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."

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[AlphaWolf_HK]

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.

Re:Yeah, I only like my colors 100% "pure"

[jpapon]

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.

Re:Why do we need this?

[gstrickler]

Because the gamut [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org], 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.