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It
was the middle of the afternoon on a bright sunny day at 39,000
feet somewhere over the North Pacific Ocean. Inside the passenger
cabin of the spacious Boeing 777 -- except for the emergency lighting,
an occasional reading lamp, and the soft glow of several hundred
LCD video screens -- it was dark. All the window shades were tightly
drawn and the passengers were immersed in watching the video displays
on the seat backs in front of them -- or on the armrest extensions
in business and first class. Not being a serious movie watcher,
I raised my window shade a few inches to see out. The passenger
across the aisle from me immediately complained that he couldn't
see his movie. I fussed, but grudgingly complied and put my window
shade back down. I don't like sitting in the dark! I like to see
daylight when it's available -- bright sunlight especially. Nevertheless,
I felt I should be considerate of my fellow travelers, closed my
shade, and sat in the dark for the remainder of the nine-hour flight.
Having thus been politely chastised by a fellow passenger and now
being in a grumpy mood because I wasn't free to satisfy my own preferences,
I began to analyze the situation.
No question about it. The LCD panels in this latest version
of the "triple-seven" were just barely adequate even for this non-critical
captive-entertainment application. This led me to recall an article
that I had seen just a few days earlier in USA Today about the new
portable devices that are aiding the evolution of the interconnected
society. In this article by Kevin Maney titled "Wireless Option
Opens Door to a New e-World," the passage that caught my eye said,
"There are caveats. Actually, lots of them. The screens stink. The
access is slow. The offerings are meager. You have to work your
way through menu hell to find things." (Bold emphasis added.) As
a longtime member of the display community, those words cut pretty
deep. Unfortunately, as I thought about it, I realized that in general
I would have to agree with Mr. Maney's assessment that most portable
devices do not have such great looking displays. Over the last two
decades, the use of electronic displays in non-television applications
has evolved from a few specialty products such as test instruments,
military systems, and data terminals to become the primary human
interface with computers and data- communications devices. In 1980
there were no desktop or laptop computers. Today their compute power
rivals the mainframes of only a few years ago.
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Communications have evolved from a few "car phones" to almost
everyone now being reachable independently of their location. These
changes were predicted by the well-known Moore's Law that states
that compute power approximately doubles every eighteen months to
two years. Some well-respected software types claim that image processing
capability is currently evolving even faster. The rate of data communications
and database "interconnectedness" is also increasing rapidly. This
leads me to pose two important questions to those of us in the display
community: "How are we doing in bringing exciting new display products
to market?" "Is the rate of display development commensurate with
progress in compute power, imaging software, and communications
bandwidth availability?" I'm going to suggest an answer, but with
the proviso that if you have a better one or a different one, you
must let me know. Why? Because the answer has important implications
for how we position SID and represent our display community to the
rest of the high-technology world over the next decade. My conclusion
is that we are falling behind. Twenty years ago, displays, built
on the solid foundation created by television and instrumentation
applications, had more than adequate capability for the first rudimentary
PCs and video games. For playing simple games like "pong," a monochrome
CRT screen did not present a limitation.
Today, the best CRTs and LCD panels are still a reasonable
match for desktop computers and perhaps barely adequate for portable
laptop computers, cell phones, and first-generation PDAs. But what
happens next? Although it is difficult to quantify all display parameters
into a "goodness" factor, and I have no intentions of trying to
propose a parallel to Moore's Law for displays, my best estimate
is that display capability is doubling no faster than about every
ten years. If I am correct, then we have a serious rate-of-development
mismatch that will soon require resolution. Because of 40 years
of television and instrumentation developments, displays were way
ahead of what computers needed in the 1980s. Today, it seems to
me that we are at no better than parity. And maybe not even that
good. At our present rate of progress, in another ten years we will
have become the highly visible bottleneck of the Internet society.
Over the last two decades, investment money has flowed freely into
microprocessors and memories, into software, and into Internet commerce
startups. With a few rare exceptions, we in the display community
have had a more difficult time creating investor interest and then
sustaining it until success could be demonstrated. Yet there is
a need for sunlight-readable displays, large displays for desktops,
low-cost and easy-to-see displays for portable Internet appliances,
high-resolution displays in all sizes and all price ranges for the
new digital television applications, and flat panels of all kinds
and sizes for low-cost multi-use home and commercial applications.
Many of these new display applications are not simple product extensions
of the traditional television displays or even of the newer desktop
or laptop computer displays.
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The good side of this is that there will be an increasing
demand for these displays. The bad side is that when we become the
limiting factor in the development of new products, there will be
increasing frustration among the system and software designers that
will manifest itself in increasing demands on the display community.
In response, there are likely to be numerous attempts at quick fixes
and perhaps even a few "leapfrog" approaches proposed. However,
if the fundamental principles haven't been thoroughly understood
and the basic materials are not fully developed, these attempts
will fail. The best that we can accomplish in bringing new display
products to market in the next ten years has to a large degree already
been set by what we know today about the basic materials and processes
for creating emissive, transmissive, or reflective displays. How
well we meet the needs of our colleagues in the rest of the high-technology
community over the next decade will now depend on how much enthusiasm
we can generate in the investment community and within the larger
corporations, while being realistic in telling the world what rate
of progress can be expected.
The Society for Information Display will also have to be
prepared to play a leading role as the growing need for better displays
of all shapes, sizes, and functionality manifests itself. As the
increasing popularity of display devices stimulates rapid change
and increased competition, SID can and must respond to these needs
as the premier organization that provides the international focal
point for the exchange of technical information in all aspects of
display technology. Of one thing we can be sure, in the next decade
we will be living in interesting times. To discuss this topic further,
please contact me by e-mail at silzars@attglobal.net
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