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LG Phillips Patents Oil and Water Display

Posted by kdawson on from the mixing-it-up dept.

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.'"

15 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Re:oil and water by Applekid · · Score: 4, Funny

    What? No vinegar? Don't know about the display quality, but it's already clearly an inferior salad.
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  2. Confusing phrasing by c0d3h4x0r · · Score: 3, Funny

    Am I the only one who read this as LG Phillips Patents Oil and Water Display ?

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    1. Re:Confusing phrasing by Anonymous+McCartneyf · · Score: 3, Funny

      No, that's what it actually says. The headline doesn't have boldface, though.
      At least it isn't "British Left Waffles on Falklands."

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    2. Re:Confusing phrasing by Kingrames · · Score: 3, Funny

      Another funny real headline:
      "Carpenter nails wife, kills self."

      The headline guy was fired for that one.

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    3. Re:Confusing phrasing by Gordonjcp · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Needs a little introduction, but here goes - there is a fairly low-end football team in Scotland called Inverness Caledonian Thistle, and a much much better team called Glasgow Celtic. Now as it happens, Inverness Caley were drawn against Celtic for a particular match, and things were, to be honest, looking like a bit of a foregone conclusion.

      A chap I know is one of the sports writers for the daily red-top rag, The Daily Record. Like most tabloids, about a quarter of it is sports pages, and what they do to get the issue out quickly is have two whole back pages set up - one talking about Celtic's win, one talking about Inverness Caley's win (should it happen). So they're sitting in the office the night before the match, writing up headlines to use for the next day. One of my mate's colleagues says "Oh, well it's never ever going to happen, but - 'Super Caley Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious'?"

      Celtic basically needn't have turned up. Inverness Caledonian beat them 4-1, and the headline went out.

  3. "I can dig that..." by starglider29a · · Score: 3, Funny

    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!

  4. Excellent Blacks by Innova · · Score: 5, Funny

    They expect to get excellent blacks (the bane of digital display technologies) by using motor oil from my 1999 Saturn.

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  5. Last Year? by bigtomrodney · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This was the big news from Philips/LG last year. Did they score another patent on this or is it the same one?

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  6. Re:Well this sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. One "L"! by MaWeiTao · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's Philips with one "L", by the way.

  8. Where's the "cheap" part? by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Prior Art by skeeto · · Score: 4, Funny

    Oil based displays have been in use for years. In fact, there is famous prior art.

    1. Re:Prior Art by Anonymous+McCartneyf · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yeah, but the burn-in rate for oil-on-canvas monitors is horrific.

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  10. Re:Ugh by DerekLyons · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Not every video application needs to be able to sustain high framerates.

  11. crap... by ItsLenny · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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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