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."

Comments

pr0n

[TLLOTS]

So much for turning the screen off when you're looking at... home movies and your parents/friend/girlfriend walks in ;)

Re:pr0n

[illerd]

I'd imagine your girlfriend would be more upset to find you jerking off to puppies, rather than women.

more vaporware?

[7Ghent]

So many e-paper technologies...so much vaporware.

Re:more vaporware?

[BarryNorton]

So many e-paper technologies...so much vaporware.

The Sony Librie isn't vapourware - it's a real product... unfortunately one crippled by DRM and consequently, as far as I know, not due for a European or American release :(

Ipod paper

[A Swing Dancing Dork]

the question is how much paprer would that ipod cost me?

Stickers anyone

[digitalchinky]

Wonder if it will work better with cell phone battery extender stickers attached to the back of the screen. (I kid)

pr0n

[Coneasfast]

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!!!
-

iPod looks impressive but..

[doormat]

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.

Sounds good.

[Anonymous Coward]

But the question remains, can I wipe my ass with it?

Very Nice

[Omkar]

I like the increased contrast. But can anyone elaborate on "nanotachnology processes"? That's like saying any common appliance uses "electromagnetic processes".

Re:Refresh Rate anyone?

[stoborrobots]

on this page it claims "fast switching"
http://www.ntera.com/products/segmentedDisplays.as p
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

Nanomites Amuck

[teknomage1]

So at what point does the thing malfunction and eat your house?

An awesome feature...

[FireballX301]

...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.

Power Consumption?

[rincebrain]

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?

Re:Power Consumption?

[sahonen]

I have no idea how the device works, but I would think you just repaint only the pixels that change from frame to frame. For example, your seconds counter going from 8 to 9 would only really have to change the bottom half of the character. Plus you only need to update when there's a change, instead of constantly refreshing at 30hz or whatever. Even for a scrolling title bar, you're still not having to refresh the entire screen.

What I'm wondering about is internal illumination. Does it rely completely on external illumination, or can you fit a backlight into it so you can read in the dark?

Re:Power Consumption?

[rusty0101]

On the assumption that most displays actually have a very small number of pixels that change with any frequency. As an example, look at an 8 element digital clock, every second the unit's second changes, every 10 seconds the tens seconds changes, every minute the minute changes, and so on. from any 30th of a second to another, the vast majority of the time, nothing has changed, so nothing needs to be refreshed, or changed.

Likewise with a spectrum analyzer view on an mp3 player. It's rather rare for the area between the bars in the analyzer to change. It's also rare that the frame, labels under the bars, scale lines, etc. change.

In an LCD system, all of those pixels need to be refreshed every refresh cycle. In this system once the pixel is set, no energy is used to keep that pixel set at that level.

Looking at my screen right now, easily 95% or more of the screen is not changing from one second to the next. Yet the entire screen is using energy to refresh itself many times a second (50-70 Hz I believe for this screen)

The place where such an interface would be expected to use significantly more energy would be in a Television type interface. Including video games on a PC which you may or may not consider related.

I don't really get your example of a touch-sensitive screen. The areas that would draw energy to be repainted are those where the stylus or mouse pointer are located. Unless you are using some interface that draws lines all over the screen when you move the stylus from one pixel to another close to it, the only pixels that should be affected are those relevant to the brush or tool in question. For a Select this usually means a couple of lines of pixels vertically, and horizontally change. Applying effects, afrects a large portion of the screen, possibly even the entire screen, but it is usually a one shot event.

Even the notorious blink tag in html documents should only cause energy to be expended with the frequency of the blink.

Let's say that it takes 60 times as much energy for a pixel change on one of these screens than on an LCD (equivalent area example, if you get 9 'nano'-pixels in the same space as an lcd pixel, each nano-pixel using ~7 times as much energy as the lcd pixel, you get what 63 times as much energy used for that same area, close enoug to 60 for this example.) If over 90% of the screen is not changing from one refresh cycle to the next, then in 60 refresh cycles after the initial screen was set, you have approximate parity. That's one to two seconds. Obviously savings go up from there.

But that's just some off the cuff calculating and thoughts. I am sure someone out there, perhaps someone who thinks that 1/20th of a dollar is not the same as 5% of a dollar will elucidate my errors.

-Rusty

Re:Power Consumption?

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's just some off the cuff calculating and thoughts. I am sure someone out there, perhaps someone who thinks that 1/20th of a dollar is not the same as 5% of a dollar will elucidate my errors.

Actually, my friend, 1/20th of a dollar is a nickel.

Respectfully yours,
The Elucidator

fragility?

[zerkon]

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.

there are a bunch of those...

[idlake]

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.

Pffffft. big deal...

[pair-a-noyd]

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...

e-ink anyone?

[esteric]

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.

Diamond Age...

[sparkhead]

So when can I pick up my "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer"?

But will need a front light

[jackstack]

"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.

Re:But will need a front light

[Feanturi]

Well sure, just like regular paper needs some light for you to see what's on it. You shouldn't be trying to read in the dark anyway, I don't know why some people are picking on that.

Not quite the market

[WinterpegCanuck]

Like they said in the article, it takes more power to render the image initially than LCD, so I don't think full motion movies/games/general screen is what they are aiming at. The strength in this product is the image lasting and having the readability of paper. I may just speak for myself, but I hate reading for great lengths from the screen, usually sending things to the laser to read from the page. The eBook they show in the last link is where the power of this guy is realized.

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.

Re:RTFA, and still nothing

[nounderscores]

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.

Re:This is not nanotech

[sahonen]

Not according to Wikipedia. Nanoassemblers are just the science fictionalized popular image of nanotechnology, actual nanotechnology is a much broader field.

Re:Pffffft. big deal...

[Jodka]

"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.

Odd review

[JavaRob]

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.

Re:Odd review

[modifried]

"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."

Looking like paper...

[Richard Kirk]

(1) Whiteness

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.

Hang on hang on - etch-a-sketch

[tod_miller]

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!

Re:I can see lots of applications

[Anonymous Coward]

If each page is a different work of literature... you've got an art/marketing phenomenon, I guess, but consider the usability. You probably can't fold back the spine like a real book (well, you could, but the lifetime of flexible electronics is still as weak as the spine on a paperback), and if you want each page to represent a single work, you're stuck scrolling anyway.

If you request a USB hookup, that means all the work might as well reside on a small USB stick or "Gumstix" computer in the spine anyway, and the pages are only providing display. So all you really need is one 'sheet,' in a suitably-protective frame, with a comfortable handgrip and scrolling controls.

Remember, the 'book' was just a bodge on the problem of producing and storing long rolls of papyrus; there's not really anything magic to the art of page-turning. However, you do need decent coding and appropriate display tech (perhaps with 'motion-prediction,' to avoid LCD-like smear, but in a general purpose device, that could easily be done in the rendering software) to create output that 'scrolls' smoother than movie credits.