Slashdot Mirror
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."
So much for turning the screen off when you're looking at... home movies and your parents/friend/girlfriend walks in ;)
So many e-paper technologies...so much vaporware.
the question is how much paprer would that ipod cost me?
Wonder if it will work better with cell phone battery extender stickers attached to the back of the screen. (I kid)
so, i can have p0rn on my screen 24 hours a day?
could be a great marketing method:
-
tired of wasting electricity on porn?
have trouble fiddling around with all those dirty magazines?
then switch to NCD today!!!
-
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
I'm guessing they've got a very long way to go before it'll be in a 24" widescreen display. The impressive thing is the contrast level... something like this could make e-books a practical option.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
But the question remains, can I wipe my ass with it?
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.
I like the increased contrast. But can anyone elaborate on "nanotachnology processes"? That's like saying any common appliance uses "electromagnetic processes".
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
So at what point does the thing malfunction and eat your house?
Stop intellectual property from infringing on me
...would be having this on Tablet PCs.
I didn't see any mention of this, but considering that they say 'it has the consistency of paper' and the extremely high resolution, if it were touch sensitive, it would replace paper/pencil in a way that PDAs couldn't. I couldn't doodle that well on a palm, but with nanotech resolution and a thin enough stylus, notes on a tablet PC would become a reality.
Just my thoughts on this.
TFA claims that initially, it will draw more power than an LCD to paint the display, but the image will remain without additional repaints, saving energy.
Now, I'd like to think I'm not an idiot...but how will that save energy on displays which, for instance, require frequent repaints? Let's say that I'm running my iPod with one of those screens, as they show in the article. The thing has to draw segments of the bar frequently, update the time remaining once per second, draw the entire "Now playing:" row to create the "scroll" effect for long titles, redraw the top if you have a clock running up there, et cetera, et cetera.
Another example would be a touch-sensitive screen. In a drawing tablet, I'd imagine the repaint levels are not going to be particularly low, especially for full-tablet images...
I suppose my question becomes...is it actually less power-hungry than traditional LCDs for its practical uses?
It's only an insult if it's not true.
a few questions come to mind, obviously the technology is fairly new, but is the physical screen stronger than that of a typical LCD? relative to current LCDs how much would it cost? Will it be sluggish at cold temps like LCDs? I'd love to have one of these on my tablet PC currently pretending to be my car radio, with the cold weather the screen reacts quite slow sometimes.
The Answer
This isn't the only one. There are a bunch of those kinds of display technologies in the pipeline: basically, LCD displays, but with small scall structures that increase contrast, viewing angle, and persistence.
It's a good short term solution because switching manufacturing over to those kinds of technologies should be fairly easy.
The disadvantage is that those are still heavy glass sandwidches, with all the problems that brings with it. eInk, OLED, and other new display technologies give far more flexible and lightweight displays, and promise significant weight savings.
The image can even remain on the screen for weeks without any power and doesn't need a backlight."
I figured out how to do that 30 years ago to my folks TV with my PONG console...
There are lots of things these days that operate at or involve nano-meter technology, but what specifically about this produce uses Nanotech?
For me, Nanotech is enginering with Atoms; purposely building tiny machine on the Nanometer scale that do things like filter specific atoms to produce "pure" materials, act as a computer or build a rocket engine in a vat of liquid.
http://www.hawknest.com/
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.
Guiness is great, I was just being sarcastic. It's kind of like the beer equivilent of Starbucks - half beverage, half ashtray. Oh, there I go again... Go on, mod me offtopic :)
So when can I pick up my "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer"?
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
"Doesn't need a backlight because it's reflective"? - doesn't that mean it needs some light to reflect? I thought it must be emissive to be truly backlight free like oleds.
I agree though, it looks like they are having difficulties with the larger screen, as the Ipod screen held the image fine, but the author stated he had to keep refreshing the ebook.
Mmmm, less power= less light shining in my eyes. Sounds like I might not need to increase the strength of my contacts after all!
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
NCD technology uses electrodes made of nanostructured films of semiconducting metal oxides with a self assembled monolayer of electrochromic viologen molecules to overcome these issues.
Oh yeah, that makes perfect sense!
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
"The image can even remain on the screen for weeks without any power and doesn't need a backlight."
Warning: Do not browse porn before a power outage.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
reminds me, what ever happened to those paper thin screens? I want one of them things, if they ever actually come out, less I read some problem with temperature or something
Signatures are so 90s
There are two issues that cause me to print out a to-do list, purchase paper books, and so on. The first is the resolution of the display. Books are generally printed at a resolution between 600 and 1200 dpi. The best my laptop or pda can get is about 100 dpi.
The second is usability life. Laptops range from 2 to 4 hours of usable time while reading a text document. Then you have to re-charge it. A book generally never needs to be recharge. It's feasable to take a book and sit on the beach for 8 hours, (I might burn rather sevearly, but that's me) I would not recomend trying that with a laptop. Additionally in this scenario, cleaning the sand out of the book is going to take a lot less effort than doing the same for your laptop.
If the resolution tripples (or more) in each direction, and over the long term takes less energy to display, then we are begining to get to where I would be much happier using such a device than I am carrying around a book. (A novel appropriate fot taking on a vacation can be rather large.
But that's just me. I don't think this is the best that Nanotechnology has in our future. I do think it's one of the better uses for Nano Materials Sciences that have come down the pipeline so far.
-Rusty
You never know...
First off, something I always thought would be cool is to have a digital picture frame. But the ones that I see a lot today just plain suck. Too thick and monitor-ish. If these looked like paper, it would be ez to make a digital pic frame out of it, and it would look good. Shoot, the things are cheap and sturdy, you could send grandma one in the mail, and not have to worry about losing the image.
A cool device that I would like to see, if this is thin enough, is an ebook device that actually looks like a book with pages, but each of the pages is a sheet of this stuff that contains a different piece of literature, and you could have like a USB hookup where the binding of hte book would normally be for syncing with a computer.
I don't know how thin this stuff is, but it would rock to have a lightweight monitor that you could hang on your wall. I know, LCD's already do that, but this stuff seems way cooler.
A device that you could draw on, and it would look good! And have good battery life! Like a digital drawing board or artists pad.
Cheaper, longer lasting battery life PDA's!
Ditto for cell phones!
And probably a whole bunch of other things!
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
E-Ink Website
It seems to me these guys are already doing this. Perhaps this is competition?
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.
Okay, maybe they're really keen on the new tech and are trying to skew things its way.
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."
Huh? Anything you can achieve by pressing a button is easily achievable through software, isn't it? This is just a minor flaw in the implementation of this particular prototype... and says nothing useful about the actual screen.
Anyway, I'm sure more thoughtful reviews will be coming along soon -- this looks like pretty solid and exciting tech to me. It may not be suitable for many screens (i.e., it takes *more* power than a standard LCD if the pixels are all changing frequently... so you wouldn't watch a movie on it), but it'd be perfect for putting little status monitor screens on all kinds of things, plus for the applications they prototyped.
Now we know why this is vapourware and will never make it to colour screens - did you ever see the Guinness ads with the tagline "Not everything in black and white makes sense"
y cl e.html
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/MC30820/bic
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.
I just looked at all thier fuss and bother, and the 'image stays without power'
But then I read the disclaimer, if you shake them the image disspears!
Nothing more than a uppity etch-a-sketch! Works on same principles.
Nanotech my ass!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I use lynx you insensitive clod.
HAD
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.)
just shake it.
Laws are for people with no friends.
A happy coincidence that the MPEG encoding format selectively keeps the parts of the screen that change to compress moving images.
An MPEG decoder card designed for this screen embedded in a purpose built portable dvd player could actually be easier to implement than for a raster screen.
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.
--
make install -not war