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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."
As usual, tell us when it has reached the market/got by the politicans/satisfy some patent/pleased some lawyers.
The article says that if you can produce light of any frequency you don't need colour filters. But this can't be the case, because a computer display needs to mix different frequencies (to produce white light, for example). That said, if they can control the proportion of incident white light that is reflected as white rather than coloured to a single frequency (or narrow band of frequencies), and with a simple light/dark filter (such as a black and white liquid crystal display), it could make a display that works on hue-saturation-value rather than red-green-blue. That would be interesting for the computer world, which has used boring RGB values to store image data for so long. I know that JPEG stores chrominance and luminance separately but I'm not aware of any file format (let alone graphics hardware) which works using HSV.
(BTW, does anyone know how to post a comment to an article using the new discussion system?)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
From the blurb, this sounds like the holy grail: reflective, full color gamut, and flexible to boot. Of course we all know what happens to 99% of breakthrough technologies that should be ready for the market in 2-4 years...
Who else looked at their Technologies page and saw:
Ela STINK
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, For you are crunchy and go well with ketchup.
I'm sure there'll be an 'illuminator' ring built into the bezel by at least the second wave of backlight-free screens.
There are just too many practical situations where it's convenient to be able to see your mobile screen in low-to-no ambient light situations.
meetings/classes with a projector in use
at the pub or theatre
in bed
outside at night
in a car/plane/train at night
etc.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Presumably the only reason that we have to use pixels, are because we didn't have any material (or any cost effective method of manipulating a meterial) that could produce colours of any desired frequency (until now). So they just used single coloured phosphors that could be adjusted to different brightnesses of a single colour, and when mixed with 2 other colours, can fool the eye into seeing any colour. If you can just set the colour directly, why bother using 3 separate colours to fake it instead.
which is totally what she said
Indeed. We need some sort of "Popular Science Magazine" factor for this stuff. Say, rate it a PSM2 for "got a patent and looking for investors", or PSFx50 for, say, anything "recently discovered" anywhere or, perhaps, PS-BS=2^132 for anything with the words "fusion" or "nanotechnology" in the title. (Or perhaps a YARP or NARP factor ...with apologies to "Hot Fuzz")
Might be better just to use bluetooth or a short cabled connection to hook into the goggles.. unless night vision can amplify the screen in enough detail when it's getting so little ambient light on it.
which is totally what she said
...we all need to have calibrated room lighting in order to get the proper colors to show up. No blue with that 60w incandescent!
Which brings me to...how does this work with fluorescent lighting? If you're using partial reflectivity, human eyes get the proper fractions of the constituents of the phosphors. If you're using interferometry, wouldn't you end up with huge dropouts in the visible spectrum?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Not to mention I'd prefer not to be emiting any more light than necessary, even in the infrared spectrum. All you'd need is an enemy with infrared vision and you might as well be using a regular laptop.
This sig is exactly seventy characters long and a real waste of space!
These photonic crystals are being built into arrays of pixels, where each pixel can, effectively, control its reflection color. So, a pixel can set itself to 'black' by adjusting its reflection to be outside the visible range (in the IR or UV), or can set itself to 'red' by tuning itself to have a reflection in the red region of the spectrum. So each pixel can take on a continum of color values:
(Black), Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, (Black)
To generate a white reflection (or non-spectral colors, like brown), adjacent pixels would still have to do what we do in modern displays: one would be Red, the other Blue, the other Green, and your eye would see reflected white light. So in a certain sense it has the same pixel-clustering limitation of current displays.
However it's better than current displays in some ways. First of all, if your image happens to be monochromatic (or parts of the display are monochromatic) then you don't have to be using three display pixels for a single image pixel... so in essence you can triple your display resolution. No doubt if such displays become common, algorithms will be developed that allow the display to maximize resolution when possible.
Perhaps more importantly, however, is that the color range is greater. A typical display mixes Red, Green and Blue. But the wavelength of the Red, Green, and Blue that are available are inherently limited. This means that although the display can generate many colors, it doesn't actually cover the full color range of colors that your eye can see. With this proposed display, you can adjust the Red, Green, and Blue wavelengths themselves. This provides access to a wider color range. For instance, when this display sets itself to 'orange' it will be a pure spectral orange, rather than an approximation generated by mixing the right amount of red, green, and blue.
And, of course, an obvious advantage is that this system is reflection-mode. Like paper, it doesn't generate light, merely reflects ambient light. This makes it ideal for reading outdoors, in natural light, etc.
So unless you're in the digital billboard industry, there's still alot more than 2-4 years of work to be done before it matters - if ever.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Is there anyone, anywhere on the web who ever tracks these technologies that are supposed to 'make it to the market soon'? I mean how about it. A site that finds out whether these new techs die, simmer down, or flourish.
There are a billion and one news sites out there, each reporting thousands of 'just in' stories each day. To have just one that actually tracks the progress of each technology would be amazing. Give each tech their own special page, and then add to them as further news comes in about the SAME tech. Perhaps add a progress bar in the form of a percentage of expected market release too. Pretty please? I'm just getting sick and tired of hearing about these amazing new futuristic gadgets, and then never hearing about them again.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc