Just imagine yourself sitting down in front of your computer and seeing plastic, thin displays on both sides of your computer monitor, having high-resolution text pages which you can print from or refer to and on the wall right next to you will be another huge display monitor were you can show your family and friends pictures and notes or a power point presentation to your colleagues at work. This is just one of the visions that Hewlett-Packard Co. has in mind to bring to the market with the alternative low cost computer monitors of any size. The HP laboratories in England and Bristol have been working on the evolution of the high resolution, trying to get a paper like display by using plastic instead of the original glass for all the applications such as magazines, electronic books, posters and other new products that will be possible for the future computer monitors.
HP had a presentation at the National Gallery in London, where they showed all their new prototypes using the new concept of display technology, being the first step in breaking out the 1000 by 1000 pixel wall that all the computer users see the electronic world.
"We have a thousand times more disc space and a thousand times more computer power, but we're still looking through a little display window that's essentially the same as it was 10 years ago," stated the manager of the display research team at the HP labs, Adrian Geisow.
Although the LCD prototype was very small, having only 1.18 inches by 1,57 inches, it has the power to display 125 colors and has a feature of bistable passive matrix which means that researchers will build monitor displays with as many pixels as they would like. The prototype that was thin as a finger nail showed very clear images from the famous collection of the gallery and researchers stated that they are very confident that they would scale them to a much larger size. In only three years they said that they would have more plans for the use of the display technology and maybe also have a product on the market.
"We think this is a substantial milestone for large, low-cost, quality displays," stated the manager of the digital and media department of the HP labs, Huw Robson. When the displays will be scaled at 16.9 inches by 22.8 inches, researchers expect the price to drop low about five times the actual amount that a LCD monitor costs now. Geisow said that 'We've done cost modeling to suggest that this kind of savings is reasonable'. The enthusiasm of the researchers about the potential cost and the size of the computer monitor displays is also produced by the fact that they have created a new process of manufacturing them that implies a print like process on plastic. This is a more affordable and simple process than the one that implies making the glass for a LCD computer monitor using photolithography. The latter process takes action like the film developing on a substrate to gain a very own pattern for the images that will be displayed.
This technology permits 200 or even more pixels to be per inch which would give a resolution suited for paper like graphics. This would be a very suitable technology for arts and texts. Geisow also stated that 'This technology is targeted at print and paper like applications' observing that no other technology that is current on the market can compete with paper when it comes to the subject of presenting images like you see them in books, posters or magazines. "With this technology we think we've opened the door for whole new possibilities" said the manager of the developing graphics HP laboratories. This will make HP the new power in the printing world because it is the first manufacturer of this kind of ground breaking technology Robson saying that 'We are always looking to research new areas of our market we can move into".
