chundra]

However, the pdf has some nice pictures and a more details of how it works.

Re:official site:

[NanoGator]

"Looks like they still have some work to do. The picture looks fairly washed out."

To be fair, projected images don't photograph well.

Re:official site:

[NanoGator]

Sorry to reply to my own post, but I thought I'd elaborate a little bit. I used to work for a company that sold a computer system along with some equipment they built. We hired a professional photographer come in and shoot photos of it in operation. He actually did a double exposure to make the LCD stand out more clearly. Took one shot with all the lights on, LCD off. Then he turned out the lights, turned the LCD on, and exposed the film again. Nice result. :)

If I had a dime...

[OpenSourced]

If I had a dime for every new display technology (or other kind of cool technologies) that gets in the papers, I could go to the same clubs of Warren Buffet. But if I had it for the technologies that actually reach me as a consumer, I could barely buy a film ticket, depending on city.

I don't know exactly why it is but it's a fact. I'm thinking of making a list. It may make for funny reading ten years from now.

another term might be handy...

[ecalkin]

You might call this a prism. The concept of bouncing light off of the inside edge of a prism is what happens in the pentaprism mirror inside a slr camera.

The big advantage that I can see with this is that a reasonable quality plastic wedge/prism should be much cheaper to replace when it gets damaged. I'm sure the initial cost will still be high, but the expensive stuff can be a little more protected.

eric

HUD on fighter aircraft

[mikewas]

This sounds like the HUD on some fighter aircraft -- some have mirrors but others use a high quality chunk of optical glass. It sounds like this approach takes a low tech chunk of plastic and corrects for the abberations in the electronics.

Cheap silicon wins again -- it's been supplanting copper, now optics.

transparence and miniaturisation

[feepcreature]

If projection tech needs to catch up so we can use this in a TV or laptop, it'll have to catch up even more to allow it to be used in glasses. But a bigger problem is that the light exits the wedge vertically (or horizontally, if the wedge is sideways), so the diffusing coating they use to make it visible in front or behind would affect transparency.

In other news....

[Viceice]

A prominent female fashion guru has just announced his new master piece, a dress made with 'Flat Projection Display' as it's only fabric.

"With it, ladies all over may customise their clothing with any pattern or picture they want", beamed the millionaire dressmaker.

However, he declined comment on what would happen to the otherwise transparent dress after it's power supply, rated for 23 minutes of use, failed.

Instead of making it cheaper

[bartyboy]

why not make screens with no dead or stuck pixels? It's a huge pain in the ass to repack the new screen and bring it back to the store because ONE pixel is not working properly.

And manufacturers, here's a clue for your QC people: there is no such thing as "acceptable amount of defective pixels". I don't care if they're not touching or not, if they work above 30 degrees Celsius or when submerged in KY jelly. If I'm buying a new car there are no dents or scratches on it, so why should your screens be any different?

Re:Instead of making it cheaper

[EkkiEkkiShiwaddle]

If I'm buying a new car there are no dents or scratches on it, so why should your screens be any different?

Troll or not, I just had to reply to this one sentence in your ramblings.

I you're buying a new car, there are no scratches or dents on it. True. But you do NOT want to know what happened with your car before your received it.

I know a lot of people in the automotive industry, ranging from people who build cars to people who sell them. There are a lot of things that could happen to your car prior to accepting your beautiful new vehicle, without you ever knowing any of it. Granted, this is more exception than rule, but it is true nonetheless.

Some examples? Ok: (I'm not going to name company names here)

• dents can be repaired
• scratches can be removed
• I've seen motorblocks get faulty numbers, and I've seen workers file out the numbers and punch in new ones with a hammer and chisel (sp?)
• ever wonder how they get a car out of the way that won't run, before they fixed the engine? Yep: start, motor halts, progress: 1 meter. Wash, rince, repeat. Afterwards, the engine is fixed, and no-one needs to know

Just because you can't see the damage (as with dead pixels) does not mean there is none. Caveat emptor.

Re:Instead of making it cheaper

[NanoGator]

"Why is this mod'd as Troll? It's a fair point - you wouldn't pay full whack for a new sofa (couch) that had holes in; no matter how small or far apart they were. Why should this be any different for LCD monitors? If I buy a monitor that advertises a 1600x1200 resolution then I expect every one of the pixels to be working; otherwise the item is defective."

It's a 'good point', but that's not what the topic is about. He was likely modded as troll for bitching about something that has little relation to this topic, not to mention that these folks don't have the power to fix the problem. Getting people riled up for no rational reason is more or less what trolling is.

As for your comment, there are a few things to consider:

1.) That's 1,920,000 individual pixels you want to work perfectly from a source that produces millions of displays. It's hard to do. Life sucks, sorry.

2.) You don't have to buy an LCD display if having one pixel misbehave is a deal breaker.

3.) Most would rather have cheaper displays at the expense of risk of a couple of dead pixels. If everybody decided that it was unacceptable, do you really think a 0 dead pixel standard would suddenly go into effect without costs going higher to maintain that level of quality?

Look, I agree, it sucks that LCDs have that standard. As I mentioned before, life sucks sometimes. However, it wouldn't hurt to be at least a little appreciative of the fact that they can't just snap their fingers and suddenly make it work. Seriously, one could make the same complaint about McDonald's not mass producing burgers that match the image in their commericals.

Re:Instead of making it cheaper

[jetmarc]

> 1.) That's 1,920,000 individual pixels you want to work perfectly from a source
> that produces millions of displays. It's hard to do. Life sucks, sorry.

Throwing in high numbers isnt really a convincing counter-argument. After all
you also return defective 512MB DIMMs, although they contain 536,870,912 individual
bits. Or defective 160GB harddrives which contain, let me see, how many bits?

I know that its difficult to produce such a large panel without any error. But
OTOH there are ways to fix the problem:

a) panels can be binned. Actually the ISO standard suggests this, but manufacturers
simply dont do it. If they were to sell zero-defect panels as such, all non-
zero-defect panel would have to have at least 1 defect. Currently manufacturers
prefer to sell "0-5 defects" instead of "0 defects" and "1-5 defects".

b) panels can be repaired. The most visible types of defect are stuck-on pixels,
and stuck sub-pixels (which change the color of the intended pixel). With laser
technology any pixel can be "burned away" and be turned into less annoying
stuck-off pixels. While this doesnt make the panel "zero-defect", it certainly
would combine well with suggestion a), because getting a "1-5 defects" item at
lower price would only mean 1-5 dark pixels. Which is more tolerable than todays
surprise-bouquet of colored pixels.

c) panels can be designed fault-tolerant. It would perfectly be possible to use
redundancy to tolerate the loss of pixels. If, eg, 2 transistors were used
instead of one, with separate control wiring, the loss of one wouldnt matter.
Only when both were to be damaged (both of any one pixel), the pixel would
actually be unusable. This method costs panel space to implement, of course.
You wouldnt be able to fit the highest resolution into lowest dimension anymore,
or would have to improve the process resolution. This is the price to be paid
for higher yield.

Unless customers start to vote with money, things wont change. Today people complain
about defective pixels, but only few actually go out and get a "zero defects
guaranteed" product. Most just hope the best, and some try to return the bad ones
with a made-up excuse.

Marc

Prism...

[Sai Babu]

First thing that came to mind was the film Brazil and the tiny CRTs with big lenses.

Pretty clever.

One way to acheive is mirror array at 'base' ala DLP. DOn't know if this is the approach, but if so, corrections for each pixel would be pretty easy to handle in firmware.

I also have a fantastic new tech!

[Zangief]

Personal air travel!

Take off anywhere, land anywhere. Fast, secure, simple.

Just wait until airplane miniaturization catches up.
--
Wiki de Ciencia Ficcion y Fantasia

Uneven shrinkage & warpage = distortion

[G4from128k]

It sounds as if these folks think they know how to manufacture these displays, but have not actually done so yet. I predict they will discover that injection molding cannot create the large optically flat surfaces they need to create an undistorted image. Differences in the solidification time across the wedge will distort the shape of the surfaces and distort the images. Any differences in the temperature across the injected flow of resin will create internal ripples in the wedge. I also wonder if they have a way of controlling thermal distortions during use where the back of the wedge is warmer than the front and thus causes the wedge to curl.

Invention is easy. Manufacturing in high quantity, high quality, low price is the actual hard part. And undercutting the deflating price-performance curve of other well-established competing technologies is even harder. That said, I do wish them luck.

Re:Uneven shrinkage & warpage = distortion

[glesga_kiss]

I predict they will discover that injection molding cannot create the large optically flat surfaces they need to create an undistorted image. Differences in the solidification time across the wedge will distort the shape of the surfaces and distort the images.

From the article, it sounds like they correct for this in software. You'd need to calibrate the firmware specially for each new display, but it's doable and can be automated.

Watch out for patents because

[tod_miller]

They have developed an ill fitting sawtoothed double paned glass window that pushes more light further into the room, and less hits the area directly below the window, making offices lighter.

This is basically doing the same but replacing light with a projector source.

Imagine a specially moulded radially displaced set of panes, that had a central gun firing at them in a 180 arc, and the timing /angles were such that you got a perfect image.

Make sense?

the viewing angle would have to be compensated a bit...

Check new scientist for the story on lighter windows.

Actually seen something like this

[SmallFurryCreature]

Was an art piece. The tech used was those LCD panes that can turn opaque or transparent depending on power.

The "dress" had the panes on certain strategic locations if you know what I mean. The controller was setup in such a way that the panes were opaque most of the time but now and they would flash very fast transparent.

The trick of course being that your brain requires time to see things. Especially when you are not trying to look like a complete pervert. You clearly saw the thing become transparent but at least I was to slow to see anything.

So in one way the girl was nude. But because you couldn't actually see anything she wasn't.

Free Space Display

[Shanemoe]

http://www.io2technology.com/dojo/178/v.jsp Free Space Display, Project the Images into the Air... No need for bulky Screens... Think it will work?

Re:Still Not Cheap Enough

[Ucklak]

Injection molding plastic is cheaper than tube manufacturing.
CRT alignment is still adjusted by a human. Injection molding does not require human intervention.

English displays

[Hal_Porter]

I read a funny review of the Z88 a long time ago. The Z88 had a small LCD display "bought from the Japanese", but that was the result of an epic battle inside Sinclair. Clive Sinclair himself was quoted as saying "LCD's are rubbish, we have the only real portable display technology". This was based on the Sinclair pocket TV, which bent electron beams through 90 degrees with a big magnet. The journalist writing the review said that he saw a demonstration and "you placed your chin on a rest, and saw a ghostly green four lines of twenty characters floating in the infinite distance."

There was a memorable conversation with Alan Sugar who bought the Sinclair

Reviewer: Do you have the rights to the Pandora display?
AS: We have the rights to all the Sinclair patents
R: Do you plan any products based on Pandora?
AS: Have you seen it?
R: Yes.
AS: Well then.

Oddly, no Pandora based products were ever produced.