Shameful but true: I own and watch a CRT TV, in all of its big, boxy glory. This might be a sore spot for someone who has recently immersed herself in the study of Displays & Screens, but my reasoning is solid. The TV works, the display area is large, and the picture is beautiful. Also, I invested a fair amount of money in a delightful cabinet to house the set and its peripherals. This TV and cabinet have a few more years to go before I can justify the investment and annoyance of rearranging my living room to accommodate a flat panel display.
So, in light of my adherence to the CRT, it makes sense that I’m happy to report that the old tube technology is finding new life in a new type of display called laser phosphor display. LPD appears to have some of the advantages of more modern displays, but with a fraction of the power requirements. Both CRT and LPD raster images onto a phosphor, but where a CRT uses an electron beam, guided by a magnetic field, to activate the phosphor coating, LPD uses lasers, guided by a mirror.
Wade Roush, a friend and former Technology Review colleague, broke the story of Prysm, the LPD startup last week. I’ll be writing a story for Technology Review about the technology, adding some perspective from display experts and explaining a bit more of the technology. Stay tuned!
I got it in college and went on to buy an expensive (and beautiful) cabinet to hide it in, and just haven’t bothered to upgrade
By Kate
Filed in technology
Tagged with displays, Gizmodo, holograms, holographic displays, holography, HP, LCD, OLED, Phicot, pixel qi, screens
January 5th, 2010 @ 3:53 pm
(Updated 12:08 p.m. January 8, 2010 to include quantum dots as an upcoming display technology)
My survey of display tech, “The Hunt for the Perfect Screen,” was posted at Gizmodo a couple of weeks ago. It was a fun piece to write because it helped me see how much I’ve actually learned about screens like holographic systems, energy-efficient LCDs, bright and beautiful OLEDs, and lightweight plastic displays and their manufacturing. Most of it is fairly mind-blowing stuff. And it reminds me why I’m happy to be a technology reporter–I get to spend my time looking at the future.
The hardest part of writing the piece, unsurprisingly, was pruning the prose. There are a lot of specific technologies that I left out for the sake of flow and length. Below is a short list of topics that didn’t make it into the article.
I plan to expand on some of these omitted topics in the future.
And now for a reporting outtake. Below is an anecdote on how a company I mentioned in the Giz article got its name.
- On the naming of Phicot: The company that’s trying to commercialize HP’s plastic electronics manufacturing process is called Phicot. When I asked Carl Taussig of HP what Phicot means, he told that one of the researchers has a son who, when he was an infant, would pick up objects and call them all the same word, something that sounded like “phicot.” A toy truck? Phicot. A book? Phicot. A piece of food? Phicot. The parents started to worry about the child’s intelligence, says Taussig. But when the boy grew up and was able to enunciate better, they learned that he was simply saying, “Look what I’ve got.” Which is also something you might say to people if you have a display manufactured by the company. Cute.