Resistive touchscreen panels get a bad rep these days, both because they can’t recognize fingertip input as easily as capacitive touch panels and for because many people have the mistaken belief that resistive displays can’t handle multitouch input. The truth is that while most cheap resistive touch panels found in tablets, netbooks, and handheld devices are single-touch only, that’s not an inherent limitation of the technology. There are also some companies providing multitouch resistive displays.
Now Fujitsu is getting in on the action with a new line of multitouch resistive panels. The panels will come in 5.6 inch, 7 inch, and 12.1 inch sizes. Unlike a capacitive display, you’ll be able to interact with these screens using a stylus or a gloved finger. On the other hand, if you want to use your fingertips, you’ll probably have to press harder on the screen than you would with a capacitive display.
The screens will be able to handle the usual range of multitouch gestures including pinch, rotate, swipe and scroll gestures as well as handwriting. What I like about resistive displays is that they can recognize precise input from a stylus, pen cap, or other sharp object, which comes in handy when you’re using an operating system like Windows which was designed for precise input from a mouse rather than fuzzy input from thick fingers.
Akihabara News reports the Fujitsu displays will run from $60 to $120.
via SlashGear
Thank goodness. While reading the news about the upcoming T580, I was happy to read that it will feature an active digitizer, a much needed improvement, but was disappointed that Fujitsu seemed to be abandoning its investment in resistive touchscreen refinement from its years with the P-Series. Theirs is really one of the few passive touchscreen implementations (resistive or capacitive) that can legitimately deliver tablet functionality like digital inking and illustration. In fact, in terms of raw accuracy, it’s even better than some of the hybrid (capacitive+active) digitizers out there. It’s nice to see that Fujitsu is carrying this forward. I actually don’t think that people care about the underlying technology of their touchscreen digitizers. They just care about the experience of using it. It be will nice to see more resistive digitizers that can give users the experience that they’re looking for on the operating systems that they like. If you’ve had experience developing embedded systems, then you know that resistive touchscreens have a lot of advantages (cost, power consumption, software simplicity). Combining these developer advantages with user preference seems like a big win.