Pixel Qi's Killer Display is the Future of E-Reading
Mary Lou Jepsen just popped into town from Taiwan, and brought along a few prototypes of her company's new displays with her. So I went over to her houseboat for a quick visit this morning. I'm pretty excited: This could be the magic bullet for the e-reader market—at least for the next few years.
Mary Lou knows displays. While at MIT, as the founding CTO of One Laptop Per Child, she concentrated on the display and decided that that's all that matters these days. The chips and operating systems are fungible. But, as you probably know, there was a bit of a religious split among the team members over which was the best display technology: one group went off to start E Ink, while Mary Lou and her husband, John Ryan, launched Pixel Qi. The basic idea of their company is that by rearranging the same ingredients used in LCD technology—the most popular display tech in the world, and the cheapest—you can come up with something far better than E Ink, or any other display technology now on the market. After seeing a laptop this morning that had been modded with a PQ screen, I'm even more of a believer than ever.
E Ink's main advantages are this: A reflective technology (meaning it doesn't emit light, like a standard LCD, so you can't read it in a dark room but you can in daylight) it draws minimal power while rendering very crisp text. The Kindle uses E Ink and if I turn wireless off on mine, it can go nearly two months without a charge. The downside is E Ink is relatively expensive to produce, and is still years away from doing color, let alone video.
Now let's look at Pixel Qi's technology.
Mary Lou had a pair of off-the-shelf Acer laptops that she had purchased at Radio Shack. Her team modded them with the new, 10-inch Pixel Qi screens for demo purposes; a jerry-rigged switch, on the side of the screen, allows you to switch between emissive mode—similar to the typical, flashlight-in-your-eyes LCD display—and reflective mode, which rivaled E Ink. Actually, it was better than E Ink: My Kindle only handles 167 DPI (the measure of dot pitch, or crispness of the font); the Pixel Qi, Mary Lou said, does 205 DPI.
In black and white, reflective mode, I couldn't see any difference when we held up the Kindle alongside the PQ-modded Netbook. Both were easy to read without any flicker or speckling. Color on the Pixel Qi was like color on an LCD, which, I guess, it is. That's the killer app, right there, of course. Good news for the magazine business!
See the toggle switch? It's just to the left of the power adapter. It allows you to switch between reflective and emissive display.
It provides a wide gamut of color, which you'd expect.
Color gamut. Yeah.
And it does video to the tune of 60 frames per second. We sat on the deck of her houseboat and watched a clip on YouTube in reflective mode, and the video ran perfectly smoothly.
The displays still have a way to go, of course. A third party would need to build a proper motherboard, optimized for the display and an e-reader. (Simply slapping a PQ display on the Acer gives it an extra hour or so of battery life; an optimized e-reader essentially goes to sleep between the turn of each page, saving far more power, among other things.) But Mary Lou said that a manufacturer could buy PQ's technology today and have an e-reader that could render high-def text, on a full color page, and video, by the first quarter of next year. The screens are cheap to produce, too—well under $200, she said. Such a device ought to enjoy 40 hours or so of use as an e-reader, between charges. Video would drain the battery faster, obviously.
In the race to build a better e-reader, Pixel Qi looks like the frontrunner at this point.
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Holy crap. That's impressive.
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[...] He brands the colors about as vibrant as a typical LCD and said video “ran perfectly smoothly” (yes, Pixel Qi is capable of both color and video). Jepsen claims battery life at around 40 hours of use, which isn’t quite up to the marathon-like endurance of the Kindle but is still impressively long. Best of all, Jepsen states that the Pixel Qi is ready for production now, at a relatively cheap price: Only about $200 for a 10-inch screen. This might finally be the tech that brings e-readers up to their potential, so please, manufacturers, bring on the Pixel Qi e-readers! [Time] [...]
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[...] He brands the colors about as vibrant as a typical LCD and said video “ran perfectly smoothly” (yes, Pixel Qi is capable of both color and video). Jepsen claims battery life at around 40 hours of use, which isn’t quite up to the marathon-like endurance of the Kindle but is still impressively long. Best of all, Jepsen states that the Pixel Qi is ready for production now, at a relatively cheap price: Only about $200 for a 10-inch screen. This might finally be the tech that brings e-readers up to their potential, so please, manufacturers, bring on the Pixel Qi e-readers! [Time] [...]
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[...] hacked Acer Aspire One netbook that Pixel Qi founder Mary Lou Jepsen is carrying around gets an extra hour of battery life because of the low power [...]
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Interesting. I hope this concept gets some backing. It certainly has potential.
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[...] He brands the colors about as vibrant as a typical LCD and said video “ran perfectly smoothly” (yes, Pixel Qi is capable of both color and video). Jepsen claims battery life at around 40 hours of use, which isn’t quite up to the marathon-like endurance of the Kindle but is still impressively long. Best of all, Jepsen states that the Pixel Qi is ready for production now, at a relatively cheap price: Only about $200 for a 10-inch screen. This might finally be the tech that brings e-readers up to their potential, so please, manufacturers, bring on the Pixel Qi e-readers! [Time] [...]
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[...] on Sunday New (much needed) e-reader technology, and a some new info on the forthcoming Plastic Logic e-reader (which promises focus on the [...]
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[...] una migliore visibilità anche in condizioni di luce non favorevoli. Da quel che riporta il Time Magazine inoltre, il basso consumo energetico richiesto consentirebbe anche qualche ora di autonomia in più [...]
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[...] Josh Quittner has scored one the first, if not the first, first-hand peeks at Pixel Qi’s potentially game-changing display. The buzz around the company’s 3Qi [...]
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[...] Time got to play with some Acer netbooks that had the 3qi screens incorporated and loved the 3qi screens. Time is already proclaiming the technology the future of ereading. [...]
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[...] Qi introduce a screen that Time magazine calls the future of ereading. Its hard to [...]
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The irony here is that JQ posts about all this technology stuff, and yet somehow Time's IT people are unable to put his face next to Grossman's and Selman's.
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And was it your intent to attract all these spambots or autobloggers or whatever they are? -
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[...] Time Magazine’s John Quittner was able to get a firsthand look at the Pixel Qi-screened Acer Aspire One netbook rigged by Mary Lou Jepsen’s, founding CTO of One Laptop Per Child, team. A switch was placed on the side of the screen that allows the switch between modes: emissive, which is the typical LCD display, and reflective.The PQ-screened netbook was reportedly as easy to read as the Kindle outdoors, without flicker or speckling. Plus, Pixel Qi’s screen handled colors pretty well, much like a regular LCD can. The reflective screen also extended battery life an hour than normal. [...]
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Until evidence to the contrary, I must assume that JQ is so unspeakably ugly that posting his visage on this blog would bring down the Time server. I shall here-forth refer to him as 'He who must not be pictured'.
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I think it's his lack of facial hair
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The way I look at it is there are two key factors to how many of us use books, neither of which are addressed by the Kindle. They both seem to be somewhat better addressed by this technology.
1. We read them where it's convenient to us --and they often get beat up. Fortunately, they are remarkably durable, and, if I happen to lose or damage one, far cheaper than the Kindle. I am NOT going to change my reading habits to use a Kindle.
So, for ordinary reading, I would want this to either be quite rugged, or cost $100 or less. This does not solve that problem, although it ameliorates it.
2. I like to read at night in bed while my wife's asleep. For this purpose I might pay a little more for a display that emits light. This does solve that problem.
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[...] war beim US-Magazin Time zu Gast und führte das 3Qi-Display in Form eines Prototypen vor, der in einem Acer Aspire One [...]
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@anon76 I'm just assuming he has a full head of luxurious hair, and is thus barred from the masthead.
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I always assumed JQ was simply the mind of the 7's. Since the entire line was discontinued, there's no picture to put.
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@Dave So, Josh "Daniel" Quittner?
We should just call him Daniel from now on....
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So it's a LCD display that acts in transmissive mode and reflective mode... and that's new and interesting?
Try US patent 4,930,365 from 1978. An LCD that acts in both transmissive mode and reflective mode! While I agree that they aren't common in the current marketplace, it's not that big of a step forward in technology.
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@patentboy That's why IP, patents included, needs to die. The idea isn't the big deal. Actually getting one to market, as you sort of point out, is.
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@Church
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JQ actually does have quite a shock of hair-albeit white. -
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[...] cool. But they’re limited to greyscale, are too slow to do video and are relatively expensive. Time magazine reports on Pixel Qi’s new LCD approach which they have dubbed the future of e-reading: In black and [...]
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[...] I've moved this post up because of its importance to many TeleRead community members. Also, see a Time Magazine/CNN item on the new display. – D.R. Digg us! Slashdot us! Share the [...]
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