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The Foldable LCD Screen

Fascinating! I swear, humans are increasing their knowledge and ability by leaps and bounds nowadays. It wont be long until we have microchips as brain enhancers.....I can see it now:

Increase your speed and memory by 33 percent with the new iBrain!!
 
Man, and LCD's are fragile enough as they are! I can't imagine them making something even MORE fragile... sounds cool, but man... a foldable display? And you thought you had to handle your iPod carefully... :rolleyes:
 
LCD paint

I can't remember where I saw this (probably Wired), but there is a company making LCD "screens" that can be painted onto any surface. Somehow the molecules align themselves properly... like magnetically charged particles.
 
That's the beauty of plastic..

Originally posted by Hemingray
Man, and LCD's are fragile enough as they are! I can't imagine them making something even MORE fragile... sounds cool, but man... a foldable display? And you thought you had to handle your iPod carefully... :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
LCD's aren't inherently fragile, it's the glass that they're attached too. They're finding ways to adhere (is that the right word???) the LCD to plastic so that you can do more stuff with LCDs. One example would be an LCD screen that you could bend around a column or something.

A competing technology (sort of) is OLEDs (Organic Light Eminating Diodes). There's people working on this as well. In the end, it'll mean lighter, more durable, cheaper, less power-consumming laptops for us.

It's a great time to be alive.
 
That is probably one of the coolest thing, now imagine that Apple made there Tablet (that maybe launched later this year) out of it and it was kind of a cloth tablet, that would be cool, But unlikely ;)

Ensign
 
A while ago Frog Design, or IDEO I can't remember, did a speculative design of the future project and one of the new technologies they were predicting was a portable computer that could be rolled up into the form factor of a tubular pencil case. Unroll and you have an instant touch-sensitive screen. No need for keyboards or anything else. I thought then that it was a bit silly, but maybe they were right on the money.
 
there was a company called e-ink that i heard about a while ago that made similar things ... it was a similar, but different, technology... they could make lcds (that were in testing) tyhat were as thin as pieces of paper.. havent heard about them for a while.
 
LCDs are a dead end technology. This is just another iteration that adds some life to the product. The key problem is that it requires a plastic layer for the transistors and a glass plate that acts as the light source.

The technology that will replace this will get rid of the glass plate altogether, leaving you with only a thin plastic film of transistors that are their own light source. Its called OLED and you can do a search on it at google to get more info. Right now they're being put in digital cameras and cell phones, but in the years to come you'll be able to get huge sheets of them that you'll be able to roll up, not just bend like this one from Toshiba.
 
Thanks for the links there Ensign. Yep, I can't wait to see OLEDs in the main stream. They'll be brighter, cheaper and eventually bigger than LCDs. Can you imagine a 4'x3' wall screen that is hung like a painting, not like the flat panels plasma displays today which are 4"-5" thick and weigh a ton, but somthing that's less than 1/2" when mounted? That and the new TiPB will have a little tube at the top that you'd just roll out the screen by its handle. Oh for the day that happens, now where'd I put the timemachine......
 
Isn't that what I said???

Originally posted by dukestreet
LCDs are a dead end technology. This is just another iteration that adds some life to the product. The key problem is that it requires a plastic layer for the transistors and a glass plate that acts as the light source.

The technology that will replace this will get rid of the glass plate altogether, leaving you with only a thin plastic film of transistors that are their own light source. Its called OLED and you can do a search on it at google to get more info. Right now they're being put in digital cameras and cell phones, but in the years to come you'll be able to get huge sheets of them that you'll be able to roll up, not just bend like this one from Toshiba.
Click to expand...
... 6 posts up.

One of the companies doing this is called Universal Display. A buddy of mine told me to invest in it about 2 years ago (the ticker is PANL for those interested). I never did, but I do track it from time to time.
 
I've excitedly watched for this technology to become a reality (price wise and quality) for years. Every now and then one would hear progress of flexible displays, and how we would use them "In The Future."

Think of having a little display sewn into your jacket sleeve and having adverts broadcast to it so you'll never be absent from the long arm of Media.

Oh, glorious days await. But that won't happen, will it? I mean, that would be like, well, like advertising stuff in front of us in public places while we pee!! They'd never go that far...:rolleyes:

(anyone remember the David Bowie flick "Man Who Fell to Earth" who was an alien and "invented" all these new technologies...he kept in contact with his family on his home planet with a flexible roll-out "visual sheet"...technology marches on)
 
all I can say is wow! :D

but how is this going to be useful on something like the PowerBook?!

or on any system for that matter...when do u guys find yourselves saying:

"damn...now if I could just bend the screen...." ;)
 
Originally posted by eyelikeart
all I can say is wow! :D

but how is this going to be useful on something like the PowerBook?!

or on any system for that matter...when do u guys find yourselves saying:

"damn...now if I could just bend the screen...." ;)
Click to expand...
This technology will be useful for laptops because we'll have 15" screens that are super durable (plastic vs. glass), and super light.

Plus, they'll be so much cheaper than the current LCDs.
 
i don't think a flexible display would be useful for a laptop. i would think you would want it to be as straight and sturdy as possible. the only real, current applications that i can think of are in destop computers and pda's. but you'd really only need it if you really wanted to move around because to me a flat, hard pda display, while not as cool, works just fine and easier to write on.

another lcd technology that i'd heard of a few years ago was an lcd screen that is see-through when off. that would be cool to have a window that turns into a computer screen whenever you need it.
 
Look how thin the screen is on a TiPB. With OLED you could have it half as thick, still as rigid and weigh a lot less. But if you had a rolled up version of the screen that locks into a collapsible framework, you could get a 20" screen on your laptop. Now tell me, who wouldn't want that?
 
Originally posted by dukestreet
Look how thin the screen is on a TiPB. With OLED you could have it half as thick, still as rigid and weigh a lot less. But if you had a rolled up version of the screen that locks into a collapsible framework, you could get a 20" screen on your laptop. Now tell me, who wouldn't want that?
Click to expand...

ok
think about this shape: __
as compared to this shape: 6
not very portable shaped
you'd have to make the computer itself rollable too
 
wrapable displays

Portable GPS maps would be a great application. Didn't one of those Mars movies have one? I always thought that was cool.
 
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