DIY Pixel Qi screens - available now | Hacker News Reader

DIY Pixel Qi screens - available now

pixelqi.com

43 pointsph0rque23 comments

While the price of $275 seems pretty high, it is still much lower than what you could get e-ink display as a developer.

The big question is, can this screen serve its stated dual purpose as an excellent e-reader screen and a general purpose netbook screen.

As for the resolution, my wild guess is standard 1024x600 which the Lenovo S10-2 they are marketing as a replacement screen has. Frankly $275 is a bit high for 1024x600.

Interesting though is this note: "The e-paper mode has 3 times the resolution of the fully saturated color mode"

So this e-paper mode is something like 1536x1200 or more like 3072x1800 (unlikely as it seems)?

It's 3072x600 [1]. This is actually exactly the same as any 1024x600 LCD it's just that in e-paper mode that extra horizontal resolution is more usable as the rgb sub-pixels are in b/w.

But the OS probably never sees it as 3072x600 (or it would have to be changing the resolution and aspect ratio on the fly). Also it's not necessary as AFAIK the sub-pixel font rendering would amount to the same thing.

[1] http://netbooked.net/blog/lenovo-s10-2-w-pixel-qi-display-ce...

I've got an Asus 1005P, which cost me £240 when I bought it. It's also got a 1024x600 screen, but adding one of these would mean I could work outside and, if I believe what the blog post says, possibly add a couple of hours of battery life to boot. Is that worth almost the same price again?

Hell yes.

No, other way around. The monochrome mode uses a 1-1 pixel mapping, so it's true 1024x600, but the color mode uses a novel pixel layout that does not have each color component in every pixel:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1#Display_resolution

So, while the resolution always remains 1024x600 as far as software's concerned, the effective resolution is a third when using color.

(Note that the new screen is, I'm sure, not identical to the XO-1 screen, so you can't assume that the Wikipedia description will be accurate for it.)

So the ACTUAL color resolution is what, about 340x200 or something? Or is it just a vertical/horizontal thing, or?

Without having seen it, or even good pictures of it, I would assume the color mode would still have full resolution, but that colors would appear "wrong" but not neccessarily less detailed.

You guys do know that there is no full color pixel? At least when i look at the recent display comparisons, it's always a matrix of different red, green, blue pixels:

http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/06/25/retinal-scientist-p...

I'm guessing this screen uses something like this: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/03/secrets-of-the-n...

A matrix of color pixels is less noticable when you have 200-350PPI, vs something like 80PPI on a netbook.

Of course, but the point is that there are usually (e.g.) 1024 red pixels, 1024 green pixels, and 1024 blue pixels, per-row. This screen has 1024 color pixels per-row total, in a novel layout.

The price tag seems high. As previously mentioned it might be because of, low inventory volumes, new tech., etc.. What baffles me is that this technology was developed with OLPC in mind. How can you hope to sell a 100$ laptop (original price target) if a 10" screen with the same technology is 275$?

OLPC didn't have insane production volumes to begin with yet shipped for 150$ which is less than this screen. Moreover, it was specifically designed to be able to use existing LCD manufacturing technology which should keep the production cost low.

I predict that this price is inflated for early adopters since they will probably be selling all their inventory anyways. They are hopping to have an extremely high profit margin to recoup original investments.

Development kits always cost 10x the volume price of the part. $275 tells you nothing about the actual cost of the screen.

I'd love to see what Rossum (http://rossum.posterous.com/) could do with one of these.

This is excellent news; the Kindle and other e-paper devices are too limited, while reading on LCD screens gives me eyestrain.

Well, this is also an LCD screen, so chances are pretty high you'll get eyestrain on this one as well?

Eyestrain comes from viewing something with a backlight. As I understand it, Pixel Qi displays have the option of turning off the backlight and enabling their tech that reflects light back through the LCD (like a piece of paper, etc).

Ah, ok. My Nokia phone has a reflective screen, but I've never really thought about the difference in eye-strain when I look at it indoors and in direct sunlight. Hm, I have to go test it. :-)

You'll still have some amount of eyestrain, but no more than reading text on paper, or looking at photos, IIRC.

I find it helps when I put my iPad into white-on-black mode when using the Kindle app.

A daylight readable iPad would be awesome for traveling. How about something like an iPad with front and back cameras? One could run a Google Maps-like program with add-on features that makes it an interactive travel guide. Hold it up to take a photo of a landmark, and it could automatically create an inset picture and upload it to a photostream. Come to think of it, this would make a great feature for an iPhone 4 app.

Based on other comments I read here, it seems that the screens are 1024 x 600. Why are they so expensive? Apple probably only pays $50 or less for the IPS screen in an iPad.

New tech at low volumes. Of course it's going to be expensive.

If it would be an ordinary LCD screen like on the iPad it wouldn't be newsworthy.

Nowhere in the announcing article on pixelqi.com, or on the linked Maker Shed product page, can the resolution of the display be found. What an awkward blooper.

1024 x 600, based on specs reported by tablets and netbooks that use them, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_tablet.

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