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Nanotech Based Display
yodha writes "Ntera showed their NanoChromics Display (NCD) recently. The display uses a nanotechnology process to create a more paper-like image than traditional LCD screen. It delivers significant power savings (they've shoehorned one into an iPod to give people a sense of what it looks like). The image can even remain on the screen for weeks without any power and doesn't need a backlight."
If you look farther there is an ebook prototype with a respectibly sized screen.
From ExtremeTech: "Still, Ntera claims that first production glass will be shipping at the end of the year, and intimated that a medical device manufacturer would be first out of the gate"
Considering the eBook prototype had an "issue", those won't be too far behind...but delayed, nonetheless.
Looks like it would cost you less paper than an LCD ipod: http://www.ntera.com/technology/nano_overview.asp
Or so they say...
on this page it claims "fast switching"s p ...
http://www.ntera.com/products/segmentedDisplays.a
Exactly what that means I'm not sure
But if someone wants to sign up for the datasheet downloads, then they can tell us for sure....
http://www.ntera.com/home/register.asp
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
This kind of technology seems promising for the future of ebooks...
Let us all hope they do not screw up with this technology like Sony/Philips did with E Ink and their Librie ebook reader.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
If this display doesn't require a backlight, then it's a major win over today's LCD technology.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
it means that the cathode has small bumps on it that are less than 10nm wide. those bumps are what the dye (vilogen) sticks to to give it colour when it is in the "coloured state".
If you tried to make the bumps any larger, the colours would look all washed out, because you'd see more bump than dye.
Maybe i missed it but i didn't read that 'it has the consistency of paper'. Notice the layers marked "glass" in the illustration. They did mention that it gave "the visual effect of ink on paper ".
Take away the glass and i assume your stylus will create the same effect as writing on wet tissue, sure.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
Not according to Wikipedia. Nanoassemblers are just the science fictionalized popular image of nanotechnology, actual nanotechnology is a much broader field.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
And you're absolutely right to be. The article states that the rendering of an image is slower than on an LCD screen.
"What a strange review -- first they give us a nice photo comparing the new screen in an iPod to the standard LCD... but the standard iPod example is turned off. There's nothing on the screen we can compare with."
If I'm not mistaken, I think that was partially the point. The iPod with the NCD was off too. Right below the photo in question is written, "The image remains on the display even after power is removed, and does not require a backlight."
And as one of the comments pointed out, the display show the playing symbol, but the timing of the track is at 0:00 on two different shots even though the progress bar is 1/3 of the way across?
But no, further down they discuss the eBook reader example. "This ebook looked great, and really shows off the power of the digital paper. Alas, I had to keep pressing the contrast button to refresh the image. Perhaps the technology is not as far along as the company suggested."
This is strange too, I thought one of the selling points for this technology is that the display should be static for weeks even if the power goes out?
Ordinary newsprint paper can reflect less than 85% of the light falling on it. Really white colour printer paper can reflect over 97% of the light. Some papers help this along a bit by adding 'optical brightners' - stuff that absorbs UV and flouresces in the blue to counter the natural yellowness of the paper. This suggests if you use a really white background, you can occupy over 10% of the surface with non-active black components, and the white will still look acceptable. This display uses TiO2, the white in white paint (not usually the white in paper), but it looks more like newsprint.
(2) Blackness
A typical print black may be a density of about 1.8. Against a good white, 2% reflectance can look pretty black. It is hard to know what they are getting here because this is a multilayered device , and we are seeing reflections from the other layers. Judging by eye, we do not have quite this constrast. A cholesteric LCD has similar storage properties, but loks contrasty (though the ones I have seen always look blue-black).
(3) Flatness
I guess the pixels are 0.1mm or larger. The device looks rectangular in cross-section from the diagram (NB: this diagram has no dimensions, and the test suggests it was churned out by marketing droids, rather than the engineers who developed it - caveat lector). This suggests the device may appear deep, and may cast shadows. This is not necessarily a problem: light can diffuse 0.1mm within paper to give things like the Yule-Neilsen effect, but we do not notice a dark halo around print. However, if the thing casts a sharp shadow like some LCDs, then this can look disturbing, particularly when you get moire with halftoning patterns. This depth problem will get a lot worse with a colour display.
(4) Resolution
A display is not likely to equal the typical 1800 pixels per inch (70 pixels per mm) for decent looking text. However, this is an unreasonable demand for a refreshable display.
Print on paper is a tough act to follow. This display looks okay, but no more than that. I would look for a flatter device (though I have little real detail on how flat this is). I worry about the switching time, and lifetime problems that dogged earlier electrochromic displays.
Disclaimer: my personal favourite technology is electrostrictive gels, which is why I could trot out these numbers.
As far as I can tell, most "e-paper" has focused on two technologies -- the original 'white side/black side' rotating-sphere design, where the little balls or molecules flip one way or the other based on charge, and Philips' new oily-dye tech for color displays, where oil dyes ebb and flow across pixels for similar reasons.
There's OLED and FED and LCD and all that, but 'e-paper' seems to imply a non-emissive display meant for reflective viewing, with no backlighting, and theoretically reduced power consumption to make it worthwhile.
If I'm following this right, these guys, with their 'NCD' stuff, seem to have found a way to make that sort of display with a higher resolution and faster response time, using more of an LCD-like substrate (so we're talking fragile glass panels with electrodes, but at least we as a species know how to do that). Instead of spinning physical spheres (be they balls or large molecules), or getting macroscopic globs of dye to slide around, they've found a repeatable and reversible electrochemical reaction that'll turn their coating from 'invisible' to 'colored' and back again, as those little molecules change the absorption/reflection of the substance depending where they're bound. Upshot is that it looks good, offers another possibility for color, and miiight be more stable against sunlight bleaching... downside is that you still need one pixel with one cocktail per color.
This seems like a halfway step between existing e-paper and what Iridigm were working on, where you're basically using microprisms to refract the spectrum of light you want... but the Iridigm tech requires a lot of (admittedly elegant) complexity, since each infinitely-variable pixel has to be made up of a ton of microactuators of one form or another. Upshot is that Iridigm would guarantee stability in sunlight (as long as heat doesn't fry the circuitry itself), since there are no chemical dyes or filters to 'wash out' in the classical sense... But does the NCD stuff offer any new breakthroughs in stability?
(Not whoring for Iridigm, they're just the only new display tech I've never heard anyone else talking about.)
Iridigm looks like a compelling tech - especially in meeting the challenge of over-lighting stability. Qualcomm just bought the 85% of them that it didn't already own, for a total value of $200M. I wonder whether we'll see an iridigm phone in the next 12-18 months.
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