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Display Makers To Use Quantum Dots For Efficiency and Color Depth

ArmageddonLord writes with this news from the IEEE Spectrum, reporting on display industry gathering Display Week: "Liquid crystal displays dominate today's big, bright world of color TVs. But they're inefficient and don't produce the vibrant, richly hued images of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens, which are expensive to make in large sizes. Now, a handful of start-up companies aim to improve the LCD by adding quantum dots, the light-emitting semiconductor nanocrystals that shine pure colors when excited by electric current or light. When integrated into the back of LCD panels, the quantum dots promise to cut power consumption in half while generating 50 percent more colors. Quantum-dot developer Nanosys says an LCD film it developed with 3M is now being tested, and a 17-inch notebook incorporating the technology should be on shelves by year's end."

9 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Static images by AlphaWolf_HK · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Any word on burn-in, permanent image persistence, or uneven aging? That's my main concern with OLED and Plasma.

    LCD can get image persistence if it shows the same image for very long periods of time (e.g. 24 hours) but on most displays it is only temporary.

    I'd be interested to hear if quantum dot might have any of these issues.

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  2. Re:Quantum dots? by Scytheford · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually you're dead wrong. Quantum dots are A Thing. Here's how to make them in a basic lab: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNuoYm7Su4o

  3. The problem with quantum dots... by outsider007 · · Score: 5, Funny

    You won't know how many pixels are dead until you open the box.

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  4. Re:Quantum dots? by Scytheford · · Score: 5, Informative

    Because the energy levels of the electrons are at quantum levels. They transition between these levels and emit light. This is an absolutely correct usage of the word "quantum". You are a foolish troll.

  5. Re:Yeah, I only like my colors 100% "pure" by jpapon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Oh, and even if what you were saying was true, it wouldn't really change the resolution at all. That's not how sampling works. If your display is 1024*768, you have that many pixels. Making it so each pixel can show any color wouldn't really increase the resolution. Your ability to resolve spatial changes in color is lower than in intensity. So adding "color spatial resolution" is not equivalent to adding "intensity spatial resolution" - this is why many encoding schemes use more bits for intensity than color information - it's more efficient.

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  6. Re:Yeah, I only like my colors 100% "pure" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you're going to call somebody out for being wrong, you might want to actually do some research. Those 1024x768 pixels are made up of basically triple that in terms of red, green and blue sites that emit the actual light. If you replace those with ones that can handle the entire gamut you would need a third of them and you lose the overhead from having to have individual shutters on each one.

  7. Re:Yeah, I only like my colors 100% "pure" by Kjella · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, yes and no the chart is technically not wrong if you have a single frequency light source like a laser. The trouble is that most real world objects emit a spectrum of light. This chart shows the cone response relative to frequency so the cone's response is an integral over the spectrum*sensitivity. The problem is that in all commonly current display technologies (CRT, LCD, LED, OLED, 3-chip DLP) you only have a fixed number of frequencies to work with. For example say you have red (600nm), green (540nm) and blue (440nm). Well, it turns out you can't actually produce all combinations with just three wavelengths as real world objects do with infinite wavelengths.

    The reason for this if you look at the response chart is that the curves overlap, you can't simply decompose them into three components you can set individually. Any wavelength you send to stimulate the M cones also stimulate the S or L cones. And our vision is particularly good at picking up on those differences, it's a two-stage process like illustrated here. Even if the mix in the SML cones is mostly right the Cg and Cb cells are extremely good at picking up on differences in the relative mix. Ideally you'd like more wavelengths or white light + a color wheel like used in single chip DLP, but it's not that easy and you need a signal with the extended information like xvYCC.

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  8. Re:Quantum dots? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The term is related to Quantum Well and Quantum Wire. A quantum well is a system where particles (electrons) are confined to move in 2D by two very large potential barriers on either side of the well. It's generally one of the first systems studied in quantum mechanics. Quantum wires are like quantum wells except the potential barriers also exist in a second dimension, so that the particle is confined to move in 1D along the "wire". A quantum dot is a small box which is confined by potential barriers in all directions so that the electron can only exist within the extremely small dot.

    Obviously quantum dots are going to be around the nm range so that they can actually confine the particles in any meaningful sense, but the point is the effects that QM predicts for that particular configuration. The size and shape of the dot allows us to precisely tweak the energy levels and wavefunction symmetries involved, something fairly particular to the "nano 3D potential barrier" system.

  9. Re:Why do we need this? by gstrickler · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Because the gamut of 24-bit RGB doesn't cover the entire range of visible colors and intensities. While we can only distinguish ~ 8M colors, we can distinguish a huge range of intensities. 24-bit displays cover 16M colors AND intensities, so in this case, 16M is not > 8M because they're counting different things.

    While current displays are adequate for most purposes, they do not display all of the colors we can see, nor all the intensities we can see. Typical displays only cover 45%-75% of the AdobeRGB (1998) color-space, which itself is a subset of the visible gamut. Some (more expensive) displays cover a greater percentage of the visible range, but none cover the entire range.

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