Prysm pitches ultra-green laser telly tech
Reinvents the CRT for the 21st Century
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US company Prysm has taken the covers off what it claims is a new type of ultra-low power HD TV that combines old-style CRT elements with laser technology.
Called Laser Phosphor Display (LPD), the system replaces a CRT's electron beam with a directed laser beam. The phosphor-coated screen that's excited by the beam to emit visible light has been upgraded to HD resolution too.
The upshot, Prysm claims, is a telly that uses up 75 per cent less power than "other display technologies". It's probably thinking of plasma, but while the improvement over OLED and LCD will be less marked, LPD could well prove more power efficient nonetheless.
"Prysm's LPDs are made with low-impact manufacturing processes and non-toxic materials. This translates into the lowest cost of ownership and carbon footprint of any large format display," the company claimed.
"Overall, the lifecycle carbon footprint for LPD displays is 80 per cent lower than other display technologies."
Prysm also said LPD makes for long lasting screens which, because it has build auto-calibration into the system, should be able to show the same gamut of colours "for years".
As with CRTs, the image produced by LPDs will be bright, with a high degree of contrast and none of the motion blur you get with LCDs - though this is being much reduced by the used of 100Hz and 200Hz frame interpolation techniques.
Prysm is pitching LPD for large-size screens, but the company stressed that the technology is applicable to displays of any size.
The use of lasers in TVs is nothing new. Mitsubishi, for one, has been working on using laser as a light source for LCDs, while other companies use laser light to illuminate LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) and DLP (Digital Light Projection). However, Prysm's technology appears to be the first to use laser light to activate a phosphor screen.
Prysm didn't say when the first displays based on its technology will debut. ®
Special Report Telly Vision: future display technologies
COMMENTS
Why even bother with side mounting?
Why tie yourselves down to the idea of a central emitting source?
As far as I understand it, the reason why TFT screens are so pricey is because of the required strength of the visible light diodes in the viewing matrix. With a LPD, you wouldn't have to worry about the lasers being visible spectrum since its the _phospors_ that emit visible light.
Use non-visible spectrum (ie. infrared, ultraviolet, etc) and can get much for effiecient, smaller and _cheaper_ lasers on the "backing" matrix material, probably in trinary clusters for RGB. To achieve 1080 high def on a 17in standard monitor (337mm x 270mm), each pixel only needs to be 0.25mm. These would only be bigger on a larger screen. This would require a fab machine capable of a 84,000nm (250,000 / 3 due to trinary clusters) process. I'm sure Intel and AMD (and even TI!) have those machines back in the shipping dept. being used to hold up the lorry doors, if they aren't already in the back lot collecting rain...
I'm sure you could still do 0.01mm (yes - MM!) fab cheap as chips, achieving 1080 hidef on a 4.32cm x 3.2cm (1.7in x 1.2in) tile, and multiple tiles achieving 1440 (4 tiles = 3.4in x 1.4in), 2210 (9 tiles = 5.1in x 3.6in), etc. Yes, really. Check out the spec; the 720 and 1080 is the number of pixels on the vertical axis, regardless of size of screen. That's why its actually cheaper (lower resolution fab process) to make a HD TV if you make the screen bigger, and why they only look good from a "recommended viewing distance".
The phosphors could be either spray deposited onto another layer or impregnated _into(?!)_ a plastic substrate, each trinary cluster having one for blue, one for red and one for green. They would react in a directly proportional manner to the varied intensities of each dedicated laser (more power to the laser, the brighter the phosphor glows) right behind them. Heck, make it a black, infrared invisible material, and you have your true black again. :)
Aligning it could be a field operation with set screws and would be a normal part of QC. Yes - really. Simple steel gears can achieve increments of 5/1000in (.0127mm) tolerances on a single axis - calipers, for instance - and do it reliably and cheaply. That's well within our 0.25mm per trinary.
So, you have a nice, big surface with all of these little trinary laser clusters (3 per pixel for RGB) that uses next to nothing in power compared to current tech. It would also be just as flat as standard LCD/plasma tech, and probably moreso without the need for the same heat dissapation, power distribution, etc. This could provide an inexpensive solution to a 1/2in (1.7cm) thick, 55in (139.7cm) diag. display. :)
CRT just looks better
Spent the last 5 years looking for a replacement for my 20yr old desktop CRT TV and not yet seen anything that looks right, LCD's just don't do SD video as well as phosphor, don't know why but its plain to see. If the old TV holds out another few years looks like I'll actually have a viable upgrade to HD phosphor.
...and I hope they aren't too flat, that's valuable shelf space on top of my current sets ;)
LCD motion blur?
Errr.... hands up anyone who sees significant motion blur on a screen made in the last few years... ok, hands down anyone using an inexplicably low-contrast and blur-a-riffic Macbook or really cheap Tesco-Special TV...
My lappy's nearly 4 years old and I did a side by side test with my 2-3 y.o. widescreen and the macbook (and how i wish I could have pulled out the ancient STN-driven old Acer in my cupboard). TV and PC were sharp as tacks, and fast enough to make the 60Hz movement seem more jerky than blurry. The mac was a blurfest... but the fact that it stands out notably as such shows that the vast majority of LCDs now in use don't have that problem. We reached sub-10ms (equivalent of 100Hz frames, or 50Hz strobe - twice as fast as UK CRT TV) full-white to full-black (& vice versa) times quite a while ago, I had a cheap-when-bought 17" monitor that I gave away because it was getting old.... still with a "8ms!" sticker in the corner.
Maybe now in the days of motion-upscaling and interpolation it may be important, but as the human eye can't much detect anything beyond 80-90Hz anyway, what's the point? 3D applications, maybe? But then you're relying on LCD shutterglasses anyway...
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