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Amazon Shuts Down Liquavista, a Screen Technology Company It Had Acquired From Samsung in 2013 (the-digital-reader.com)
Liquavista, a screen tech company Amazon acquired five years ago, has shut down. Rumblings of Liquavista's potential closure have been bouncing around the e-reader community for more than six months. It remains unclear if Liquavista's work has been brought inside Amazon and moved to other parts of the organization, or if it was shut down entirely. Amazon declined to release further details. From a report: Launched in 2006 as a spin off from Philips, Liquavista had been developing a unique type of screen tech that was based on running an electric current through a liquid. This is called electrowetting technology, which is a fancy way of saying that each pixel in a Liquavista screen contained 3 liquids (red, green, blue), and that the color shown by a pixel depended on the amount of power fed into each liquid. [...] The screens were originally being developed as a solution to the battery life issue. Mobile battery life was terrible back in the pre-iPad, pre-iPhone, and pre-netbook era, and people were willing to pay a premium for a screen which used less power than typical LCD screens.
Mobile battery life is still terrible, and their screens are still the largest contributors to their power consumption. If a Mirasol or Liquavista display could remove that factor, it would be a great selling point for a high-end mobile phone.
Except that Mirasol displays were crap. To quote Wikipedia:
Mirasol screens were only able to produce 60 Hz video but it quickly drained the battery. Devices that used the screen have colors that look washed out, so the technology never saw mainstream support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yeah, sounds like a real winner of a technology.
Some 15-20 years ago they bought a company with a display based on, I think, butterfly wings (it's been a while, forgive my memory). I worked there at the time, and a friend of mine ended up software lead on it. If everything was good the tech worked very well, you could see your phone in daylight with less battery than using it in a darkened room.
But
Key phrase: "When things were good". When things weren't good you couldn't see the screen for shit. Go out into the sunlight for that nice, bright display? The screen warmed up and all those butterfly cells (or whatever) quit working. Voltage/current changed? Same thing. Go into a darkened room? Regular screens worked fine, who needs fancy ass butterfly wings.
I could google the name of that but, hell I'm not doing anything right now. Mirasol. Google that, found a link to "what went wrong" but too tired to figure out how to turn it into an HTML link.
Funny thing is, that link says video performance sucked. I assume that was Mediaflow, which if memory serves was a year or two after Mirasol crapped out. The real problem was that Mirasol flat out didn't work outside of the lab.