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Forget LCDs and LEDs, Here Come LPDs
waderoush writes "It's not every day you hear about a brand new display technology, but San Jose, CA-based Prysm came out of stealth mode yesterday to talk about its plans for manufacturing laser phosphor displays, or LPDs. The new devices, which the company will show off at the Integrated Systems Europe trade show in Amsterdam next month, reportedly use 25 percent as much electricity as equivalently-sized LCD screens. And they should be easier to manufacture too, since they don't have a backplane of transistors like LCD screens: the image is generated by a laser beam that sweeps across phosphor stripes under the control of a scanning mirror. The venture-funded startup, which plans to build and sell LPD screens under its own brand, is promoting them as a low-cost, low-maintenance way to display information in lobbies, airports, broadcast studios, command centers, and the like."
And they should be easier to manufacture too, since they don't have a backplane of transistors like LCD screens: the image is generated by a laser beam that sweeps across phosphor stripes under the control of a scanning mirror.
Of all the information I can find, no one is addressing the thickness of the display unit. I'm not saying it can't be done in close quarters but I'm basically inquiring how thick the unit must be in order for a laser beam to sweep across the phospher stripes that comprise the screen? Are we talking about moving back towards the sizes of back projector displays? Because it might not matter how efficient or awesome the picture display is to the consumer.
I guess that might explain why they're targeting airports and malls and not your living room.
I believe this particular patent image illustrates what I'm wondering about (Roger Hajjar is one of Prysm's founders).
CA-based Prysm came out of stealth mode yesterday
No one can fly under the radar when they need to patent their invention:
Laser displays using UV-excitable phosphors emitting visible colored light
Laser vector scanner systems with display screens having optical fluorescent materials
Optical designs for scanning beam display systems using fluorescent screens
Phosphor Compositions For Scanning Beam Displays
Prysm's founders (Amit Jain and Roger Hajjar) have had their names on quite a few display related patents since 2005. I'm excited a small startup can enter this market but I'm skeptical of the marketability due to the one drawback: a step backwards in compactness and style.
My work here is dung.
I had a similar idea once, except using electrons instead of lasers. It also required a vacuum tube for the electrons to travel through. I called it the Fluorescent Electron Cathode Konduit, or FECK for short. After considering it a while, I thought the concept was rather ludicrious and without merit, so abandoned it.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
About time! I'm sick of the lackluster displays in my command center.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
I didn't see any mention in the article - will it have this horrible weakness that CRTs had?
How is this better than Mitsubishi's LaserVue technology? It's basically a laser DLP to phosphor opposed to whatever material is used by Mitsubishi for a standard DLP screen. It even looks like the LaserVue uses less power than this.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
If it is new, it is unfortunate not only to reuse an acronym, but reusing one in the same domain.
There are only 17,576 three letter acronyms. We've been warning people for years of the need to upgrade to TLAv6, which allows for a wider range of three letter acronyms, including punctuation and numbers as well as unicode support. But many major buzzword providers have refused to upgrade. The last unique TLAs will be depleted within 18 months in our field. Thanks to AAT (Acronym Address Translation), there are already far more TLAs than there are available spaces -- we've been using CIAR (Classless Inter-Acronym Routing) to separate namespaces based on subject matter and field, but it's only a matter of time before even that fails.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
WTF... there was a time when people didn't want to move to LCD because of motion blur issues, problems that CRTs, a phosphor-based technology, didn't have. Now you're saying the exact opposite is the case? *boggle*
A gentleman? I think you missed a minor detail there...
guaranteed to be thicker than LED or LCD, and with phosphor delay; I want LED so that I can have [effectively] instant transitions. we can get back the delay effect with processing, but you can't eliminate phosphor delays when you've got phosphors.
There is essentially zero phosphor delay (I defy you to measure it ... I am a visual neuroscientist and have, so yes, it is possible, and no, it is not easy) on the scale of perceptual latencies. I believe the latency from excitation to phosphor emission is on the nanosecond scale. The typical perceptual delays in the early visual system (retina and the first few stages of processing in the brain) are on order of 30 milliseconds, going from the time photons enter the eye to the first wave of activity in primary visual cortex. Different orders of magnitude. Like 6. Phosphor delay is irrelevant.
What you are perhaps thinking of is the phosphor DECAY which is another thing entirely. When phosphors are excited (such as by an impinging electron or photon beam) the emitted brightness steps up almost instantaneously and then decays down through an exponential relaxation curve. That decay time can tend to blur images when too long, or induce eye bleed (to use the vernacular) when the update rate is too low. The thing is that phosphor decays can be adjusted by reformulating the compounds, and are determined ultimately at time of manufacturing. Very fast phosphors are available to support KHz updates, but also very slow ones (some older oscilloscopes have phosphor decay constants measured in seconds).
Contemporary LCD monitors have typically 2 or 3 frames of latency because of the push to get faster transition times. Those 5 ms response time LCDs get fast specs by overdriving the pixels in a highly controlled fashion, but one that requires knowing what is on the next handful of frames. Since we live in a causal world, that means introducing a 2-3 frame latency for processing within the display. Since the update rates on LCDs are typically 60 Hz, that's on order of 45 ms latency, a non-trivial fraction of the loop from visual perception to motor action (known in the gaming vernacular as twitch response). If you're watching a movie, that latency is irrelevant and wholly, entirely unperceived. If you're playing a game, then it is very important.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.