Comment by robinsoh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robinsoh | Hacker News Reader

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> Overall, my impression was of a project whose participants treated it as a vehicle for promoting their personal "pet" projects

I'm so glad to see others speaking out about this. I'm 100% in agreement that's what "saviour" projects like MIT Asia, OLPC have all ended up being.

> the Pixel Qi display (monochrome mode was poorly utilized by software)

I've said this before about the Pixel Qi panel in the XO-1. I'm not attempting to be negative, but I actually work in the display industry and found the PixelQi display on the OLPC-XO-1 to be unusable. My perception of the display was one with very low quality color with backlight; and terrible viewing angle and unreadable contrast levels in bright sunlight. It also had low resolution. The XO-1 display I had access to had lots of pixel defects. If I am not mistaken (as I do not know actual pricing that Quanta got for the PixelQi displays) they were more expensive than LCDs and required additional parts that made managing their supply chain overall difficult. Most experts in my industry that I talked to expressed the opinion that it was a reality-distortion field type charismatic executive (ML Jepsen) who managed to convince people at OLPC to try that idea. It was funded by UN and money from developing countries budgets who were excited by the promise of being able to educate their masses. Sadly it looks as if those countries and their budget expenditures were taken for a ride by Nicholas Negroponte and his gang, rather than benefiting from a genuinely merit based idea.

Your assessment of the properties of the display specifically seem to go counter what I perceived as a convincing argument by the OLPC guy brought up in a TED talk at the time, namely, that the two biggest cost factors of a new laptop are marketing and the display unit. He then argued that the project can largely just do away with marketing altogether (plausible) and went on to say that even displays that come out of production with a single pixel error have a massively reduced price tag. From that I concluded that the project could reasonably build cheap hardware if only they went with no advertising and run-of-the-mill display units that narrowly failed quality checks.

Nothing in that talk hinted at the possibility that instead of opting for a established and proven technology like LCD they'd choose to go with RDF (reality distortion field) displays instead.

I feel being lied to.

> I feel being lied to.

I notice this kind of response anytime I say something that goes against the faith of the OLPC believers.

If you feel something I said is factually inaccurate, then please point it out specifically.

Otherwise, I believe all my points have been proven out. Quite simply, we can all observe the fact that nobody is using a Pixel Qi display or any technology related to it. If your speaker's claims about "Nothing in that talk hinted at the possibility that instead of opting for a established and proven technology like LCD they'd choose to go with RDF (reality distortion field) displays instead." were true, then I'd have been proven wrong and the display industry today would be worshiping at the feet of Jepsen.

He meant he was being lied to by OLPC, not by you.

One Display Unit Failing QA Per Child? There aren't that many failed displays in the world! Especially in the cost, size and energy budget of a hand crank computer.

> low resolution

Do you mean color resolution? The screen pixel resolution was 1200x900, which was unusually high both for a 7.5" screen, and for a 2007 laptop.

> The screen pixel resolution was 1200x900, which was unusually high both for a 7.5" screen, and for a 2007 laptop.

RGB XGA was dominant by 2006 so I don't think that's accurate.

Don't think which part is accurate? 1200x900 has 28% more pixels than XGA, right? (And that XGA was often on a 14" screen instead of a 7.5" screen.)

I think this is another effect of the reality distortion field.

XO-1's resolution was 692×520 (1/3 of 1200×900 which is the black&white resolution). Apples to apples means RGB XGA vs 692x520 bayer or whatever layout Jepsen claimed was better than industry standard.

There were many XGA 7" and 6" panels in 2006 from Panasonic, Sharp and others.

Why do all of the pages I’m finding with a quick search say it’s 1200x900? Some wires must be crossed somewhere or some massive limitation must exist for your 1/3rd res to be correct, that I’m missing

> it’s 1200x900? Some wires must be crossed somewhere

1200x900 in XO-1 is tft pixels not RGB pixels like XGA. In the simplest 1d layout, a 1x1 resolution RGB display is actually 1x3 tft pixels. That's why I'm saying apples to apples comparison.

It's 1200x900 subpixels. In transmissive (color) mode, this was effectively 600x450, since it took a full 2x2 elements to display a color (it used a Bayer-style RGBG matrix, iirc).

I think the OLPC software still treated the display as 1200x900, but this meant that there were visible color artifacts on any sort of fine detail, and color rendition was pretty awful.

I have an XO-1 in my closet and the display was really the only thing I loved about that laptop. I wish I had the knowledge to create a display driver for it to hook it up to a raspberry pi that could make a fun little netbook.

A display that you could actually read outdoors was super useful for me. I used the XO-1 for a few months as my actual laptop after my macbook died and I bought a macbook pro. Those were literally unusable outdoors and for a while I would carry the XO-1 around with me instead of my laptop just because I could actually use it. Honestly if they keyboard had not been complete crap I might have never replaced my macbook.

Even today my laptops 500 nit display is only usable outdoors at 100% screen brightness and destroys my battery life.

Well Pixel Qi seemed like a magical display at the time. I wonder if given a few more revisions it could have been more competitive? It always felt like a shame that we lost the option of having this display.

I have seen really cool stuff like Mirasol and CED displays come and go and it just sucks that we have seen so many nifty things never really make it. I am holding out hope for CLEARink ePaper and playNitride microLED.

> Well Pixel Qi seemed like a magical display at the time.

Not to me. I had the chance to carefully look at an OLPC XO-1. It was terrible even by the lowest standards of the industry at the time.

> I wonder if given a few more revisions it could have been more competitive?

This is like saying Theranos' drop of blood test could laso have become successful if we just gave the founders a few more billion and a few more decades.

> I have seen really cool stuff like Mirasol

Yes, it is sad that we still can't make interferometric displays work reliably. Some day though. Some day. I still have some hope.

>reality-distortion field type charismatic executive

This sounds like something you would read in a SCP article, but is the perfect description for those kind of leaders

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