Quantum Dots Will Make Flexible Displays 83
judgecorp writes "Quantum dots are small semiconductors, whose properties are defined by their size and shape. British nanotechnology firm Nanoco has found they are ideal for displays, allowing the possibility of screens that can be rolled up — and which also use far less of the hazardous chemicals found in normal screens."
In addition to being Cadmium free (a problem in the EU where the exemption for Cadmium in displays expires in 2014), they directly emit light using less power than traditional filtered color LCDs.
Resolution (Score:3)
The tiny crystals, which are 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair
Think of what resolution sizes we can get with pixels in this scale.
Re:Resolution (Score:5, Informative)
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That would be awesome!
Re:Resolution (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm pretty sure contact lenses would not be something your eye can focus on. I'd be happy if it were wrong, but I think it's too close to be able to see anything but a blurry mess.
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Re:Resolution (Score:5, Interesting)
The answer is not contacts. Direct retinal contact only separated by a thin transparent film. Bypass everything else.
Use the rest of the space in the eye for equipment. Processing, storage, CCD, power generation, etc. With a high enough resolution CCD (or equivalent) you create a cybernetic implant with incredible vision. Overlay any kind of visual information you want on to any surface you can see, or have it hover in front of you.
Re:Resolution (Score:4, Funny)
And if you see strange things, you don't know whether to go to the psychiatrist for hallucinations, or to tech support for someone hacking your augmented reality system.
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And if you see strange things, you don't know whether to go to the psychiatrist for hallucinations, or to tech support for someone hacking your augmented reality system.
Oh, I got these contacts a while ago, but for some reason I keep seeing a purple ape that claims to be my "buddy". It's been very confusing, and driving has been really dicey.
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The light from the display on your desk enters your pupil in some definite configuration that results in an image on your retina after being focused by the lens in your eye. Duplicate that configuration of light with emitters on the surface of your eye and you duplicate the image of your monitor on your desk.
Re:Resolution (Score:4, Informative)
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I've been thinking to myself that it'd be neat to have some sort of a small plug behind your ear into which you can plug in a small audio cable, and then have the audio transmitted directly to your inner ear through cranial resonance
If you have to plug in a cable anyway, why not just use headphones? They're a lot less traumatic. Okay so operations aren't that traumatic, I've had ops on both my ears under local anaesthetic, but still I wouldn't go in for such an operation unless it was going to make a big difference to my life.
I'd only get aural implants if they were wireless. I'd probably be happy to go for direct cabling if it linked directly to the nervous system though. That could be hella fun, if you didn't die in the process of in
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I would think noise cancelling headphones would cancel out a lot more noise - though your system could do noise cancellation too of course, but headphones already help to block a noise out simply by being in or over your ears, so I think they'd be an easier starting point.
I actually thought maybe one the reasons you'd prefer a cable behind the ear rather than headphones was to leave your normal hearing at full capacity while you also listen to your music or whatever. Maybe I was imagining your idea wrong.
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Oh, yeah. I guess I should have just gone to bed instead of checking Slashdot at 12:30AM! From that point of view though, you could also have a microphone feeding real world sound into your headphones if you wanted to hear everything around you, or have hearing enhanced in some other way - perhaps selectively filtering out voices or traffic noise or that kind of thing.
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Re:Resolution (Score:4, Informative)
Think of the resolutions the human eye won't be able to distinguish; dots the size of percentage of a human hair to dots the size of potatoes, its all just a blur to our eyes. But hey, who am I to poop on progress on any scale?
What it would mean is that you could support multiple resolutions like on a CRT display. The fact that an LCD has to have a 'native resolution' at all is a nuisance for things like games. That and this thing should sidestep the horrible contrast problems LCD has.
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Even though the eyes couldn't distinguish individual dots the adjacent dots could be used to create interesting color and other illusions - maybe depth?
Related question for all the optics gurus... (Score:3)
In a hologram, tightly packed alternating dark and light regions produce constructive/destructive interference, causing a 3D effect. If the pixels can be made close enough is it possible to recreate this effect on a monitor?
If so there's an excuse to go beyond human perceptible detail.
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Yes, but there are other advantage. While it appear as blur, it would actually be a blur. That means you can have a lot o data.
Basically making the 'enhance..Enhance!" aspect of CSI factual, instead of craptual.
And of course, the is a tone of uses in scinece.
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Sadly, they will still sell screens that are 1080p. I wished LCD manufacturers would get off their asses and make more affordable screens over 1080p. 1920x1200 is the best I've seen that's not ridiculously expensive and I bought one of those a few years ago.
Great... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great... (Score:4, Funny)
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I wish you Apple employees would stop visiting /.
Cadmium (Score:4, Interesting)
First I've heard about Cadmium in LCDs. Anyone know more? The wikipedia article says it's usually inhaled, but it's pretty vague as to how it causes problems.
Re:Cadmium (Score:5, Funny)
The inhalation is a crucial step in the manufacture. A well trained technician can inhale, then spew forth in a finely detailed pattern to create the final image. One of the most exalted practitioners was able to create not only images of Christ, but also Mary, and Colonel Sanders.
Re:Cadmium (Score:5, Interesting)
I think some reporter got confused. Cadmium hasn't seen much use in displays since the early 80s, because there are better, non-toxic materials that have been discovered since then. I think it's still used in a few applications, but nothing Joe Consumer is likely to buy. Where cadmium is often used is in quantum dots, which has thus far made quantum dots unusable for most consumer applications. That appears to be one of the innovations coming out of the research here... quantum dots that don't use cadmium (or other heavy metals), and are thus safe to use in the creation of the flexible display that everyone's wanted for a while.
Re:Cadmium (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, the reporter (and then the submitter) somehow interpreted the company's press release about a cadmium free QD-LED display to mean normal LCD displays contained cadmium. And then to make it worse the submitter tried to expand on this misinformation by quoting one exemption for a single company's special purpose LED and wrongly applying that to a whole industry and regulatory body. Sigh.
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SMBC did it first.
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Yep, but not necessarily... I tried smoking Cadmium once... but I did not inhale :p.... or was it really cadmium... hum, who knows :-)
You insensitive clod! (Score:3)
I've got trouble enough reading things on little iPhone and netbook displays. And now you want me to try to read off of a quantum dot?!!
article or advertisement? (Score:2)
Is this an article or an ad for this company? I hope Slashdot made some money on this one, because there's nothing to this story other than the company name.
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Ideal display (Score:2)
Then we can finally have a display that can show any color, instead of the color-poor monitors we have today. It makes me sad sometimes.....65 million shades of color, more than the eye can distinguish, and yet we can't get a proper shade of orange.
SlashQuantumDot NG interface, gonna be awesomeeee (Score:1)
slashdot version 432442, optimized for quantum dot displays, hello web 5.0
Why compare to LCDs? (Score:4, Insightful)
We have a potential replacement for LCDs in the works already, and its far more advanced along the R&D chain.
How do these displays compare to OLED which can also be rolled and are also less toxic in their production?
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They consume less power, because light does not need to pass through a color filter (the dots radiate the color themselves). Some say they will consume 1/4 of the power of current displays.
Try again. OLEDs consume less power than LCD because light does not need to pass through a color filter (OLEDs radiate the color themselves). Some say they will consume 1/4 of the power of current displays...
So why do we need quantum dot displays again?
Re:Why compare to LCDs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because they are still working on making stable chemistry for OLED? The clue is in the name - O means organic. Organic molecules decay. The colours on OLED screens therefore fade with time and with UV light [wikipedia.org].
They can also consume MORE power than LCD under certain circumstances - the light doesn't need to pass through a filter, true, and they are much more efficient at displaying a mostly black screen (because the OLEDs just switch off while the LCD still generates all that backlight and then blocks it), but in a predominantly white picture, such as is common in computer applications, they can consume more power than the LCD does. I guess that lots of little LED elements are less efficient than a few big ones.
Quantum dots are teensy little aggregations of inorganic chemicals, so they shouldn't suffer from the same decay problems as OLED.
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The 50% lifetime degradation for red and green is in the hundreds of thousands of hours for PHOLED. It's in the tens of thousands of hours for 95%, far longer than the usable life of actual products on the market:
http://www.universaldisplay.com/default.asp?contentID=604 [universaldisplay.com]
"Sky blue" PHOLED has a sufficient lifetime but dark blue is a long way off. So fluorescent blue is used which is lower efficiency but compensates by having a much higher lifetime. This is the set of chemicals currently being used in all S
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There are ~9000 hours in a year, so tens of thousands of hours is a few years. That is not "far longer than the usable life..." I still use a flat CRT that I bought in 1993 so even the 50% degradation may not be within the usable life.
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JimFive
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Not sure I understand what you're saying. One thing you may have missed is the footnote in the material lifetime table. Since they're material specs, those figures do not factor any outcoupling efficiency gains for the emitter structure. Also the drive currents are worst case (constant illumination). Both factors greatly suppress EQE (but still 100% IQE for AMOLED). So with sufficient encapsulation, the usable lifetime is definitely far longer than device lifetime. HTH.
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That was going to be the original plan. Before we realized that flash memory was going to be cheaper than the equivalent amount of "e-paper memory"....
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JimFive
Heard it before.... (Score:3)
They said that 10 years ago with OLED technology, still waiting on that...
Interesting video on quantum dots (the Economist) (Score:2)
This is not about making displays with quantum dots -- it's about color correcting LEDs, but still interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjznErmcLnU [youtube.com]
Not sure how you go from what I see in the video to display tech.
yumm? (Score:2)
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All hype... (Score:4, Funny)
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Old news. (Score:2, Interesting)
Nanosys in Palo Alto (http://www.nanosysinc.com/) has been involved in designing quantum dots for display purposes for a while. The point isn't the size of the dots, but rather that one can tune the output wavelengths to match the filters on the front of LCD displays. This increases the efficiency measurably, vastly increasing the color gamut that can be displayed (3x more color according to their website). In my opinion, this is a REAL revolution in display technology!
I have no interest (beyond intellectua
Quantum ? (Score:2, Funny)
So, is it basically uncertain what it will be displayed then ?
Only took 13 years (Score:2)
It's about time. I wrote my final year physics paper on this, using quantum dots tuned to the wavelengths of RGB for flat panel displays. In 1998.
Most fun part was that I did most of the work from my bedroom, running simulations on the unix system at uni via a C app and my trusty 33.6k modem. Good times.
Quantum (Score:2)
The newest buzzword, joins the ranks of the "Cloud", "Nano", "iSomething", "Web 2.0", "eSomething" etc, as previously overused buzz words that do not really mean what they are supposed to mean. Everything is going "quantum" these days.
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That's been true for 2 decades. WHer have you been?
*How does homeopathy work? "quantum!"
*How does acupuncture work: "Quantum!"
**How can there be ghosts? "Quantum!"
How big was that leap? "Quantum!"***
*It doesn't
**There aren't.
*** Ho boy.
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There's a fair amount of evidence that acupuncture works, at least for pain relief. It might of course simply be placebo (which is proven to work), but dismissing something out of hand due to lack of knowledge is idiocy.
The real benefit (Score:2)
The real benefit is flexible displays in current style tech so the screens won't shatter if you prove yourself human and drop your phone once in a while.