Toss That LCD?

LCD, or Liquid Crystal Display screens, revolutionized computer displays, especially for portable computers where the bulk and power demands of a CRT preclude their use. Although the first LCDs were sometimes a challenge to view for long periods of time, today's screens are incredibly bright and detailed. Indeed, with LCD prices currently dropping, they're increasingly appearing on desktops. Yet as good as LCDs are, flat panel screens can, and are about to, get better.

The thing is, the pixels on an LCD screen do not produce any light! In fact, each pixel selectively BLOCKS light, which typically comes from a backlight behind the screen. The backlight is white, and the various red, green, and blue pixels are turned on and off to filter out the colors that don't belong at that spot on the screen.

If you use an LCD, you know that this does work pretty well, but it also has some shortcomings. First, because the light is being filtered, it requires a very bright backlight to start with, which adds weight, eats power, and generates heat. Then, additional filters on the front of the screen further reduce the light that actually reaches us, and they sometimes restrict the angle at which we can view the image (which is a problem if several people are crowding around a screen.) According to Sony though, this is about to change.

Sony has demonstrated a prototype credit card-thick, 13-inch "Organic Electroluminescence" (OEL) display with 800x600 resolution (OEL is similar to other display technologies that we previewed during COMDEX - http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc/20001127.html#_Toc499299985). They say that this self-luminous display (each pixel actually emits light directly towards us, rather than filtering out light from behind) provides high contrast, it can be viewed from a wide angle, its response rate is fast (so it doesn't blur motion on the screen), and it accurately reproduces colors. (http://www.world.sony.com/News/Press/200102/01-007aE/)

Sounds good, although we don't yet know how much power it consumes, how it stands up to temperature extremes, or what its cost will be when it makes it to market by 2003. Nevertheless, this is an exciting example of things to come. And it's a reminder that every element of our technology, no matter how "old and familiar," is subject to being changed by the rapidly changing face of computing!

This is an excerpt from the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing, " a free weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal Member of Technical Staff for the Corporate Strategy group at Compaq. A more extensive version of this discussion, as well as others around the innovations and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc . Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Compaq. The RCFoC is a service of, and Copyright 2000, Compaq Computer Corp."