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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!
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.
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
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
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!
Oil based displays have been in use for years. In fact, there is famous prior art.
If you think black and white is different from color, yes.
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
Looks like Sharp will have to rename their Aquos line!