Pixel Qi founder Mary Lou Jepsen has announced that the company is working on a 7 inch version of its low power, dual mode displays. The 7 inch screens should ship in the first half of 2011, although samples could be available for companies looking to integrated the technology into their tablet computers and eBook readers by the end of 2010.

Pixel Qi already offers a 10 inch display for netbooks and tablets. The screens are designed to look like normal LCD displays when a computer backlight is on, showing full color and full motion. When you cut the backlight, the screen is still visible but the colors fade to grayscale. In this high contrast mode, the screen looks similar to an E-ink display and consumes about 20% of the power used by a typical LCD, which should be enough to add about an hour of battery life to a modern netbook with a high capacity 6 cell battery.

We’re still waiting for commercial products such as the Notion Ink Adam tablet or Innoveral Lattice tablet to hit the streets, but you can pick up a DIY kit that will let you install a Pixel Qi display in your existing 10 inch netbook from the Maker Shed. Unfortunately the DIY kits carry a pretty steep $275 price tag.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

7 replies on “Pixel Qi to deliver 7 inch low power, high contrast screens next year”

  1. Glad to hear there are new Pixel Qi tablets in the pipelines. But 7″ is disappointing. I was hoping for DIY kits in larger, mainstream sizes, like 12.1 or 13.3. Seems to me like there’d be more demand. But what do I know.

    1. Most demand would be in the portable device markets for outdoor use. So 7″ and 10″ covers tablets through netbooks.

      But larger screens are in the works and was the plan from the beginning, the 7″ is actually a surprise because original reports where that they would have 10″ and larger only, but Pixel Qi is still trying to build itself up and has a long way to go before they have a full lineup of products for all the devices people will want to use them in…

  2. the DIY kits are stupid expensive. but this 7″ screen sounds like something that would be good in the Kindle 4 running AmazonOS

  3. Yeah, I’ll say the Maker Shed kits are pricey — especially given that they’re not touchscreens. While it won’t work as well outdoors, you can pick up a 3M touchscreen with single touch for as little as <$100, and the availability of various tablets as reported on this site offers a number of other options.

    Unfortunately, the whole market seems pretty volatile, with no real clear winners for developers and users right now beyond the iPad. I think you'll have to be fairly patient, as you had to be with Android – took a couple of years for things to ramp up to something usable.

    (speaking of which, still trying to find out what happened to stantum's work in multitouch resistive…)

Comments are closed.