Liquavista’s color and monochrome screens have looked impressive in demos we’ve seen to date — but their performance in direct sunlight was still an unknown. That’s all changed now, as the folks at ARMDevices managed to secure a little outdoor time with the displays on a bright, sunshiney day.
As you can see in the image above, a traditional laptop display doesn’t hold a candle to the Liquavista screen on the middle device (presumably an eReader of some sort). Better still, Liquavista claims that the improvement in outdoor readability doesn’t involve major modifications to the way existing LCD displays are manufactured.
That’s good news, and should allow for more widespread adoption of the technology by other manufacturers. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen for a while yet — the displays aren’t set to go into production until 2011.
Check out the video after the break to see the side-by-side-by-side comparison.
ARMDevices via Engadget
Hopefully this one won’t prove to be vapourware?
Is this a Pixel Qi knock off? Sounds like it.
Stop it. LCD screens that are visible outdoor are not something new nor did Pixel Qi invent them. Check out rugged units like those from Getac, Mobile Demand, General Drynamics – Itronix, Xplore (best in the business?), Panasonic Toughbook, and Motion Computing, just to name a few. Also, I don’t understand if Liquivista’s solution is supposed to be as low powered as Pixel Qi’s or not. Finally, did anybody else think that the color reproduction is weird. It looked like everything was dithered on to a 4-bit or 8-bit palette, so it may be a low bit display.
Pixel Qi has done some finishing work on the tech, that makes them currently the leader in the screen area… enough so that they have an earned industry awards this year. See:
https://pixelqi.com/blog1/2010/05/25/pixel-qi-recieve-sid-display-of-the-year-award/
“Pixel Qi’s 3Qi Multimode LCD has been awarded the Display of the Year Award by the Society for Information Display (SID)”