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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."
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
"The beauty of the device is that it can produce the whole spectrum of colors, even ultraviolet and infrared light"
Sweet, now we can get a virus on our computers that gives us sunburn.
I wonder if Hawaiian Tropic will hire me as a blackhat to ensure they get increased sales from computer users. Maybe they'll introduce me to the girls.
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
I see you have a +5 insightful, so this is for you and everyone who agrees with you. Get out of the /. science section if you do not want to hear about this stuff till it hits market. Two years from now if this display is good enough to be sold, you can read about it in /. hardware. Many of us enjoy hearing of new discoveries even if they may never make it to market.
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
Doesn't use of IE6 lead to automatic revocation of Slashdot privileges? Just sayin'...