Pixel Qi e-ink / LCD hybrid display to debut on tablet next month?
By Darren Murph 
posted October 17th 2009 3:11PM
posted October 17th 2009 3:11PM
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posted October 17th 2009 3:11PM
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Well, if it's Apple, and the tablet is therefore targetted at consuming what was once published using paper, then it confirms that the iPod Touch / iPhone (whose screens are not suited to lengthy reading under low background light levels) are for comms, gaming, movie clips and music, whilst the tablet will be totally mixed media and suited to lengthy content consumption in any background lighting conditions. IE, eBooks and magazines.
But then, it may not be Apple. It could be OLPC MK II (remember that amazing two screen book like device previewed a while back?), something from HP, Tosh, Samsung or LG, or even an unheard of startup. Exciting times!
No chance it's Apple. Too risky for them to use unproven technology in a premium product.
I hope the PixelQi screens kick ass, but it will be another company to takes the plunge with it first.
@tacitus
I don't know what you're smoking, but Apple is throwing in new technologies before they are readily adapted by others all the time.
Way back in the NeXT days, Steve Jobs got them to drop floppy discs (1980s) and go with a brand new Canon optical disc nobody was using. They went with Wifi on every laptop they made a year before Dell did the same thing (who did it before any other PC maker - and Michael Dell bragged about being an innovator in the process). Same for gigabit ethernet. They went with 802.11n before it was even a finalized specification - and a few other similar moves before that.
They pushed USB and dropped serial ports and the floppy as well - cold turkey - before anyone else did it - across the board. Many printer, keyboard and mouse makers had to go to USB long before they wanted to, simply to sell to people with Macs. PC makers held on to the PS2 connectors for years and years.
The list goes on and on
If Apple puts it in their tablet then it will be hailed as revolutionary. Otherwise no one will pay attention.
That and that all noobs out there will think they invented the technology.
If it’s not Apple, lots of people will pay attention, just not as many as if it is Apple. I’ll certainly pay attention no matter who it is. I amass ridiculous amounts of PDFs; would love to stop using paper (while still being able to read in bed); and still am not convinced that what I need is on the market yet.
It could be the opposite case...
If Apple does not include this in their tablet, they may get shut out of the boom.
This still sounds one step away from what we really want which is color e-ink that can be illuminated. No toggling please.
You mean like a backlight? Have you heard of an "LCD"?
Is there an LCD screen on the market that can work with or without the backlight?
This one can. And technically any transflective LCD (by definition).
These hybrid displays are nice, but in reality a large OLED screen would probably be seen as a larger break through.
Not if it's $10,000.
Not if it requires you to drain the battery dead just to remain readable under the sun. OLEDs are nice, but they also have their downsides depending on the application.
Not really. All OLED screens I have seen so far are too reflective... you will see yourself like on those brilliant MacBook Pro screens... the Pixel Qi screens aren't, they are more like paper e.g.
This thing doesn't even come close to e-ink. The killer feature of e-ink is that it doesn't require power to hold an image -- it only uses power to change the page. Therefore, on an e-ink device, battery life can be measured in weeks.
All this screen does is allow you to switch between a backlit color screen (like a laptop) and a reflective B&W screen, like an old Palm III or Palm V PDA. Yes, it's better for battery life than a color backlit screen, but you still have to power the screen while the device is on. Also, since this is an LCD device and has a polarizer, you automatically lose 50% of your reflected light, which isn't true of e-ink.
its called progress
If you can get 15-20 hours out of a netbook or tablet PC with one of these screens, that would be great progress. This screen technology isn't just about eBook readers.
Honestly, is being able to to hold charge for weeks that big a deal? Very few of us are away from a power supply for more than a day or two...
And when we are, the 20 hours of battery life claimed by Pixel Qi for devices using their--first generatio--screens should last for many days of recreational reading...
For the last time, it's not a "e-ink / LCD hybrid". This technology has nothing to do with Electrophoretic displays!
thank you plothole saves me some typing
Every time you talk about this tech you call it e-ink, and every time the people at Pixel Qi tell you there is no e-ink involved whatsoever.
thank you Voideka saves me some typing too
I wonder if this is in the new Barnes and Noble e-reader? I would like to believe it will be in something based on MS's Courier design, but I'm not that hopeful.
I'll be very interested to see how this technology develops. In previous posts, the CEO and COO have said that their screen can be made by existing screen manufacturing plants, that it is more power efficient than existing LCD screens, and unlike e-ink, allows for fast refresh times (enough to watch a movie). They concede the e-ink technology has "whiter whites" and better power efficiency.
So I think Pixel Qi wins, hands down.
Not because they have succeeded in replicating all the advantages of e-ink technology, but because they apparently have made a better LCD screen that has one of the desirable features of e-ink without incurring the disadvantage of slow refresh times that seem so far inherent in e-ink (electrophoretic) technology. Those slow refresh times kill the e-ink technology for academic e-reader use. In part, that's why the Kindle sucked it up in that pilot program to use it in a college setting. To properly replace paper in education, you have to be able to write and annotate on the display. Real paper, if you draw on it, delivers an infinitesimally small refresh time.
Interestingly, the COO stated that incorporating their screen technology in a touchscreen was not completely straightforward, so the fact that this new device is supposed to be a touchscreen tablet is noteworthy.
To the jaded naysayers: of course it would be better if it were also OLED and color and one million times more power efficient and made you waffles every morning. The fact, based on what the company has described and shown in video demonstrations, is that this is a better LCD screen than existing LCD screens. It would deliver superior performance on practically every existing consumer device that has an LCD screen, especially in portable electronics: notebooks, phones, GPS navigators, and PMPs.
Yeah.
In on of the interviews they pointed out that you could use any number of touch screen technologies. The issue is that some of those... resistive being the worst offender... can reduce the brightness of the display.
Meh... Hurry up and speed up the process of OLED TV's!
You know, something with a reasonable size where I can at least tell the difference between SD and HD...
If you can't tell the difference between SD and HD on an LCD or Plasma TV, then I don't think it's the technology that's the problem. You're either sitting too far away, or you have old VGA eyes.
@Alan Strangis:
Please take your time and read my post again.
I'm referring at OLED TV's, where the largest size is currently a puny 11" as far as I'm concerned.
It's a transflective display e-ink is not involved. It doesn't even have e-ink properties, e-ink doesn't use power to display an image this does.
It's a staight up LCD with transflective back so you can cut out the backlight and the surface below the image becomes reflective so you can use ambient light in the opposite direction to the backlight.
NOTHING TO DO WITH E-INK repeat after me.....
thank you Major4Play
What I want to know is, what is the viewing angle like, both in transmissive and reflective modes? Granted, it could hardly be much worse than most laptop displays out there, but if it were better, that'd be another perk.
Also, since e-ink has a very wide viewing angle, that is a spec that the display needs to be able to compete on....
PIxelQi isn't competing with eInk, but in any case, why do you need an ultra-wide viewing angle for a eBook reader screen that's always going to be a foot or two in front of one person's eyes. Doesn't make any sense at all.
Why would I want a better viewing angle than what you get on a typical laptop? Maybe because there are plenty of situations where it's nice to be able to have two people be able to see the screen; say, watching a movie together, for instance?
And why wouldn't you want wider viewing angles on an ebook reader? Why limit yourself to having to hold the book perpendicular to your line of gaze? If you're trying to use the reader in low light, you're probably going to need to orient the book to catch what light is available... what good does that do you if you can't see what's on the screen at that angle?
If PQ is competing for market share in the netbook and tablet space (which is their stated claim) then they don't need a "very wide viewing angle" as you put it. If they have a superior viewing angle then that's great, but people will settle for an equal viewing angle and perhaps even a little worse if it gives them double the battery life and the ability to read the screen in bright sunlight.
Hence there is no need for PQ to measure themselves up against eInk's viewing angle -- there are plenty of other reasons why people will want it. Plus, if someone does decide to put it on an eBook reader, it's going to spank eInk on screen refresh rates and support for color (with a backlight). Battery life will be an issue, of course, but if it competes on price then people will still buy it for the performance and color support.
Either way, a wide viewing angle is simply not an issue for eBook readers. People aren't going to not buy one just because they can't read it when they lay it down to go to the toilet or something.
I don't think the 3Qi technology is 'competing', they're more of a value add...
http://www.rgbfilter.com/?p=2098
Pixel Qi can add their layer to any existing LCD screen, just like one can add a digitizer layer (Wacom, resistive, capacitive) to existing screens. According to the Pixel Qi blog (in the link) there'll be multiple vendors using 3Qi, and the video shows the technology added to a bog standard Acer Aspire One. Any vendor could theoretically license the technology for their displays. And it's not that expensive either. Apparently at the mass production level it's in the 10s of $ additional cost.
It's not e-ink, but the quality is nearly the same as e-ink.
Compared to e-ink it's much cheaper and can provide full color and refresh as any normal LCD.
Basically, Pixel Qi has turned LCD technology into E-ink quality for reading.
As for battery life, 20 hours for ARM powered laptops or tablets with Pixel Qi is achievable with the first generation. And even more could be achieved as screen refresh rates can later be lowered to 15hz and all the way down to 1hz. Also, technology can turn everything in the laptop or tablet off appart from a very small memory that stays on to keep the screen informations, called DCON process in the OLPC XO-1 laptop.
haven't transflective displays been around forever? My first ipod nano had one. Course it couldn't do video well at all, and color gamut was mediocre. So it certainly has come a long way.
Pixel Qi appears to be using a radically new design compared to conventional transflective LCDs. The most obvious practical difference is that the reflective state forgoes color in favor of much higher contrast.
On a normal transflective LCD, there is a colour filter that sits on top of the display with (usually) red, green and blue filters for each subpixel. Underneath the panel is the equivalent of a 2-way mirror. There are two problems with this:
1) The colour filter massively reduces the brightness of the light, both as it goes in and again as it comes out
2) The mirror layer cuts down on the amount of light that can get through from the backlight
What that means is that standard transflective displays are darker and less efficient indoors than a transmissive display and also that outdoors, they only are about 5% reflective.
Pixel Qi have totally redesigned the layout of most elements of the LCD in order to get around those two problems so that it reaches equivalent performance to electrophoretic displays (such as e-ink) in black & white outdoor performance while retaining the ability to do colour and animations.
It also outputs at higher resolution in b&w mode than the electrophoretic displays, so text looks much better.
I can't wait to have a laptop that's actually usable outdoors! I've tried the Tosh and it's disappointing.
This is just a transflective display. With all the transflective display limitations. One is that if in reflective mode you generally don't get enough brightness for color, so you have to use color sparingly. Just like a reflective Blackberry (the older ones).
Transflective displays can look good, iPhones have them for example. iPods have them since the 3G, and the original Nano even had a color one that reflected enough to use without the backlight on high-contrast scenes.
This is not just a transflective display. Or at least it's not the same kind of transflective displays that have been on the market.
Yes it is.
Transflective displays have a rating as to how reflective they are. Under 5% is common. This is probably somewhat over 10%. But anyone can make a display like that, you just put the right films in the display. No one makes them because transflective displays have poor contrasts, which exhibits as colors that aren't very deep. The more reflectivity you have, the less deep the colors are. This exhibits that problem very well. It is showing solid colors and they are not very well saturated.
In these low-power modes where only very contrasty images are visible anyway, it is common to turn off or reduce the capability of the voltage divider that produces intermediate (not fully on or off red, green and blue) to save power. You also cut down the refresh rate, although some flicker then might be visible under bright light. If you do all this, the display power probably can be cut to under 1/2 a watt (I've seen displays that go much lower than this, but they were all smaller) and thus you get great battery life. But it has plenty of downsides.
One is that the sun on a bright day is 10x brighter than on a cloudy day. And your office indoors is 5x-10x dimmer than even a cloudy day even if you have the lights on full. That means that if this looks good outside on a bright day, it's still going to be difficult to read even in a brightly lit room. The average person spends less than 10% of their day outdoors, and that's not all in the day either.
I don't think Pixel Qi has been going around saying that their technology is revolutionary. Their selling points have been that it requires minimal changes for the LCD manufacturing industry - which should help drive down cost significantly, and that it can provide much the same non-color, non-backlit quality as E Ink without E Ink's limitations. For netbooks and tablets both are extremely important, especially if we're thinking about convergence devices in the near future. Where Pixel Qi suffers is in providing a really good color gamut, but that is higher-end goal anyway.
"In office lighting a piece of paper that reflects 60 nits is quite readable. Our screens with good office lighting also reflect 60 nits or more – I measured 120 nits in our offices on Friday. This with the backlight off. The exact reflectance measurement depends very much on the room lighting."
~ http://www.pixelqi.com/blog1/2009/10/17/pixel-qi-screens-debuting-in-tablets/
Admittedly it's not the most reliable source. But this, along with many other statements, suggests the product differs a fair bit from existing displays.
BTW, are you basing your assessment of the color saturation solely on the above picture?
Also take a gander at Charbax's comments. Remember he has seen the displays in action.
I apologize for replying so many times in a row. However I just found something I thought you might find interesting:
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=vP2pAAAAEBAJ
It's the patent filed for the OLPC XO's display (the precursor to 3Qi). You'll probably understand it better than I do.
I find the 120 nits ludicrously high. But we'll just have to see.
As to Charbax, Charbax just says it looks good, that doesn't mean it isn't just a transflective display because Charbax thinks it looks good.
It's not going to look as good as eInk because the gridlines of wires that drive the pixels are visible in an LCD, especially in a reflective one, because in order for light to reflect, the light has to go through the entire display and reflect off the back, then come back through. With eInk, it just reflects off the front surface. This means the LCD will look more "dirty" because of those gridlines, but it has the huge advantage that it can be backlit, which is impossible with eInk as light cannot penetrate the display.
Ugh, he's talking about lowering the refresh rate to 1Hz. With high contrast images like shown at 1Hz you'll see a pulsing wave across the display if you refresh it at 1Hz.
Am I basing my belief about the unsaturated colors on just this image? Nope, I'm also going by how transflective displays work. It limits how dark a pixel can get unless the room you are in is very dark, and thus you cannot have deep colors. It's inherent.
If this screen is done well, it will look as good as the original Blackberry displays, which personally thought looked fantastic. But that doesn't make this display revolutionary and it doesn't mean the colors will look like a transmissive display.
They could also make a display that has a separate transmissive and emissive mode, and it switches between them when it turns on the backlight. This might have some advantages that I don't know of, but if you have the backlight on in strong light, the display will invert, like the original iPod did.
"As to Charbax, Charbax just says it looks good, that doesn't mean it isn't just a transflective display because Charbax thinks it looks good."
Perhaps. But being one of the better known tech bloggers he has been around a lot of devices.
"Ugh, he's talking about lowering the refresh rate to 1Hz. With high contrast images like shown at 1Hz you'll see a pulsing wave across the display if you refresh it at 1Hz."
That would be true with current LCD technology. However there is research being done into creating more stable liquid crystals, which then would need a much lower minimum refresh rate.
--
Did you read the patent? I may not understand all the tech jargon, but it certainly is a bit different from other transflective LCDs I've seen.
For all the people wondering about the quality this and that, dig around a little bit.
They had some video up a couple months ago of some test mule laptops with their screen installed and one of the engineers giving a demo.
It was pretty impressive from what I remember.
I am very anxious to see the final product in retail and what kind of capability it has and what kind of price premium.
http://www.pixelqi.com/blog1/2009/10/17/pixel-qi-screens-debuting-in-tablets/