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

The OLPC screen already does this

[NixieBunny]

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.

Not to be ignored...

[pushing-robot]

...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.