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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."
Every time I hear about the great research that MS does I think about how great it is that they are putting their money into these IT projects. Then I stop and think "wait a minute, will this only work on Windows?"
Well it seems obvious to me that a display technology should not be impacted by an OS but then my more synical nature takes over and asks if there is SOMEHOW a way that they could make this a Windows only thing.
Well is it possible?
http://projectleader.wordpress.com
It says that it uses mirrors? Will these new LCDs suffer rainbows now like single-chip DLP projects?
I always said that Microsoft was pretty good as a hardware company.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
That's one reason it gets such good battery life. It uses the magic of diffraction gratings to use nearly all the light that it receives. I read that the creator of the screen is in the process of commercializing it, and I can't wait for it to get into the world of readily-available products.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
...is the faster switching speed. Considering this prototype has a ~1ms switching time, and LED backlights are already popular, it may be feasible to create, in effect, a flat panel DLP display by rapidly cycling the backlight color.
Current flat panel displays have three sub-pixels in every pixel. One only allows red light, one blue, and one green. It's very inefficient: You need three LCD elements to display each pixel, and two-thirds of the backlight is blocked outright by the color filters.
With a color-cycling display, every element displays every color in turn, so (all else being equal) you triple the resolution *and* the efficiency.
The only downside is a possible rainbow effect if the display does not cycle colors quickly enough.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Do you have a source for this number? It wasn't in the TFA that I could see.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Anna Pyayt led the research as part of her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Washington in collaboration with two Microsoft engineers. Microsoft funded the work and has also applied for a patent on the technology.
See, they may not manufacture it themselves, but they'll certainly be getting license fees for each unit sold...
They need something to make up for their lack of Vista sales.
Who knows, maybe the display will incorporate a TCPA/Palladium chip, so a licensed OS will be required also.
e.g. For an OS to be able to display something on this type of the monitor, the OS vendor must license the patent and pay the fee
And support the TCPA specs.
What better way to push Vista than to make the hardware explicitly require it? XP doesn't support the advanced DRM required for the more modern lines of efficient displays (which will eventually be mandated by law, just like laws will eventually be passed banning traditional lightbulbs).
If this really works like a telescope, then wouldn't that mean the display would have a very low viewable angle? After all, a telescope is just a telephoto lens. And telephoto lenses have a narrow field-of-view.
So, you'd probably have to look directly at the display from a perpendicular angle. Move a little to the side, and you're going to lose the image altogether, or have it severely degraded. LCDs are already bad enough in this respect.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Where have you been? OLEDs are easy to make these days. There was even an article on PRINTING OLEDs on poster size paper some months back.
I have no clue why. Dell/HP/Logitech mice, meh, they're essentially disposable -- I get a new one with every new computer because they're generally on their last legs by then. Persistent gunk issues, laser malfunctioning when running over certain colors, total hardware failure, button responsiveness drops, what have you.
I got a Microsoft laser mouse for ~$50 back in, crikey, must have been about 2000. It isn't a gamer anything -- just two buttons and a wheel -- but that thing is an absolute tank. If its reliability continues like it has through the last near decade of heavy, heavy use it might very well be the last mouse I ever buy.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Something that was invented 20 years ago. I wonder if Texas Instruments have their lawyers on standby...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLP
'Invention' is compatible with open source 'schtuf', but the GP is right that Linux is a unix-clone and therefore, limited in the amount of (software) invention it will allow. Granted, /any/ OS is limited and unix is a better choice than most, but there /are/ better models out there, including, ironically, models invented by the very inventors of unix that were already available when Linux was still in its infancy. All you get from cloning unix is a lot of eyeballs and a lot of already compilable source-code. But many choices of better desktop-OS-es and better server-OS-es and better embedded-OS-es have since come and gone.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.