Microsoft Engineers Invent Displays That Top LCDs For Efficiency

MechEMark writes with this excerpt from a hope-inspiring article at the IEEE Spectrum, which says "Researchers from Microsoft say they've built a prototype of a display screen using a technology that essentially mimics the optics in a telescope but at the scale of individual display pixels. The result is a display that is faster and more energy efficient than a liquid crystal display, or LCD, according to research reported yesterday in Nature Photonics ... The design greatly increases the amount of backlight that reaches the screen. The researchers were able to get about 36 percent of the backlight out of a pixel, more than three times as much light as an LCD can deliver. But Microsoft senior research engineer Michael Sinclair says that through design improvements, he expects that number to go up — theoretically, as high as 75 percent."

Comments

OLEDs? SEDs?

[renoX]

OLEDs and SEDs have many advantages over LCD (the big disadvantage being that they're not mass-produced cheaply currently: OLEDs are produced but they're not cheap)..

So I'm not very excited about a technology which only cuts the power consumption of LCDs..

Re:OLEDs? SEDs?

[MrNiCeGUi]

By the same token Linux should have never appeared since Hurd was just around the corner. But hurd never came and Linux stole its thunder.

In the marketplace success is very dependent on price. If OLED does not get cheaper and easier to manufacture faster than five years, not to mention in larger sizes and with longer life, this improvement may well find a very nice place if it does come on said schedule.

What's true also is that a lot of these articles are just "look at what cool things we have developed in our lab" and there is no real intention of ever using them besides PR. Which may very well be the case with OLED, which was trumped up for as long as I can remember and besides a few little screens we haven't seen anything.

contrast ratio: 20:1

[YesIAmAScript]

And that's uselessly low.

It's easy to make an LCD more efficient, just block less light. The problem is that the contrast ratio is the difference between the least amount of light you can block and the most you can block. They've just basically made a system that isn't capable of blocking much light and so it's brighter. But at the expense of the contrast ratio.

Re:contrast ratio: 20:1

[scrib]

Since you didn't include a reference, it took a bit of searching to find a good source. This source also has some good graphics about how the display works.

"The first prototype's contrast ratio was 20:1, mainly due to the use of non-collimated back light. This was a limitation of the current prototype, not of the technology. This is supported by simulations ... which show that a ratio of at least 800:1 is possible."

20:1 may not be particularly useful, but 800:1 is certainly usable, and modified with "at least" makes this a technology "at least" worthy watching for future development. It's not reasonable to judge a technology by its first prototype.

Re:DLP rainbows

[originalTMAN]

unlikey for three reasons 1.) rainbow effect only exists in ("slow") single chip DLP's because, only one color is on at any given time. 2.) the mirrors don't spin and reflect per say, they bend to focus. 3.) the switching time is fast- 600fps fast- so even if they're were rainbows which they're shouldn't be, you wouldn't be able to see them because it is so far above the flicker fusion threshhold.

Re:OLED

[Anpheus]

Yeah but they're a pain to manufacture still (still stuck to small form factors,) expensive for the number of square inches you get, hard to get really awesome brightness out of and then there's still problems with one of the colors (blue, I believe) fading much faster than the others.

For that matter, aren't quantum dot based displays a lot more efficient? Well, yes. But.

Re:OS Agnostic?

[RobertM1968]

Your quite valid point aside, here's another one to throw into the mix...

Dont OLEDs obsolete this technology already? And I am pretty sure they get more than just blue out of an OLED display... :-)

Re:OS Agnostic?

[nmg196]

Inferior don't you mean? - Hence the fact that they're hardly used. They're really expensive and only last a few thousand hours before fading. They also bring back the burn-in problems which we thought we'd long since forgotten from phosphor based displays. Hence, if I walk into a local shop, they have NO OLED screens at all.

They tend to only be used in things with an inherently short lifespan, eg mobile phones, which are rarely used after a 2-3 years. Nobody would buy a TV which is quarter as bright after 2 years and has a channel logo burnt into the top left.

F-Lock?

[PRMan]

It's not that F-Lock is so bad, it's the fact that it is ON BY DEFAULT EVERY TIME YOU BOOT THE FRIGGIN PC that's the problem.

The keyboard I'm on right now (a Logitech) has the F-Lock key and I never think about it because it remembers the setting between reboots.