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Qualcomm's Butterfly Wing Display Gets Nearer
holy_calamity writes "Technology Review has an update on a screen technology from Qualcomm called Mirasol that delivers LCD-like colors and video but sips power like e-ink. Demonstration Android tablets with 5.7 inch Mirasol displays apparently held up well in bright light and were responsive enough for gaming. Qualcomm are in the process of building a $1 billion new factory to make the screens, which should appear in devices from phone and tablet makers next year."
Between this and a couple of other low power passive displays working their way to market, one of them is going to succeed. And change everything.
The display is one of the biggest power hogs right now. The radios in cell phones are also pretty hungry but having an always on display will be game changing. Then when you consider the work on various memory techs that eliminate idle current and the lifetime issues with flash, things are going to continue to be very interesting in the tech world.
Democrat delenda est
Am I the only one who wants backlight in his tablet? E-Ink is all nice and good, but its stupid to have to turn the lights on to read from an electronic device...
This is great! I keep a Sony Reader, since it accepts SD cards, loaded with survival manuals, medical books, car/motorcycle repair manuals, only problem is most of the files are in PDF format, which the device isn't too great at displaying. Combine this screen in a device with large storage and battery, solar charging option and I'm all set Unless Ron Paul continues his trend, he's in second in Iowa, then I'll have no need for such a thing.
Oh wow. A techno survivalist nutjob. Here on Slashdot.
Sorry guy, the Aliens have already contacted the Illuminati. NO digital devices will be allowed to the masses. Not even Ron Paul can save us now.
We're doomed.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
They're just now building the factory, and you expect the product to be in devices next year? That would be the smoothest production bring-up in history. Maybe in 2013.
Make it large enough to handle textbook content presented at a readable size (typically letter-sized pages), and I'd be all over it, as long as it allowed me to upload my own pdf's to it, and, perhaps no less important, as long as it wasn't priced ridiculously high. And yeah, I know there's some e-ink readers oout there with displays nearly that big, but the current state of affairs with eink displays totally blows. Page refreshes are so slow that I'd rather carry 20 lbs worth of textbooks than try to use an eink reader for anything other than the reading of fiction.
A 14" screen would be ideal... although with a respectable resolution, a 10-11" one might also be able to suffice.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Considering the vast majority of people are perfectly happy with 1920x1080 on a 50" screen, I doubt people will really care much if their 10" screen is any higher than that.
The BIGGEST complaint/problem with smartphones today is the lower battery life. If I could choose between doubling the resolution on my phone and doubling the battery life, I would choose the battery life in a heartbeat.
I can't wait for this tech to get into tablets. Just a few of the advantages I'm expecting (and here's hoping there will be no disappointments)
1. I stare at an LCD screen all day, and I really detest the backlight. This is what prevents me from reading on a "tablet". Mirasol will fix that.
2. The Kindle's e-ink display, even though it didn't have colour, was simply amazing. However, the slow refresh rates combined with the lack of colour, made it too special purpose. Mirasol fixes all that, allowing for a general purpose tablet + e-reader and I can't imagine why that wouldn't succeed.
3. The paper like effect (which I assume Mirasol will have), will be so much easier on the eyes - meaning less eye strain. Given a choice between ruining my eye sight and enduring bad colour, I'll choose bad colour anytime.
4. We can go back to the look & feel of paper without the associated wastage (trees cut down etc. etc). One "electronic book" to substitute them all.
5. A battery life comparable in the kindle range instead of the lcd range would be an added bonus, but not a deal breaker.
6. Resolution however is important. I assume that high res screens will be available.
7. Some form of built-in illumination in the absence of ambient light.
The reason why Apple needs 2048x1536, and not, say, 1980x1200, is because with the latter they cannot easily scale up existing apps with a simple 2x factor.
(flexible layouts? what's that?)
This page explains near the end: http://www.mirasoldisplays.com/mobile-display-imod-technology
It's bistable, so it retains memory of the image without needing power (or only a little power), which is similar to e-ink.
But it switches much faster than e-ink, so it can do video, presumably consuming power for the regions which change.
We've been hearing about this technology for years now, and unfortunately it's taken it so long to get to market that I think they've missed their market window.
Smartphones and tablets, spurred on in large part by Apple, have entered into an arms race of display quality with consumer displays the likes has never been seen before. The sort of displays our mobile devices have make our computer monitors look shameful, with AMOLED pushing the boundaries in terms of true blacks and contrast ratios and viewing angles, and ever-higher resolutions pushing DPIs to the boundaries of human sight. Most LCD IPS displays, which are the cream of the crop for desktop monitors and better than any flat-screen TV, are really just average at best these days in the mobile world.
The Mirasol displays, at least the ones that have been demoed, have never been the highest quality displays. Their two huge advantages are daylight-readability and low power-consumption. Those are two very positive traits, but at this stage, I don't really foresee anything outside of a niche market giving up ordinary-circumstance display quality for these.
This technology uses "interferometric modulators", which I cannot hear in anything but Marvin the Martian's voice.
About a lot of things, actually.
Not dithering -- just cumulative addition. The more reflecting elements there are, the more color you get. So each pixel is a series of imod elements, arrays of R, G and B. Black is all off; dark color is just a few on... medium color is half of 'em on... bright color is all of 'em on.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No. The resonance (physical size) of the cavity controls the color; it doesn't depend upon how many layers are in there.
Yes and no (mostly no.) Look at your LCD screen. See that bright, burn-your-eyes out white capability? That comes from r,g and b spots. Meaning, each spot is only emitting 1/3 of the light that it takes to be white, or, in your concept, you're only seeing 1/3 as "white" as you could be (well, not exactly, since our eyes are nonlinear between red, green and blue, but anyway...) Still makes for a nice white. Bottom line: You don't have to reflect every photon to make a decent white. And in fact, paper reflects a lot of them at angles that don't hit your eyes, so you're not getting them all there, either. The "brightness" of the white here will depend on how wide the reflected photons spread on the way back out of the cells. Or to look at it another way, if the light reflection angle is 1/3 of the light capture angle, it'll seem perfectly white to you. The RGB nature of them isn't really the limiting factor.
No. Each pixel holds many elements. So the color of the pixel doesn't depend upon its neighbors.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That's what makes them far more dangerous.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
What are the 3 scariest things to a SysAdmin?
1. An Electrical Engineer with a software patch.
2. A Programmer with a soldering iron.
3. A user with an idea.
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.