The team building the $100 laptop has been promising a “dual-mode” display (1200×900 black and white mode readable in sunlight and 800×600 backlit color mode) by the time it goes into production. The goal is to build a high-resolution display that can work indoors and outdoors (optionally with the backlight off). There are some indoor-outdoor displays available now, however, the ones I’m aware of are relatively expensive and sacrifice display quality in one way or another. So it’s interesting to see if the MIT team is making any progress with its custom display.
For the first time, the OLPC team is sharing photos of a functioning dual-mode display prototype. You can see the pictures here.
As you can see from the photos, the quality isn’t too bad. It’s hard to tell how strong the backlight is and similarly how much power the display is drawing. The viewing angle looks OK although it’s a bit hard to tell from the photos.
By the way, the program shown in the screenshots is called Scratch (More about Scratch and its companions Squeak and SqueakLand here.) and is from the eToys team. Who is behind eToys? None other than Alan Kay–the person behind the DynaBook, which was the first “Tablet PC” concept design.
Oh and notice the thin digitizer sitting just below the keyboard. Yes, the OLPC has a foldable display and a digitizer–albeit not one on the display. Sure sounds like a Tablet PC, doesn’t it?? Looks to me like Linux is going to have a Tablet PC before Apple :-).
For some additional photos of the display in action, check out eWeek here. In eWeek’s photos you can see the display running in both color and its novel black and white mode. There are also some charts that indicate the expected power consumption and costs. We’ll have to see how this all works out in production. An accompanying article is available here.
Update: I just chatted with a friend that’s worked in the display industry and talked with him about some of the details of the dual mode display. He was impressed with the claim that the display will draw 0.2W max. He also mentioned that in terms of the interface logic, it was hard for him to tell what the “novel TTL interface” that the designers mention really is. LVDS (often an RGB set of “serial” links) has the advantage of reducing the numbers of wires that must pass through the hinges as well as helping to reduce the EMI radiation since signals can cancel each other out. It does sacrifice power though. However, he mentioned that there may be a way to downgrade the design to something simpler. “TTL” in itself didn’t sound like it was power friendly though. There’s probably more to it. The other details were also too sketchy for him to be able to tell what’s being done. He did say though that if you have cooperation with the display manufacturers that there could be some very interesting things that you could do. We’ll have to see how this all shakes out.
[Link found via Engadget]