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."

Comments

1000 words

[Verteiron]

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

Re:Ha!

[TheRaven64]

It's worth pointing out that RGB is an artefact of our retina, not our display technology. We have three different kinds of wavelength-specific sensors in our eyes which detect three fixed wavelengths (with some leakage to the sides). This is entirely a human thing; it is conceivable that a creature with a different evolutionary heritage might only have two wavelength sensors, or more than two.

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.