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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.'"
More Twoson than Cupertino
They expect to get excellent blacks (the bane of digital display technologies) by using motor oil from my 1999 Saturn.
See my Home Theater
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.
It's Philips with one "L", by the way.
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.
Oil based displays have been in use for years. In fact, there is famous prior art.