At the end of last year, a company called Eazeye (or more accurately, crowdfunding) announced various exhibits that the company said “ Semi-transparent type LCD display. Easy readability in daylight, significant reduction in power consumption, and even reduced output of blue light, which is thought to disrupt people's circadian rhythms and even threaten eye safety, make it attractive. There was a claim. Eazeye's technology has been repeatedly described as a first, and the company is currently pushing a 15-inch desktop display.
Inevitably, like a main battle tank being deployed from a cargo plane, a warning is about to rush into this conversation, brought to you by the letters “R” and “E.”TranceReReflective LCD displays are not new. In fact, this is the earliest type of LCD and we are all familiar with it. Calculators and digital clocks that have a black area on a silver-gray or green background are transflective LCDs.
As the acclaimed Posey explains in his beautiful and engaging YouTube video series, colored optical films and dyes are used to create different colors, and there are many variations. Some transflective displays have an optional backlight, making them (optional) transmissive displays. Remember the Indiglo clock? The most useful thing, however, is that transflective displays can operate using only ambient light. The LCD panel itself requires very little power, so a digital clock can run for months on a small battery. This is probably the most common display technology on the planet, but it's not used much for video.
nintendo game boy
There are two differences between the Nintendo Game Boy type of LCD we're used to and the type of video display you're probably watching right now. First, cell phones and laptops have tiny transistors behind each pixel, which make switching stronger and faster, making video displays less blurry and more contrasty. The term is “thin film transistor,” or TFT, and it allows for better displays without substantially changing the fundamentals. Secondly, the display is backlit. Not designed to reflect ambient light.
So what Eazeye is proposing is nothing new. This is a combination of two of his existing ones. It has a full-color TFT display panel, typical of monitors and phones, and a (possibly removable) reflective panel behind it that allows ambient light to be reflected or transmitted through the panel, or to be switched on. Some LEDs operate in a more traditional backlight mode. As with many attractive and simple ideas, its promise probably won't be realized as much as we expected, and the results are quite variable, but the Eazeye product is actually a different, more fundamental realization. It's just a talisman.
Technology isn't magic.
Being able to look at a device and have a working knowledge of what technology already exists to understand what it is like, how it was made, and therefore roughly what to look out for. is a necessary skill for modern people. . When a truly new technology like OLED displays emerges, it takes time. Year, and often there are no amazing moments of revelation. There's no guarantee that a new idea will come to fruition, even though he did it once or maybe twice at his NAB show in the late 2000s, like the NanoSpint field emission display.
LCD won
One of the challenges that new technology faces is that its pretenders are, well, new, unexperienced and undeveloped, and facing existing technology that is the result of even more development work. That's it. Remember, plasma is a new and exciting technology that offers many advantages over LCD. Camera experts waxed lyrical about plasma displays and their painterly, cinematic images (Where's the Vow Box?). Still, the LCD won. Although OLED displays seem more established, it will not be a surprise to anyone to learn that fundamental advances in LCDs could equally make OLED displays unnecessary. .
So it's easy to imagine a market for Eazeye's transflective video displays. In fact, for Steadicam operators who care about framing but not so much about color accuracy, there's really no need to imagine it, as similar things have been done before. Reflective LCDs lack constant brightness and color, and their brightness and color change as the surrounding light changes. Still, more R&D could yield better results, and while the movie industry probably isn't a big enough market to spark that kind of R&D, cell phones might be.
But the point is, part of the fun of being a geek is determining whether a new idea is ready for the big event. Especially when we're hanging around at the time of the year when exhibitions are on and people are eager to woo us. Their ideas are not just an evolution of what came before.
