Liquavista Announces Dev Kits for New Screens

[Nate the great]

cross posted from The Digital Reader

From the press release:

Liquavista today announced the launch of System Development Kits aimed at enabling their core customers to work on developing products based on their innovative electrowetting display technology. Available for both LiquavistaBright 6” mono and LiquavistaColor 6” color electrowetting displays, customers will be able to create applications and therefore products that benefit from the features of Liquavista’s unique display technology.

[Greg Anos]

Very good news indeed. It implies that at least sample quantities of the color screen are being produced.

The long term future of e-book reading will be based on screens like Liquavista and/or Mirasol. Extremely low power use (or bistable) screens with fast refresh rates will make the ideal tablet pc/internet browser/e-book reader/Media player/portable game player. That's why I think the Apple Ipad, as it is currently constructed, is not going to be as successful as it could be, due to LCD screen energy requirements....

[Ride]

What about the Pixel Qi screen, the 3Qi? It is being produced in production quantities for products to be released this year. Not only that, it is both colour and grey scale.

What I haven't seen is a comparison of the Liquavista and Pixel Qi technologies. Both are using a variant of LCD technology but I'd like to know the pros and cons of each when compared to each other. Which would give longer battery? The Liquavista or the 3Qi with backlight off? Which technology has higher resolution? Fastest refresh? And so on.

I've not been able to find such a comparison. Anyone else had any luck?

Ride

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by Ride

What I haven't seen is a comparison of the Liquavista and Pixel Qi technologies. Both are using a variant of LCD technology

Liquavision is not a variant of LCD:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrowetting

[A4-]

Originally Posted by Ride

What I haven't seen is a comparison of the Liquavista and Pixel Qi technologies. Both are using a variant of LCD technology but I'd like to know the pros and cons of each when compared to each other. Which would give longer battery? The Liquavista or the 3Qi with backlight off? Which technology has higher resolution? Fastest refresh? And so on.

I've not been able to find such a comparison. Anyone else had any luck?

As far as I know, battery-life wont differ much (what I've heard is that they use less power then E-ink), at least not so much as being noteworthy, you still need to recharge em once in a while. An economic CPU will make a bigger difference imo.

LCD has a pixel-density of ~100 ppi.
E-ink has a pixel-density of 142-200 ppi depending on screen-size.
Pixel Qi has a pixel-density which is ~120 ppi color, 200 ppi grayscale.

Originally Posted by wallcraft

~200 ppi monocrome (I have also heard 205 ppi) ~120 ppi full color

The Mirasol prototype had a pixel-density of 240 ppi (which will be the first- to-the-market screen @ 5.7" according to engadget).
Liquavista has a pixel-density of 160 ppi (according to Liquavista.com)

Pixel Qi, Mirasol and Liquavista can all be used to display video, so for reading, browsing and navigating menu's the refresh rate is high enough. I wont be playing first-person-shooters on them, so refresh rate isn't that important to me.

'And so on' could be color quality or price? which I don't know (yet).

Ow, I've seen some numbers about the reflectivity:

Originally Posted by LDBoblo

I don't think any reflective technology gives close to "true" white. EWD like Liquavista expects to get above 50% white reflectance (some claims state 60%), EPD like E-Ink stands around 40% (SiPix's flexible-backed MicroCup stuff mentioned 33% reflectance). Some technologies like electrofluidic and electrochromic are [at least theoretically] capable of above 80% (pretty white). For what it's worth, Mirasol's white papers suggest they are capable of around 50% white reflectance, compared to 60% for the Wall Street Journal (print version, obviously). Bear in mind that white reflectance can be measured in different ways, so the numbers are not always completely comparable.

White reflectance will certainly improve overall readability in diverse light conditions, but black reflectance is also important to consider. Without a solid black state, even good white reflectance will look washed out.

Something else I've read recently is that Current LCD-factory's can be used to produce Liquavista screens with only minor changes to the production process.

[raac]

Larger LCD screens have ~100 dpi. Smaller screens, such as mobile phones and some laptops, have substantially higher resolutions. The iPhone, for instance, has a screen which is 160 dpi. Presumably this is how Liquavista achieve their dpi of 160, since they use the same manufacturing process as common LCD displays.

It is worth noting that how smooth text looks does not depend only on the dpi but also on how you anti-alias and display it. LCDs have many more more shades of gray to play with than does a current generation e-ink display (which are usually 8 or 16 shades, I believe) so will produce smoothing-looking text for a given dpi.

I was thinking of buying an Adam until I saw the Liquavista demo. Now I'm going to wait a while. Why bother switching between B&W and colour when there'll be displays that can produce paper-like colour without draining the battery?