LG Phillips Patents Oil and Water Display

jordanhh writes "Tech.co.uk reports that LG Phillips has filed a patent for a new type of thin, flexible display. 'The pixels are made from tiny plastic cells filled with minute amounts of oil and water. The oil floats on the surface of the water and shrouds the colored surface underneath it. When electricity is applied across the cell, the oil moves aside, changing the color of the pixel.'"

Thanks for the link

[oneiros27]

That makes much more sense. The one from tech.co.uk talks about floating, which would make it useless for the applications mentioned.

('street furniture' => 'bus stops') ie. vertical, not horizontal mounting

One "L"!

[MaWeiTao]

It's Philips with one "L", by the way.

Re:Well this sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

n the 1990s another type of electronic paper was invented by Joseph Jacobson, who later co-founded the corporation E Ink which formed a partnership with Philips Components two years later to develop and market the technology. In 2005, Philips sold the electronic paper business as well as its related patents to Prime View International. This used tiny microcapsules filled with electrically charged white particles suspended in a colored oil.[3] In early versions, the underlying circuitry controls whether the white particles were at the top of the capsule (so it looked white to the viewer) or at the bottom of the capsule (so the viewer saw the color of the oil). This was essentially a reintroduction of the well-known electrophoretic display technology, but the use of microcapsules allowed the display to be used on flexible plastic sheets instead of glass. ... From the wikipedia entry on Electronic paper ...

It's most likely a tweaked version of the same.

Where's the "cheap" part?

[Animats]

The "E-paper" and "E-ink" crowd have been touting "cheap, flexible displays" for about fifteen years now. But all they ever seem to deliver are expensive, rigid displays inferior to other technologies.

Electrostatic oil displacement has been used before, most notably in the Eidophor [spgv.com] projection TV system. This is a technology first demonstrated in 1939, yet in use through 1993. Big, heavy, expensive, and complicated, but could project TV pictures brighter than film. The image medium was an oil film written by an electron beam, used as a reflector for a lamp.

The basic idea is simple, but making it work required rotating smoothed oil film past the projection station, so there were big moving parts. All this had to happen in vacuum, but it wasn't a sealed unit, because the cathode had to be changed every 200 hours or so. So it needed high-vacuum pumps, vacuum locks, hours of startup, and a skilled operator.

Re:eink?

[the eric conspiracy]

If you think black and white is different from color, yes.