Uni-Pixel, a company based in Woodlands, Texas, has announced it is about to start mass production of a thin-film to be used in time-multiplexed optical shutter (TMOS) displays, a next-generation display technology that exploits retinal persistence in the human eye and promises significantly better performance than CRT, LCD and OLED displays with, among other things, great durability and dramatically improved energy efficiency.

The vast majority of displays available today use spatial superimposition of a synchronized red, green and blue light, each shining with a specific intensity, to create millions of color combinations. For instance, in LCD displays each pixel is made up of three RGB-colored dots that can take up discrete values over a 6- or 8-bit range: when watching the pixels from a distance, the human eye blends these three components together and perceives a single color over a total 18- or 24-bit range respectively.

TMOS displays harness a different principle in human vision: rather than superimposing the three components spatially, they do it temporally, exploiting the retinal persistence by intermittently sending just one of the three components at a time at very short intervals, and letting our brains “do the math” by adding the colors.

This approach greatly simplifies the manufacturing process, basically subtracting components from existing LCD lines and reducing others — such as the thin-film transistors for the RGB dots — by a factor of three, resulting in monitors that are 60 percent cheaper to manufacture than LCDs.

Because each layer placed between the top and the bottom glass sheet reduces the monitor’s overall light output (each layer acts as a filter), removing components and simplifying the rest makes TMOS displays highly energy-efficient, letting through more than ten times as much light as a conventional LCD screen. Intuitively, this means one could obtain the same picture brightness using less than one-tenth of the power.

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• Samsung and Uni-Pixel team up for better, cheaper TMOS displays (engadget.com)

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Tags: display technology, energy efficiency, human eye, human vision, lcd displays, lcd screen, lcds, manufacturing process, mass production, oled displays, persistence, superimposition, thin film transistors, tmos

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