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Are Nanotube Monitors In Your Future?
cmburns69 writes "There is an article over on CNET News about some new nanotube technology which could replace LCD flat panel displays. "These 'field effect displays,' or FEDs, will consume less energy than plasma or liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs, deliver a better picture and even cost less.". The article is mostly focused on the FED technology, but also includes a summary of what other new display technology is coming up such as SEDs and slim CRTs. "
And it says:
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Yes, on May 2nd, 2017, I go to the local "Best Circuit" and by a 154" unit.
I wonder how much the first models will go for and how long it will take before Joe sixpack can afford one without selling a kidney.
is developing a similar panel that relies on specially doped diamond dust.
Do you suppose the author meant dropped? Otherwise, I hope that dust has glaucoma!
first post?
If it's not in the sub $250 range, most people won't buy it. And just because they say it is cheaper, doesn't mean it'll be affordable until 5 years after it hits the market.
There is a new technology that researches believe is promising as a potential replacement for existing technology!
Everyone knows that feds consume massive amounts of resources. And i sure as hell don't want one attached to my computer!
Uh oh... here come the FEDs!
Is this a Monitor that Mork and Mindy would like? Nano Nano
Bringing your mosaic ideas to life. Mosaiclegs
My monitor should be at least 20". ...
You can not impress girls with something as small as nano
OK, why would anyone get into the TV manufacturing business? Now, you have to compete against everyone, including the people that make nuclear plants.
"These , will consume less energy than plasma or liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs, deliver a better picture and even cost less.".
This seems to be the spin for any new display technology that's being hawked, regardless of development, deployment or truth.
-Teiresias
RD-D2 Droids to come out, so I can play Doom III in 3d Holographic Projection mode!
Now to just program the R2 unit to fetch me "Cold Ones"...
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
Yes, this does sound truly excellent. And maybe in 20 or so years, I can afford to buy one. By which time, a new, more excellent technology will be developed which I won't be able to afford.
I'm still using CRTs. Bleh.
All these useless gadgets..Still No Cure 4 the common cold. At the ces show this week, they are showing 1000s of new useless gadgets like new tvs and stuffs... all useless. why don't they spend money on something useful like a gadget that can cure diseases and grow more food.....
...is the 1mm diagonal viewing size, but for the dustmite starved for desk space, these monitors are sure to please.
Like an LCD, an FED is made up of layers. A layer of glass is coated with a cathode and a layer of diamond dust coated with lithium or carbon nanotubes. The negatively charged cathode, organized in a grid, then emits electrons through the diamonds or nanotubes, which focus that energy like a tiny lightening rod.
But then, like a CRT, the electrons shoot through a vacuum at a layer of phosphorescent glass covered with pixels. The big difference is that the source of electrons, the carbon, is located only 1 millimeter to 2 millimeters rather than nearly 2 feet from the target glass, and instead of one electron source--the electron gun--there are thousands. The electrons are attracted to the pixilated glass because this layer contains a positively charged anode.
"This generates light the same way a CRT tube does," said Pitstick, leading to similar picture quality. At the same time, a FED is only slightly thicker than an LCD panel.
Nanotubes + energy = explosion
The early adopter market is great for high tech because they:
- don't mind paying a premium for cool stuff, and they
- don't expect things to run perfectly.
You can imagine that if some company creating these things were to decide to just jump right to mass market, they would have huge problems with the volumes of customer support calls, returns, and so on. The people who bought the first plasma screens probably don't really care that they (the screens) look like crap by now from burn-in. They have probably replaced them AT LEAST once.If you sell a million units to a million Joe Sixpacks, even if they didn't sell a kidney to get the product, that sort of potential problem would result in lawsuits a million times greater than the potential profits.
The CB App. What's your 20?
At a nanotube workshop in 1999 Samsung demoed an early prototype. It was only about 8-inch diagonal and displayed a fixed image, but was still impressive. The basic idea is to have an electron gun for each pixel as nanotubes make nice electron guns. In fact, each pixel had hundreds or thousands (I forget) of nanotubes, probably for ease of manufacture and redundancy.
You know what I have heard for a long time that LCDs will become cheap and affordable for guys like...me. but that hassent happend in a long time. Plasma is looking good but not $4999 good so I will belive it when I see it. I am going to stick with my CRT until I see that they have come down in price.
All of which promise cheaper, higher definition pictures, using less energy, and do 0-500 mph in a quarter second.
Whatever. Go to fucking circuit city and notice that anything other than a "plain ole tv set" costs an order of magnitude more, and doesn't even boast a better image.
LCoS SED Plasma OLED LCD DLP SHOMORK
So lets take the buzzword of the day and rebadge it as "TV tech of teh futore".
Nanotubes.
WiFi Nanotubes, with iTunes.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
yet another new reason for Americans to take out a home equity loan.
I thought OLED would be where we were heading.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Yes. Right after stem cells cure all diseases, and Longhorn fixes all security holes in my PC.
Jesus, I've been reading about FEDs for like 8 years now. I keep going to Wal-Mart every week to check, but they still don't carry them.
no they are not. i already have a projector.
I read about new tech all the time, but the only thing I ever see sold are incremental improvements to existing technologies. Maybe I should move to Japan or something. Where are my consumer priced video-phones, laser guns, flying cars, transporters, cloaking devices, etc.????
The article is interesting and IMHO, new display technologies will always find their niche. But I've always thought the "next-gen" technology to beat LCD flat-screen or plasma displays was going to be OLEDs.
On the one hand, OLEDs still have some problems with lifetimes--even research devices that I saw in grad school might degrade quickly. And of course I haven't seen anyone really give proof that single-walled nanotubes (SWNT) used in these FEDs can be produced cost-effectively.
However, unlike these technologies, OLEDs have already been produced as prototypes in sizes as large as 40" (by Seiko Epson) and being used in products like Digital Cameras and MP3/Ogg players and being mass-produced by companies like Sony.
Previous Slashdot stories on OLEDs:3 7 m l?tid=137 2 34.shtml l ?tid=137&tid=141&tid=159&tid=184&tid=186&tid=188
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/15/20172
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/03/04/0127213.sht
http://science.slashdot.org/science/04/03/09/0112
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/05/05/004227.shtm
I RTFA, and those FED monitors sound pretty nice. The only problem is they require diamonds or carbon nanotubes to manufacture. Last I heard, carbon nanotubes are quite expensive to manufacture in any quantity (wikipedia seems to confirm this). I'm not sure about the cost of the small syntehtic diamond that FEDs require, but I imagine they aren't cheap to make either (does anyone know?).
Hopefully a breakthrough will come along and make these things cheap to manufacture though, because FEDs sound like very cool technology.
SED stands for surface-conduction electron emitter display? Shouldn't that be SCEED? Or at least SEED?
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
which was last years FED, everything will be fine.
(TV technology as vaporware... we've come a long way baby!)
You guys are thinking of the wrong doped. "Doped" in electronics means treated with a special dopant, which does NOT get you high. Instead, the dopant alters its conductive properties.
Nanotubes are becoming increasingly more popular as they become mass-producable. A few weeks ago they invented a new process that creates nanotubes with 99.9% purity. Nanotubes are 100 times stronger than steel at 1/10 the weight. Hopefully we will be seeing more nanotube projects in the future.
12" orange monochrome
After all, if I tell some of my 1337 friends that I have some FEDs at my house, they won't want to come over or talk to me anymore!
Wasn't there an article on /. a while back in which a company claimed they would have these monitors out by the end of '04? Guess they were lying.
Yup...they're thinner than the hair of a unicorn, have negative weight due to their anti-gravity properties, they actually generate money instead of cost money and because they can be produced on such a massive scale the UN is contemplating replacing the sky with a Large Array Unified Graphics Heaven ;)
This news is over 2 years old, and still no displays!
...and even cost less.
Costs less to produce. But that in no way translates into direct savings for the consumers. I would expect the companies to pocket the difference, until the next gen of TVs after this comes out. They'll most likely charge as much as they can.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
It doesn't say what it costs less than, maybe it means cheaper than an 18 inch sheet of diamond. May I suggest using diamondelle? There sure as sh*t won't be any elvis incidents with these suckers! Can't exactly shoot out a diamond boob-tube...
Frylock: "We should have cloned twenties, Jackson wouldn't have given a fuck."
Just out of curiousity, does damage to eyes play a factor in new display technologies? I'm not qualified to make any judgements, but shouldn't that be the prominent feature of a display you're looking at, probably over 8 hours a day? I think that would be a far better selling feature than cheaper! ligther! less energy consumption!
~ marko Savic
and it just went *beep* *buzz* *fizz*, and I lost my paper.
That's why I got a Mac.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
So in the future our TVs will be nanometre sized? Cool. I hope we all have those enhanced eyes that were talking about last week as well, by then. That way I can zoom in and watch TV while I'm flying my flying car, which will go 254 Football Fields per Library of Congress.
All in 5 years...
How about an R2 unit with built in refridgeration unit? Because a one is not truely a one if it is not indeed cold.
Frylock: "We should have cloned twenties, Jackson wouldn't have given a fuck."
I believe OLED stands for "Organic Light Emitting Diode." I know it's been awhile since I took organic chemistry, but organic means the molecules are composed of carbon to some extent (and maybe with other elements). Since these nanotechnology monitors are made using diamond dust (carbon) or nanotubes (also carbon), aren't these new technologies, another type of Organic display? And since they use field-emitting diodes (FED's) to produce the light, wouldn't this really be another OLED?
Please excuse my ignorance, but I think it's just crazy the way we throw all sorts of acronyms around -- sometimes with overlapping or contradicting definitions.
once the carbon nanotube based space elevator falls, we can all make tvs out of pieces of it yay
and I just bought a brand new Dell UltraSharp 2001FP 20 inch LCD monitor about 20 minutes ago... http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.a spx?sku=320-1578&c=us&l=en&cs=19&category_id=2999& page=external
does this nano tube-top make me look fat?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The slim CRTs mentioned should be out by the end of this year. Time will tell in what quantity, and what market (TV, computer display, etc.).
:(
I'm using a 6 year old, deep, non-flat 21" CRT behemoth at home, and I'm still waiting for some type of shallow-depth flat display to come along that doesn't have colour issues or slow response time. Oh, and that's affordable!
I'd _really_ love to reclaim all that deskspace. I'm thinking two 19" flat panel displays, mounted from above (I have a 'Jerker' desk from IKEA that has a shelf mounted above the desktop). More screen real estate, AND more desk real estate by getting them physically off the desktop. But I really need the accurate colour reproduction that I can't get from LCDs.
First time I've heard of this technology it was 15 years ago. This has been originally developped at the LETI (a french research institute). PixTech (also french) seems to be an emanation from this lab.
FED displays are based on the so-called 'tip effect' (not sure about the english term, in french it's 'effet de pointe'). This electromagnetic effect is what makes lightning rods work. To simplify, each pixel is thus basically filled with micro-lightning rods that throw particles towards the phosphore.
FED has already been used for flat panel screens. Specifically: field emission displays. Worth noting is that these, while very neat, turned out to be fiscally problematic (hence the need for the Wayback Machine). Not a good omen for this incarnation...
Isn't it always: Chose any two.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I agree. where is my cost less cable tv and cost less DSL. what's next, "cost less fiber" to your front door. Nothing that looks better ever costs less.
I'm sorry but a nano monitor is just too small for my needs.
Our new display technology will be bulkier, cost more, require more power and the picture will be orse.
http://accounts901.tripod.com/ebayupdates.html
Stop with the nano-tube announcements!
We've been hearing for years about how nano-tubes are going to save mankind, make everything 100 times faster, 100x more energy efficient and taste 100% better.
So far not one commercial product has been produced that actually uses them for anything other than marketing hype. It's getting beyond tired.
"Nano-tube" is the call of the entrepreneur trying to get funding. All it takes is writing a paper or press release with the word "nano-tube" in it and people all jump to attention and thorw money. This is the 50th time we've heard it.
Keep researching but stop with the "This could be the greatest thing ever, why in two years blah blah blah" annoucements already. Just tell us when it's done and for sale.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
As crude as it may be, the post drives home some very valid points. New technology is rarely cheap for several reasons:
1. The cost of R&D has to be paid off somehow.
2. The simplest law of economics will previal: If the item is much better, it creates demand and demand drives up prices. People will pay whatever the set price is, simply because it's the best item out there.
3. Companies are not charities. They aren't interested in selling product that's better than their comeptitor's at a much lower price, even if their production is minimal.
i'm somewhat FED up with all these reports of new monitor technologies yet not of it is actually yet usable or affordable to the consumer.
If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
I've been following this for years, but I never hear about it anywhere. These guys seem to have a pretty good thing going on...
From their site:
iFire Technology has created a solid-state flat panel display technology called thick-film dielectric electroluminescence (TDEL). An inorganic electroluminescent (IEL) display technology, TDEL is based on a patented thick-film dielectric structure that enables excellent video performance and color saturation, while providing inherent ruggedness and reliability. Compared to other flat panel display technologies, iFire's TDEL technology involves a low-cost and high-yield manufacturing process. Combining low-cost potential with excellent video performance characteristics, iFire(TM) displays are poised to become the affordable, high performance flat panel alternative for the mass consumer television market.
Maxivista is my new monitor. It's freakin' sweet!
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
What can't they do?
It's taken OLEDs 10+ years for a good proof of concept, and will take them 5 more to be cost effective.
Nanotube monitors are going to be at least as long in coming.
It seems like they have been talking about all the great things nano tubes can do for years now and I thought the first products were suppose to be on the market by now. It was nano tube batties for cell phones.
Where are they, hanging out with Duke Nukem??
Oh shit, it's the FEDs!
Sorry, I couldn't resist...
It's difficult (and annoying) to discern all the acronyms being thrown around sometimes. However, I am impressed at how many new display technologies are being invented in such a short period of time. I doubt that more than one or two will survive to the maturity stage because only the best technologies will survive.
"These 'field effect displays,' or FEDs, will consume less energy than plasma or liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs, deliver a better picture and even cost less.".
If it consumes less energy and delivers a better picture, it will be a better product. Better products cost more. Even if they're simpler and less costly to make, they will be more expensive (until supply/demand/competition/other factors drive them the other way).
Laws of economics my friend :/
How many times have we read about a new display technology that's going to be better/faster/higher quality/cheaper/stronger/smarter/prettier/jumps higher/etc than LCDs and Plasma.
:P ).
Yeah, but Plasma,LCD and OLED's were revolutionary in the way they produce the light in the displays. FED's only use the existing phosphore pixels technology that we have been using in our CRT's for decades.
The revolutionary (and therefore expensive) part of Field Emission Displays are the nanotube arrays replacing the bulky vacuum tubes. About freakin' time I'd say. I always had the idea that smaller vacuum tubes could be arranged in arrays to flatten the displays - i was stunned to find out that nanotech would do the trick. So actually, nanotube-based FED's are not a true revolution, but rather an evolution of the existing CRT model. They use revolutionary technology, but that's a minor detail.
A couple of months ago I found out in nanoapex that a new method of nanotubes mass-production was discovered. I don't doubt that other methods are discovered within the next 2 years, dropping production costs.
However, nanotubes have similar properties to graphene (single sheets of graphite), and maybe using simple graphite instead of nanotubes could do the trick (nobody has tried, tho, and I don't have gazillion dollars to do the research myself
Whatever the delay is, I expect nanotube FED's to replace all CRT's afterwards.
FED? Meet FUD.
Discuss
Since they're essentially CRT tubes redesigned, and since CRTs suffer from burn-in, wouldn't the FEDs as well be prone to burn-in?
;-) Plasma displays are ridiculous - not only they're the most expensive, but they're most vulnerable to burn-in.
I woulnd't buy a burn-in-prone HDTV set at any price. Maybe if i get it for free...
That's why i'm looking at DLP displays for my next purchase.
What about your laser based optical storage? Your flash memory cards, your digital cameras, your LCD monitors, your wireless internet, your 3-D accelerators, your entire music collections in one device, and most of all your cellphones.
All of these seemed like impossible futuristic leaps years ago.
The marketing types want to make all these things seem as normal as possible just before they're actually on sale. Cutting edge, but almost exactly like an existing product.
That said, the things you list are pretty silly. Transporters and cloaking devices may well be impossible, and nobody's said they're coming. Consumer-priced video phones are common, they just connect over MSN. Laser guns are available but boring.
Something better/faster/cheaper than LCDs?? :)
Damnit! And I was just contemplating dumping my 1993 Nec Multisync CRT (seriously!) for an LCD screen.. But if these are gonna be so much better I wouldn't want to waste my money now....
Goddamn technology *mumble mumble*
Considering that carbon nanotubes are toxic.
Smoke Emitting Diode...right?
Yes. I don't need a big c-net article to convince me otherwise IDWTRTFA
From the article:
So now the pixles are attached to the glass? WHAT?! Are the pixels little stickers or something??
I love articles written by people who have no idea what the hell they are saying.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08