All owners of cell phones and other portable electronic devices want the brightest possible displays, but that takes a lot of battery power. Now there are new breakthroughs in display technology that may help solve this problem.

A number of companies have recently announced improvements in the science behind display technology. There is good reason for this: battery life. Paul Semenza, with market research company DisplaySearch in Austin, says that  “Everybody is shooting for low-power color.” Newer applications on highly portable devices, such as video and Web page viewing, are starting to show the limitation of old display technology, according to a New York Times story. Users want more battery life, and most of the battery energy is used to light up the displays.

Pixtronix has developed one of these new technologies, combining more energy efficient LED bulbs with million of tiny shutters that more efficiently block or expose LED pixels. This technology is called PerfectLight, which has been almost four years in the making. Mark Halfman, a Pixtronix vice president, says “We offer one-fourth the power consumption of a liquid crystal display.” LEDs are more efficient than LCDs because they do not lose so much of their power passing through polarizers, filters and crystals on the way to the viewer’s eyes. Paul Semenza notes that “You can end up with about a fifth of the optical energy that is put out by the backlight — or even less.”

Another solution is the mirasol microelectro-mechanical system, which utilizes ambient light (the natural illumination surrounding an object) reflectively, using tiny devices which act like mirrors but which selectively reflect the red, blue, and green light which makes up all the colors on a color display panel. Even better, the mirasol technology is built not on silicon but on glass, which is a much less expensive material. And, according to Jim Cathey, a vice president at Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, ““Because we can harness the ambient light, our technology is low-power, as low as one milliwatt.” It works like a charm in bright-light conditions, normally a bane of LCD and LED displays, and it can do it with 1/50 the power of even Pictronix PerfecLight, at least under ideal conditions.

The day may soon come when we will be able to use our hand-held devices, like phones and MP3 players, to watch hour upon hour of video on a single battery charge. Technologies such as these are exactly what users are clamoring for, and will allow them to be truly free of wires of any kind for longer and longer periods of time. Somehow, technology seems to always keep up with user demand.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 5:30 pm under Cell phones, Green Technology, LCD, Online video, Science and technology.

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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