More colors for your inches
As an update to my older post about field emission displays, here are some recent developments in the field of display technology.
Toshiba and Canon’s SED is showing actual working products that appear to have superior specifications to both CRTs and TFTs. They claim they are able to reach competitive prices points in a couple of years. What is still unkown, however, is what the lifetime characteristics of these screens will be. Will these be ‘mature’ products?
One thing is for sure: TFT technology isn’t giving up the fight, starting with the use of LED backlights instead of CCFL tubes. That change alone could bring better brightness and better color fidelity; altough it will be limited to the very high end products in the beginning. Sony for example has announced the $10.000 Qualia 005 to be available this year, and Samsung and NEC are preparing releases too.
In the mean time, Samsung is also boasting about cheap FTFs without a color filter. While this may be a very cost effective system, I doubt it will go without visual artifacts. Because of the single-color backlight, some kind of dithering system will be needed. Dithering in the time domain produces ghosting or flicker effects, and spatial dithering could yield blurry images. Of course there are shortcuts to be taken (like you don’t need all 16 million colors in one given image, and some color differences can simply be ignored), but let’s wait and (literally) see!
Philips, on the other hand, works on fast-switching CCFL backlights that can be used to reduce ghosting by switching off the backlight during the pixel’s transition from color to the next color. The effects of this technique on image stability and brightness are still unclear.
Speaking of image stability — it looks like electronic ink is really coming to an e-book near you, and it will be rollable. Here too we only need to wait until next year, says Philips.
And all this is happening while major manufacturers are releasing more and more gadgets with OLED displays.
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