A friend of the Crunch charbax sent us the first hands-on video of the Pixel Qi e-paper screen, a new kind of LCD technology that uses standard LCD fabrication tools to create an LCD/e-paper/transflective screen that displays full color in direct sunlight and takes very little power.
This is not to be confused with the Kindle’s e-ink technology. Think of it as a new form of LCD that has e-ink properties – readability, low-power cost, and barely any lag – in full color.
We wrote more about it here but charbax’s video really goes deep – it’s 13 minutes long. Hopefully this fascinating technology will hit laptops in the next few years. I doubt it will hit mainstream devices but smaller devices could definitely use this technology.
Acer is trying really hard and it shows. It has gotten far better than where it started from. This device on laptops could wipe out display issues to a huge extent at a good cost that is…
Wel, Pixel Qi hacked (”mod”-ed) comecially available Acer netbooks to prototype their display. So, Acer isn’t involved, but I bet they like the demo, too. Hopefully, Acer will consider adopting the technology along with Irex and Vaio (Sony). Kindle (Amazon) and iTouch (Apple) don’t need any kudos.
Wheres the bing story I clicked on??
I Bing’d it.
That story is here http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/06/02/bing-brings-mobile-service-to-life-almost/
Nice video! Interesting questions and responses.
At the 5-minute mark, Mr. Ryan mentioned that the color transmissive mode for the panel likely used about 2.5W, on par with the factory screen.
He then was apparently about to mention the power consumption of the reflective screen with the backlight off when his train-of-thought was unfortunately switched to another track. Anyone know or have a guess as to how many watts the reflective mode consumes?
This appears to be in the neighborhood of a 12″ screen. For some context, a small 3.5″ TFT LCD with a backlight uses about 0.5W, altogether, the backlight consuming the lion’s share. I’d venture that the reflective mode for this screen sans BL is less than that, perhaps even under 0.1W.
For an e-book application, the lower the screen power consumption, the better, of course. And the ability to use animation and to respond quickly (depending on CPU usage) offers some definite advantages in educational situations.
Ummm . . . somethings screwy with your rss feed. Like the commenter above the headline on the rss was “Bing Brings”.
Just Saying