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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."
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?
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).
You mean require HDCP? Why would they do that? So that suddenly 75% (guess) of their customer base couldn't use their choice of monitor? For what possible gain?
HDCP is only required when you play blu-ray or hd-dvd discs. I suppose Microsoft could agree to require it on DRMed media -- but they've never even hinted that they would be stupid enough to require it for general purpose computing. What would be the point?!
Honestly, this train of thought looks like the paranoid rantings of a delusional conspiracy theorist.
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.
'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.