Hasta La Gadget!

The problem with the future is that it’s always 3 to 5 years away. Nevertheless, what you’re looking at is what Philips and Dimenco, a small company of ex-Philips engineers, say will be coming to the consumer television market as early as 2013 — earlier if you’re in the professional advertising business or just want to view your family photos on a small 3D photo frame. Just remember that Philips has been showing off variations of the glasses-free technology behind this prototype lenticular lens television for years, so we’re not getting our hopes up. Nevertheless, Dimenco assured us that the path to the consumer market for its 3D display is clear.

So how did it look? Well, it was ok, we guess. It doesn’t have that in-your-face pop of the current generation of 3D televisions that require 3D glasses. The effect is more subtle (or maybe the content was). Our biggest problem was with the sharpness of the display. Although the 56-inch prototype CCFL LCD was 4k (that’s 4 times the resolution of your Full HD TV) the image we saw was coarse in appearance due to the lenticular lens required to refract the left and right images for each eye. Having said that, the lenticular lens technology used is certainly better suited for non-stationary viewing. While the border around objects on the screen tended to shift quickly and blur (see the video after the break) when looking at the panel frombetween any of its 15 viewing angles (spread across a 120-degree arc), at least it didn’t exhibit those horrible dark vertical bands seen when changing your angle even slightly while viewing 3D panels based on the parallax barrier method of glasses-less 3D. Still, it was hard to find the viewing sweet spot and honestly, given the option to sit in front of this display and a 4k panel “limited” to 2D, we’d have to opt for the latter. Get back to us in 3 to 5 and see if we feel the same.

Continue reading Philips Dimenco glasses-less 3D TV of the future, hopefully our future

Philips Dimenco glasses-less 3D TV of the future, hopefully our future originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple claims that its iPhone 4 “retina display” has pixels so small the human eye can’t distinguish one from the other. Researchers at the University of Michigan say they can beat that pixel density by an order of magnitude — and make screens that are simpler to make and more efficient to illuminate too.

The technology — called plasmonic nanophotonics — works a little like the rainbow, if light were refracted through nano-thin metal grates instead of raindrops. Vary the spacing between the grates, and white light appears in different colors. Instead of the multiple layers of glass, metal polarizers, and filter sheets in a conventional LCD, the polarizer is the color filter. The whole color component of the screen is a three-layer all-metal dielectric stack.

The energy savings are potentially tremendous. According to Michigan engineering professor expert Jay Guo, only about 5 percent of the backlight in an LCD screen actually reaches our eyes. This means we could use the technology in optical chip-to-chip communications, or even fiberoptics without the fiber. It could also be used to make high-efficiency, high-resolution projectors, or flexible color screens.

And yes — it does allow for the production of extremely tiny color pixels, less than 10 microns. That U of M logo in the first image above? It’s about 12 x 9 microns, or 1/6 the width of a human hair.

University of Michigan via R&D Magazine. Images courtesy of the University of Michigan and Apple.

See Also:

• Pictures: Kindle and iPad Screens Under Microscope
• iPhone 4's 'Retina' Display Claims Are False Marketing
• IPhone 4 'Retina Display' Suffering from Discolored Blobs
• Display Expert: iPhone 4 Resolution 'Significantly Lower' Than …
• Floating Nanosheets Could Be the Plywood of Nanotechnology

Pixel density enthusiasts, pay close attention, because science is ready to blow your minds — the University of Michigan has developed an LCD technology that can display their logo in a space just nine microns high. By creating a filter made of microscopic metal gratings with differently sized holes just a few hundred nanometers wide, researchers discovered they could precisely capture wavelengths associated to red, green and blue light, producing pixels roughly eight times smaller than those in the iPhone 4’s famous screen, and entire images that could practically fit inside a single dot of Kopin’s microdisplay.

Meanwhile, OLEDs (which don’t require filters to produce their color) saw a nanotech breakthrough of their own last week, as a group at the University of Florida have discovered that carbon nanotubes can revitalize a once-inefficient but promising vertical stacking technique. Layering thin sheets of aluminum, carbon nanotubes, organic material and finally gold on top of a glass substrate, scientists have created OLEDs that promise to be cheaper, faster and require one-tenth of the power of those using polycrystalline silicon, and could theoretically be printed as a flexible display as well. Here’s hoping we’ll see the fruits of these fellows’ labors soon — we can’t wait to pen a follow-up to this epic fight.

Nanotechnology enables ultra high-def LCDs, cheaper stacked-electrode OLED screens originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink TG Daily, OLED-Info.com  |  Technology Review, University of Michigan  | Email this | Comments

Look who’s back. The LCD plus digitizer combo that we first laid eyes on last month seems to have leaked out again, still claiming it’ll be part of Apple’s upcoming (unannounced, but popular knowledge anyway) iPod touch 4th generation refresh. It continues to insist it’ll have a front-facing camera, pointing to the rounded hole in its forehead as evidence, and we’re now inclined to trust it that little bit more given the leaking site’s prior record. A visual inspection reveals it to have the same fused design as on the iPhone 4, which naturally invites speculation that the retina display will be pulling some PMP duty as well. Skip past the break to see the new screen side-by-side with Apple’s latest phone display and third-gen iPod touch hardware.

Continue reading Possible iPod touch LCD and digitizer assembly compared to older gen, iPhone 4 (video)

Possible iPod touch LCD and digitizer assembly compared to older gen, iPhone 4 (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Aug 2010 06:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Keith, of tech blog BIT-101, got himself a new USB-microscope. And like any nerd with a new toy, he started pointing it at things around the house. Happily for us, Keith avoided magnifying the dog’s fleas and instead turned his high-powered eye on the screens of his twin tablets, Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad. As you see in the photos, the closer you get, the more interesting things become.

Above are pictures snapped at “about 26x” (the Kindle is on the left). So far, so expected, right? The Kindle’s e-ink display looks almost the same as it does to the naked eye, although one surprise is just how well the iPad’s anti-aliasing works to keep the text smooth, even though the pixels are clearly visible as jagged squares.

Jack things up to 400x and it gets a whole lot weirder. On the left again is the Kindle (400x). It resembles a bowl of sugar, or at least like some ink spattered on gray paper. As Keith says, it “looks almost organic”. Compare that to the iPad’s display at 375x, whose sharp edges and primary colors look more like a 1970s arcade game:

At his readers’ request, Keith then went on to snap pictures of ink on paper, adding newsprint, magazines and books to the gallery at the same magnifications. It’s a fascinating read. Go check it out.

Kindle and iPad Displays: Up close and personal [BIT-101 via Hacker News]

See Also:

• Esquire's E-Ink Display Dismantled. Result: Hackable
• Display Expert: iPhone 4 Resolution 'Significantly Lower' Than …