Chameleon Liquid Could Replace LCDs 175
InvisblePinkUnicorn writes "NewScientist reports on a color-changing liquid that could cheaply replace the color components of standard LCDs. According to researchers at UC Riverside, the liquid 'contains tiny iron oxide particles coated with plastic. It is cheap and easy to make, and could also be used in flexible, rewritable, electronic paper.' From the article: 'The opposing forces of electrostatic repulsion [in the plastic] and magnetic attraction [in the iron oxide] result in the particles arranging themselves into an ordered structure, known as a colloidal "photonic crystal". The colloidal crystal reflects light because the spacing between neighboring particles in the structure is equivalent to the wavelength of light. Also, tuning the spacing slightly alters the exact wavelength, or colour, of light that is reflected. This can easily be done by varying the strength of the magnetic field applied to the crystal.'"
Liquid Paper already exists.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Liquid Paper already exists.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Liquid Paper already exists.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Wite-Out vs. White-out (Score:2)
A whiteout is a severe snow condition.
A brownout is a power fluctuation.
And a blackout is what the corporate lawyers give you for generalizing their trademarked terms.
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Faster response time
Light-emission (rather than masking - better efficiencies)
Lower cost
Physical flexibility
Until I see a product with *all four* of these features, I predict LCD will remain the mainstay of thin displays.
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Response time? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Response time? (Score:4, Informative)
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As opposed to an LCD which truly is at a given level, there is no fade out.
Sure your CRT may refresh at 200Hz but the phosphor coating doesn't.
Tom
Re:Response time? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Response time? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want a good waveform, you'll need an OLED. Those can respond in a few ms from/to any brightness level (just like an LED). Once those take off in popularity, they will probably rule the roost for gaming and video, if not everything.
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a) modern LCD panels do not have a square pulse. In order to achieve fast switching times, the frame-to-frame differences are actually overdriven. Say you are currently at pixel value 100, and want to go to 150. You would actually drive the pixel at 170 or so, such that at the end of the new frame, the time-averaged transmission over the frame interval is the desired 150. The numbers are made up of course, but the principle holds.
b) CRT phosphors have a non-zero decay peri
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There is a switch time (called rise and fall time) associated with turning an LCD pixel from full bright to full black. I saw an article that did some real world tests on LDC monitors to compare the rated response time to measured response times and typically the rated was half of the actual (some times much less than half). E.g. monitors rated at 10 milliseconds were a
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I think he's right... (Score:3, Interesting)
Nope. The phosphor is designed for that particular refresh rate.
The problems started when PCs decided they wanted to refresh at lots of different rates so the phosphor was designed for the highest rates supported by the monitor.
Result? 60Hz flickered like mad on them.
So...he's right and you're wrong. Ergo, you suck.
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It just depends on how susceptible. Weren't floppy disks susceptible to being erased by magnetic interference, but people rarely took special precautions.
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Not really. It results in disappearance of the mouse cursor, and interferes with scrolling.
That said, general purpose reflective displays (rather than today's emissive displays) would be a revolution in most electronics applications. No longer would dim lighting be necessary. The story mentions billboards, which is overlooking the obvious - home TV sets and home theater. Since movies were invented they've been associated with
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I guess it depend too on what you mean by "slow" response time. The OP in not so many words said it had to be fast enough to play video games without ghosting. Most applications are not that demanding.
If it was too slow you could not use a mouse or scroll, but their could be workarounds (page up and down instead of scroll, moveable focus rather than a moveable cursor).
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Seriously, people are absolutely insane about refresh rates where it really doesn't matter. For CRTs a high refresh rate is important because you get flickering without it, but if your light output remains fixed between frames ( as would appear to be the case with these displays ) it really doesn't matter once you are above a fairly small threshold ( video tapes use about 24fps iirc )
In comparison, in a cinema your projector may emit some 72 pulses of light ea
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The problem with (most) LCDs is that the image only changes at the point of moving to the next frame. This means that persistence of vision causes two frames to be visible, un
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Layne
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lets get to it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:lets get to it (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, if you don't want to know the cutting-edge tech that -might- come out soon, you are probably on the wrong site. Geeks tend to value new ideas, even if they are impractical.
Re:lets get to it (Score:4, Insightful)
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I know if happens (probably a lot more than we even know about), but this is
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Like maybe this guy [youtube.com], who's desperately trying to come up with perpetual motion machine made of magnets?
Some geeks maybe value any new idea with a catchy news title "X will replace Y!!". But geeks worth their salt prefer actual facts that matter (check site slogan), and which aren't misleading.
First of all, this is not t
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Says you. epaper currently only does grayscale. This can do full color. That makes it very interesting.
And epaper isn't all that cheap.
Re:lets get to it (Score:4, Funny)
I hate it when my new technology crosses that painful threshold between "slightly impossible" and "too impossible".
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Asbestos: Because it wasn't too cancer-causing
I don't see how this can ever work (Score:2)
b) There's this tiny problem of having individual tunable magnets for every single pixel.
c) There's also the problem that the magnetic field of one pixel isn't allowed to influence adjacent pixels - unlikely at any decent screen resolution.
etc.
Well maybe for monster size outdoor screens... (Score:2)
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Re:lets get to it (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm, they often do (Score:2)
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In a market with one supplier and many consumers, the price is (essentially) set by demand, not production cost. Only with many suppliers will the price be related to production cost. When products first come out, there are few suppliers and demand can be high, so prices are high. If the product becomes commoditized and production costs are low, prices fall.
Also, I don't know what you can
Magnets (Score:3, Insightful)
Toner? (Score:2)
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brown and other hues (Score:3, Informative)
Also, if you rely on reflecting light (aka. mirror), you rely on fact that the light source HAS this color wavelength in its spectrum. This is not always the case if you don't use sunlight.
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A reflective screen only needs additional lighting in conditions with low ambient light, and has superior performance in high ambient light conditions. That means that under most circumstances, no additional lighting would be necessary. If you look at a normal LCD screen, a backlight is almost always necessary, even in a well-lit office. And it'
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If you look at a normal LCD screen, a backlight is almost always necessary, even in a well-lit office.
For that matter, it's necessary even in direct sunlight (can just _barely_ make out the outlines of windows without it). Why is that, anyway? My watch, my calculator, my gameboy, don't have that problem. Is it resolution-dependent (the watch being 7-segment cells, the calculator being about 50dpi and the gameboy being maybe 180 counting subpixels)? Or is it some difference in how they're made?
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Probably not. Too many electromagnets (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds cute, but it's another minor advance in materials science, and a long way from being a new display technology.
The basic problem is that it requires a big array of electromagnets, one per pixel. Fabricating large arrays of electromagnets is expensive; it's hard to fabricate coils using an IC process. And it doesn't scale down well; tiny coils are tough to make. It's also hard to contain a magnetic field in a small space. So electrostatic devices, like LCDs, and emission devices, like plasma panels, tend to win out.
Previous technologies shot down by this fact include magnetic bubble and magnetic core memories. They worked, but they never got either cheap or tiny.
Re:Probably not. Too many electromagnets (Score:4, Informative)
"It's also hard to contain a magnetic field in a small space"
There is no need to "contain" the magnetic field, since each pixel would be dominated the nearest magnet (magnetic fields dissipate rapidly with distance).
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(yes, I'm kidding.)
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While that may not be practical (moving head, what am I thinking?), I did RTFA. The effect is caused by the opposing static and magnetic forces. So, if we can electrostatically increase the static charge on the particles, like we do in an LCD screen
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Picture and other info (Score:2)
Check out the picture: The liquid in a magnetic field [ucr.edu]
And those of you with Interscience acccess here's the pdf [wiley.com]
A neat aspect of this is it simply reflects light. It's not a light source. I could see a pool in Vegas using a derivative of this (albeit with a NO PACEMAKER SIGN on it) to make a multi-color pool. Or imagine what the Cirque du Soleil engineers could do with this.
I agree those, in terms of LCD replacement we'd really have to se
Color changes with viewing angle? (Score:3, Insightful)
I do hope they can create angle-independence -- perhaps microlenses or shaping of the cell well would help in some way.
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Solution to: Color changes with viewing angle? (Score:2)
One major advantage to LCDs... (Score:2, Interesting)
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They might well be shielded; shielded doesn't mean perfect. I'd bet they're a lot better than non-shielded speakers.
If you cared, you could add your own shielding. Get some mu-metal foil, and put it between the speaker and the CRT. The exact positioning may be finicky; play with it till it seems best. You'll want to open up the speaker housing and put the foil close to the magnet, if only so you don't need as much foil -- it's kinda pricey. Also, be careful working with it -- edges can be sharp. A c
photonic crystals ? (Score:3, Funny)
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This is from a video game which is something completely different.
or was that last weeks episode of Boston Legal?
Sounds nice. (Score:2)
1. How's the refresh rate? If it doesn't have to constantly refresh, how fast CAN the entire image be changed?
2. What's the energy cost to change the whole image, for a given size surface? Worst case/best case? Partial image change cost?
3. Can I get random access to setting a single pixel without having to recalculate & resend the entire image?
4. What are the predicted cost of materials/cost of manufacture? What sizes could be produced f
What about the other direction? (Score:2)
On the other hand, since the method appears to rely on physically moving the particles to adjust to different wavelengths of light, there is an inherent lag time. It would be great for slow-moving but not permanent displays like billboards, airport schedules, and clocks.
But what about using it for an input device? If you had a pen that could generate electromagnetic force at a variable frequency
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The speed of chemistry is far faster than human conception of time. Typical enzymes can act hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of times per second, and that's an active process involving multiple-trigger deformation of a molecule. The distance these
cool picture, a long way off (Score:2)
Also, they are talking about using
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Looks like a glass vial to me. With a single magnet in the middle. So, yeah, resolution seems to be 1:1 and they are showing off all the colors in the vial, not trying to make it a single color. And I *do* see most colors you would need, so that's a plus.
As for liquid paper: it can be made flexible, I suppose it uses little energy and it uses reflexion as well. Couple this with high dpi and this would qualify it for digital paper in my view. Actually, for me
Colored Bubbles (Score:2)
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/0a03b5108e097 010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html [popsci.com]
Both use the same mechanism butterfly wings or an oil slick on water to reflect different light wavel
I wouldn't buy one (Score:2)
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So cool (Score:2)
Practical electrostatic interformetric display? (Score:2)
Even so, this technology has been around for ten years, and is still in the very early research stages.
Thad Beier
Imagine (Score:2)
The implications... (Score:2, Insightful)
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would require an entirely new video driver (possibly new graphics hardware) to output a "color" signal, rather than an RGB signal
Nah. Converting RGB to HSV or other color spaces is fairly straight-forward and can easily be done in real-time at 60 Hz. I have no idea how cheap a chip that can do that is - but it can be done right in the monitor.
This way, you have a color and a brightness, everything you need for a pixel.
Not exactly. Adding white LEDs whould give you color and saturation, which isn't the same as brightness. Turning up the white light would just wash out the colors (which is an ability you'd want - just not for the reason you gave). What you need is control over how much colored light gets refl
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Fancy that! (Score:2)
In the printer world we call that toner.
Computer screens? Screw that! (Score:2)
I can already see things like "Star Trek wallpaper" being available on torrents, makes your walls appear like the NCC-1701D (or whatever the number was), or maybe you feel paranoid, then put Aliens wallpaper up, etc...
That's a very big "maybe" (Score:2)
I don't think it will challenge TV-sized media applications anytime soon due to the infrastructure and backplane developement that still needs to be done. On the small scale it would have to compete with electrowetting and e-ink based displays. This technology may provide a ve
This stuff isn't new!! (Score:2)
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You fail.
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Re:But wait... (Score:5, Funny)
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Plaid? (Score:2)
MagnaDoodle (Score:2)