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Stretching Crystals Promise Bendy, Full-Color Displays
NewScientist is reporting that a new approach to crystal formation could help create power-efficient, flexible color displays. These new photonic crystals, structured similar to opals, can be tuned by adjusting the gaps between the crystals. "The beauty of the device is that it can produce the whole spectrum of colors, even ultraviolet and infrared light, using only incident light. As a result, the expensive color filters used in every other color display on the market today, are no longer needed. And because the displays use only reflected ambient light, no power is wasted on back-lighting, as in today's mobile phones, for example. 'They can be viewed just as well in bright sunlight as in indoor light,' team member André Arsenault of the University of Toronto told New Scientist."
This story is worthless without pictures.
There are none here, although there's no shortage of sales brochure style summaries:
http://www.opalux.com/technologies.php
End of lesson. You may press the button.
except don't computer display all their colors by limiting any given spot to one frequency, and then altering the brightness of that spot. Specifically there are static spots for each pixel - one red, green and blue. Their frequencies remain, only their brightnesses change - and we get a lot of colors from them.
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After thinking about it more, I see what you mean. Black, white and greys aren't colours in the visual spectrum, rather white needs to be made from a mix of other colours, and black is the absence of colour.. so simply being able to set a colour isn't enough, you need to control the brightness and still need to be able to mix different frequencies. So if you didn't have some kind of filter then you'd have a pretty weird looking display. Should have known better than to think a low /. id'er needed me to explain things :P
which is totally what she said
I appreciate your desire for real technology rather than vaporware. However this recent publication is interesting scientifically even if it doesn't pan out into useful technology.
Having said that, I would like to point out that this design idea is further along than many (most?) of the "display tech of the week" articles we read. In particular, in the actual scientific paper they show working prototype systems with multi-pixel displays. Their devices, while prototypes, have realistic parameters: 0.3 mm pixel size; 25 micron pixel resolution; 0-3 V switching requirement; stable over hundreds of switching cycles; etc.
Furthermore, they have started a company to begin building real technology: Opalux. Now, I acknowledge that many startups fail... however this technology seems relatively workable, and is further along than many other ideas I've seen.
To accurately represent any given colour, you need an infinite number of values, not just three, since a colour is the sum of an arbitrary number of wavelengths of light. The red cones in our eyes, for example, detect light at around 580nm. If a photon with a wavelength of 590nm hits the red cone, then it is perceived as being a slightly weaker 580nm signal, rather than a different colour. This lets us fool our eyes into thinking they are seeing the full range of colours when they are only seeing three in a different wavelengths with different amplitudes. A species which saw colours properly would find it much harder to design a colour display.
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I posted a comment to slashdot more than ten years ago about the potential of passive displays that only reflect ambient light, suggesting that there would be potential for display development. Glad to see my prognostication turned out to be true.
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