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OLPC Spinoff Pixel Qi Merges E-ink With LCD
MaryBethP writes with some tasty prototype photos and info about the new OLPC spin off "Pixel Qi" that is combining the best of e-ink and traditional LCD displays. "The screen can work as a traditional backlit LCD when indoors, can have that backlight disabled to be perfectly visible outdoors (shown after the break), and, as its pièce de résistance, can be toggled into an energy-efficient 'epaper' mode. How exactly the company is fitting these seemingly disparate slices of technology into a single 10.1-inch screen is something of a mystery, but we're guessing much will be answered next week ahead of a planned product launch by the end of the year. Color us intrigued."
LCD is traditional?
Technoli
As far as I know, e-Ink is a marketing name for a specific piece of technology using colored particles and static electricity. Somehow I'm not so sure that this is the technology used here, it looks more like different ways of handling an LCD than a layer of e-Ink. I would not know how you could make a sheet of e-Ink invisible for the eye, and it seems this is required. The screen in the photo does not look like digital paper either.
My money is on B/W LCD without (significant) back-lighting.
The B/W e-paper and the high-contrast Color LCD - sounds like the color is used in both the backlit and non-lit versions, while the e-paper is used to get the high efficiency mode.
I wonder what the refresh rates on each of these displays is?
I'm guessing the refresh rate on the e-paper is way low if it uses so little power. Black to White in 250ms maybe?
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
Considering the linked article IS the Engadget one... And the little grey bar is usually meant to mean it's a quote, then yes, it IS a copy-paste. Duh.
Alright, maybe I was a bit hasty, I see that they did link to Engadget - I didn't see "Engadget" in the summary so I figured someone was just passing it off as their own writing. But should it have at least been mentioned that it was via Engadget, rather than leaving the reader to actually follow the link to see where the text came from? How does that work?
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Are we just copying and pasting now? WTF?
You must be new here.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be. -PF
This is why you should have RTFA before going nuts over plagiarism.
Things like this can sometimes lead to law getting involved. (but luckily, Slashdot staff aren't asses (most of the time))
Anonymous Coward casts Flee.
Flee was successful.
Are we just copying and pasting now? WTF?
Don't be ridiculous. If we'd just been copying and pasting, it would have looked like this (emphasis added):
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
This looks to me exactly like the XO, but with a better color display.
I was intrigued 2 years ago when i got my XO.
Now it is simply what I hoped would happen, same tech, but with focus on image quality and resolution over inexpensiveness.
On the XO, the wavy lines can become quite the hassle.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I wonder if you can convert this one into a economically helpful Mean Green Hacking Machine like the OLPC
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Now all we need is someone to to make a netbook with an arm processor, one of these as the screen, and solar panels on the back and we'd be all set.
ACRONYMS?
accumulated contradictory rhetoric ostensibly nears yearly massive shitstorm?
Lots of people just get confused and thing e-Ink == epaper, which is not true.
You use one to write and the other to write on.
Looking at power consumption of LCD's by laptops as percentage of total power consumption it isn't much for most modern laptops (5-0.5 watts versus 50-20 whats for a system under moderate load) and its going down on average with LED backlights becoming more common. It Using this sort of black and white only mode only really makes sense for ultra low power system.
That being said, it would be killer on a laptop with an embedded SplashTop.
While the Pixel Qi displays are (we believe) remarkable and can and will really serve as exceptional e-paper displays, there is no relationship to E-Ink. Not the company and not the electrophoretic technology that E-Ink uses.
John Ryan
Pixel Qi Corp.
Taiwan
(Filed as anonymous coward, because I *do* have a separate /. personal account.)
It's not "e-ink", which is an electrophoretic display, it's an LCD that can be run in two different modes: reflective and with backlight. When it's used with a backlight, the LCD elements are colored, and when used without, they are not colored. It's kind of a hack, but it's a useful hack. In terms of resolution, it doesn't actually help much, since you can do color antialiasing on a color LCD anyway. It's good for battery life, though.
The OLPC screens already work that way. I'm not sure what they are announcing. Maybe they just needed a press release.
The question I have is: when is there going to be an EEE PC with one of these screens? That would be really useful.
I predict that the 3qi technology is going to be a real game-changer. The daylight-readable screen means you will be taking your netbook into many more places and situations than you ever had before. The e-paper mode means that you can truly use your netbook as a Kindle-like device -- only better, because then it will be a true PC, and not a purpose-built appliance. The low power, full-motion color mode means you'll be able to use your netbook to watch video or play games without sucking down twice the cost of your netbook in extra batteries.
Combine this with very low cost (fabless) construction techniques, and you've got a real winner.
Go, Mary Jo!
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
This looks interesting. For some reason, low-power displays just fascinate the heck out of me. I can think of so many neat projects to create out of them. (eInk displays would be great, except that they are horribly expensive right now.)
One display that I'd love to get more information on is the one in Google's new electronic conference room signs. It looks and acts just like a standard low-resolution LCD display, except the image is retained even when power is completely removed. I did some research and I found the company that apparently makes them, but I never was able to figure out exactly how to buy a development kit or sample.
There are already laptops with translucent screens that let ambient light substitute for the backlight, so you can e.g. turn off the backlight entirely when you're outside. As the owner of a Japanese Toshiba Dynabook SS RX2, I can confirm that it works as described -- I'm beginning to wonder if they actually enforce "truth in advertising" over here or something -- and is actually easier on my eyes than using the backlight indoors.