Polymer "muscles" provide full visible color gamut to displays
By Paul Miller 
posted August 21st 2006 11:20AM
posted August 21st 2006 11:20AM
Forget SED, we're already on to bigger and badder ways to provide our eyeballs with those sweet sweet photons. What's new and hip this week is a polymer pixel technology developed by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. They've built a grid of 10 pixels, each 80 micrometers across -- hardly a challenger to a 70-inch LCD, but its what's under the hood that has us salivating. Each pixel is built of a polymer "muscle" that flexes when a current is applied. Light is reflected through a "diffraction grating," making only one wavelength of light visible at a time from each pixel, but allowing for use of the full color spectrum -- something not possible with the current method of mixing RGB LCD pixels. It sounds like actual displays from the tech are a long way off -- researchers are currently working on ways to limit the pixels to visible parts of the light spectrum, and power consumption will need some work as well -- but our hopes are high for a display size war within the next 10 years or so.[Via Slashdot]
Wow!
I have a feeling polymer displays are going to revolutionize display technology.
Do you really need to put diffraction grating in quotes? Diffraction is one of the most basic concepts in physics 101.
Oh, and first post!
Now the question is how much muscle fatigue this polymer can sustain. Nothing worse than your widescreen pulling a muscle during a crucial play in the Superbowl! (Maybe we'll need to wait for the polymer steriods...)
"researchers are currently working on ways to limit the pixels to visible parts of the light spectrum"
Don't do that, vidoephiles will want the full spectrum, even if you can't see it, saying things like, "The uv and infrared light makes the video 'feel' more realistic", then you just need to stick some vacuum tubes in it to make it output a "smoother" specture.
When it is released, this technology will finally force folks to start working in LAB color space, instead of RGB... color fidelity will be amazing.
I agree with Vinyl Addict - diffraction gratings are used regularly nowadays in 7th-9th grade classrooms to teach about color and spectroscopy, and are definitely not a fancy new term worthy of quotes.
Yeah really if I'm going to buy a 70 inch poly display I want it to give me a tan too!
"Yeah really if I'm going to buy a 70 inch poly display I want it to give me a tan too!"
Hmmm... Tan-O-Vision... I think you might have something there. (I predict a resurgence in those beach-blanket party movies of the 60's.)
Well to be honest, I have always felt that one of the things that makes displays so artificial looking is that they really do lack that tiny bit of the spectrum that overlaps into the invisible range.
Look at blacklights, they have this odd glowing quality about them that you just cannot reproduce in a display.
The HDRI displays I have seen come pretty close. These are the sort of displays they use for high end film-compositing are 32-bit and beautiful.
This may be ignorance on my part, but wouldn't one pixel doing the work of three allow manufacturers to easily triple screen resolutions?
all i want from a lcd is wide angle,
high contrast, no latency, and a zero dead pixel
5 year warranty, id never settle for less
if its over 80 bux.