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LG Phillips Patents Oil and Water Display
jordanhh writes "Tech.co.uk reports that LG Phillips has filed a patent for a new type of thin, flexible display. 'The pixels are made from tiny plastic cells filled with minute amounts of oil and water. The oil floats on the surface of the water and shrouds the colored surface underneath it. When electricity is applied across the cell, the oil moves aside, changing the color of the pixel.'"
What? No vinegar?
This guy's the limit!
Am I the only one who read this as LG Phillips Patents Oil and Water Display ?
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Yeah, man... I saw something like that on the screen over the heads of the Jefferson Airplane back in '67. At least I THINK it was on the screen... oh... WOW!
Thanks - I'll be here all night.
They expect to get excellent blacks (the bane of digital display technologies) by using motor oil from my 1999 Saturn.
See my Home Theater
This was the big news from Philips/LG last year. Did they score another patent on this or is it the same one?
I never get used to these constant resurrections
That really paints the term "dead pixels" in a new light.
I'm waiting for Hidden Valley's research into a ranch-based display to pan out.
That makes much more sense. The one from tech.co.uk talks about floating, which would make it useless for the applications mentioned.
('street furniture' => 'bus stops') ie. vertical, not horizontal mounting
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
They sunk millions into it and they haven't been able to get it to work yet (this is old old news). A fair amount of that money going to lawyers and work to avoid existing patents no doubt. Hell who knows, maybe they'd have been able to get it to work if random areas of science weren't cordoned off to engineers trying to create products.
Well, so far it seems that nobody here has seen this done before and thinks it's a pretty neat idea. So, no, you just need to get the latest groupthink patch.
(IANAL)
It's Philips with one "L", by the way.
this is exactly like the light show I saw at a Dead concert once.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It's not a software patent ;-)
Follow me
Groovy baby!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Sincerely,
Dr. Peter V. Boesen
SP Technolgies
Pardon my pessimism, but I couldn't see this being very fast.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
n the 1990s another type of electronic paper was invented by Joseph Jacobson, who later co-founded the corporation E Ink which formed a partnership with Philips Components two years later to develop and market the technology. In 2005, Philips sold the electronic paper business as well as its related patents to Prime View International. This used tiny microcapsules filled with electrically charged white particles suspended in a colored oil.[3] In early versions, the underlying circuitry controls whether the white particles were at the top of the capsule (so it looked white to the viewer) or at the bottom of the capsule (so the viewer saw the color of the oil). This was essentially a reintroduction of the well-known electrophoretic display technology, but the use of microcapsules allowed the display to be used on flexible plastic sheets instead of glass. ... From the wikipedia entry on Electronic paper ...
It's most likely a tweaked version of the same.
The "E-paper" and "E-ink" crowd have been touting "cheap, flexible displays" for about fifteen years now. But all they ever seem to deliver are expensive, rigid displays inferior to other technologies.
Electrostatic oil displacement has been used before, most notably in the Eidophor projection TV system. This is a technology first demonstrated in 1939, yet in use through 1993. Big, heavy, expensive, and complicated, but could project TV pictures brighter than film. The image medium was an oil film written by an electron beam, used as a reflector for a lamp.
The basic idea is simple, but making it work required rotating smoothed oil film past the projection station, so there were big moving parts. All this had to happen in vacuum, but it wasn't a sealed unit, because the cathode had to be changed every 200 hours or so. So it needed high-vacuum pumps, vacuum locks, hours of startup, and a skilled operator.
...something else to drive up the price of oil!
...with the world being on the brink of an Oil Peak and everything...
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It uses liposuction wastes, so the fatter you are, the bigger the screen.
Oil based displays have been in use for years. In fact, there is famous prior art.
i doubt it. i have been told that oil and water don't mix. You might get an excitingly crunchy mayonnaise, though.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
so is it that different from this tech? Eink has been around for quite a while now.
You can't handle the truth.
good as a toy if you're rich and wanna be like... "LOOK WHAT I GOT!!!"
however they say they wanna use it for marketing purposes such as wrapping it around street furniture...
HOWEVER it also says in this part that it needs to be viewed from 180 (straight on)... which would make it invisible to passing vehicles almost always and i'd imagine since it's "not as bright as a standard LCD" that the sun light will just wash it out anways...
cool tech honestly.. but mostly useless I say
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Trying to fix or change something only guarantees and perpetuates it's existence
Right, because everyone knows that's it's impossible to make a profit if other people have access to the same technology you do. Just like how nobody is able to make profits publishing materials in the public domain.
No they don't. They report that LG Philips has done so. How hard is it to at least get the name of the subject company right?
And it's not even right in the headline. Sometimes I despair.
First to name the old SOD.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Looks like Sharp will have to rename their Aquos line!
And what does that word mean, when translated from the German?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
So this is the real OLED, an Oleo (oil) Display, or should that be OLEOD?
The problem is not that nobody can profit. The problem is that people who had nothing invested in the creation get to profit obscenely because they don't have to put any work into it.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Prior Art!
# cat
These things will become popular, and someone at NASA will forget that they require gravity to function...
"Shuttle to Mission Control: Orbital insertion in 3...2...1...ummmm.... Guys, we have a problem..."
"Dance like it hurts. Love like you need money. Work when people are watching." - Dogbert.
Just what everyone needs: A color Etch-a-Sketch monitor.
That's been tried. The Iconorama was a 1950s effort by the USAF to build a large-screen display. This was a computer-controlled Etch-a-Sketch like setup arranged as a projector. As with an Etch-A-Sketch, there was no selective erasing; when the image (which was mostly the tracks of attacking aircraft) became cluttered, the entire image was cleared and replaced with a newly drawn one. The previous big-screen attack plotting technology was an edge-lit Plexiglas map with people in on the back side plotting with grease pencils, so the Iconorama was a logical upgrade.
This was a mechanical device. The thing really was etching lines on a projection slide. "Erasure" was accomplished with a slide change to a new blank slide. The Iconorama was usually installed as a pair of units, both for backup and so that slide changes could be accomplished without waiting for a redraw.
I never actually saw one, but a 1970s evaluation of USAF large screen display systems once crossed my desk, and I recall the recommendation on the Iconorama being "Further systems of this type should not be procured."
Ref: Schmidt, George WN "The Iconorama System," Datamation 11, no. 1 (January 1965)