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Super-cheap laptop display coming: More significant than E Ink, for now?
August 6, 2006 | 8:18 am
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By David Rothman
Tthe U.S. space program helped inspire the creation of microchips. Could the $100 laptop project, aka One Laptop Per Child, have a similar effect in areas such as displays for reading e-books? That’s what I’m wondering now that Mary Lou Jepsen, the CTO, has come up with a dirt-cheap display that will provide decent contrast for reading e-books in sunlight and also suffice for reading inside. Details from the OLPC newsletter:
We have reached an important milestone this week: the dual-mode display now works in prototype! We have been counting on Mary Lou Jepsen’s new approach to LCD displays to help us achieve our price and power consumption targets and enable our expected models of indoor and outdoor use, while also rapidly achieving mass production. We now have a display that can readily be mass produced in standard LCD factories, with no process changes. Our display has higher resolution than 95% of the laptop displays on the market today; approximately 1/7th the power consumption; 1/3rd the price; sunlight readability; and room-light readability with the backlight off.”
On the eBook Community list, Bill Janssen notes: “This is claimed to be a 1200×900 8-bit grayscale display at 200 dpi, which will cost manufacturers approximately $35. A diffraction grating behind it, plus white LED backlights, allows it to be used in a lower-resolution somewhat odd ‘swizzled’ color mode.”
You can see a mockup of the color-mode in operation.
The obvious questions: How long until this is commercialized, and on what machines from which companies will it show up? I’d also be curious about the commercial collaborators behind the breakthrough. See the end of an OLPC hardware-spec wiki, last changed in June, which mentions ChiLin of Taiwan as the manufacturer of the display and 3M as “building specialized plastic optical components being used in the design of these displays.” What’s the role of these companies, if any, in the breakthrough display?
Whatever the answer, don’t underestimate the the potential significance of OLPC’s work to the e-book world–perhaps greater than E Ink‘s, at least for now (next two years, say). A display is typically the most expensive component of a handheld or tablet computer, the best kind for the prolonged reading of e-books. So the breakthrough really could be a major boost for e-books if indeed the OLPC claims are true.
Moreover, keep in mind that the OLPC is an ongoing project. I can’t wait for other surprises made possible through (1) a commitment to mass production and (2) the combined talents of the people involved. I know. It’s fashionable and indeed necessary to be skeptical about new technology, and beyond that, I was rather put off by OLPC’s premature claim of laptop orders by four countries. But from afar, at least, the display announcement seem credible. I’d welcome more thoughts from Bill, who, as a PARC guy, has been studying e-book hardware for years.
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Comments:
I couldn’t agree with you more. If (and that’s a big “if”) OLPC really has developed a low-power dual display that can reach full production levels, it will revolutionize the computer industry overnight and may just have a larger impact on technology adoption and diffusion than anything else the OLPC project accomplishes.
Let’s hope that the OLPC claim is true, as I believe it is. If not, if it’s like the claim of orders from those several countries, I’ll rev down my enthusiasm several notches. Meanwhile keep chugging away with your Unofficial One Laptop Per Child Website, so people can benefit from your own perspective. David
While the OLPC screen seems really great to ebook folks, I think that in the mass consumer laptop market, it would fail pretty quickly. Most folks don’t need (and, with Windows, really can’t handle) 200 dpi. It’s a reflective grayscale screen at heart (which is why it’s so cheap, and so low-power), most folks require color. It’s small (thus, again, low-power and cheap), and most folks want something larger. The color mode seems a bit odd — while I’m sure it works, it won’t win any awards from digital photo companies. Since the OLPC folks don’t have to worry about marketing this to consumers, they were free to make a somewhat unusual set of laptop display design choices.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for an ebook reader screen, it looks pretty darn good. The one remaining issue is the weight. But this kind of screen can also be created (for more money) on the newer lighter “flexible” substrates. If I was manufacturing E-Ink displays, I’d be interested/worried. And experimenting with diffraction gratings
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Sounds like a pretty good analysis, Bill. Because K-12 is the main market, I’d hope very much that reading would be an important app–more so than, say, multimedia. The big question is whether the OLPC claim is credible. Why hasn’t OLPC come out with more details? Perhaps NDAs? Although I believe the claim is true, I’ll certainly feel more comfortable when more information appears.
Entirely unrelated: There’s also another OLPC issue–one that I’ll mostly likely cover in a post in the main area of the blog in the next day or two. Might OLPC be better off showing more sensitivity to teachers, who may feel very uncomfortable with the pedagogical approach that Papert and Negroponte are pushing? OLPC will have to decide what the main priority is–spreading around the hardware or popularizing Papert’s theories. Is it possible the project might round win over more countries if it offers a variety of approaches? No need for folks to comment now–I’m just looking ahead, and writing this partly as a memo to myself.
Thanks,
David
You have pulled out from my post a section where I put forward my OLPC concerns (the text you’ve quoted actually dates back to a 29th June post on metafilter) and have framed me as being anti-OPLC (you have also emphasised the anti bit). I do go on to state that I would like to be proved wrong; that I would like to see the project succeed. Clearly, however, I am not convinced by the OLPC in its current form. I believe that it has distracted from other initiatives and that it suffers not from a lack of vision; but from a coherent implementation strategy.
Moreover, to me it seems the ethos behind OLPC casually dismisses the notion of community computing, classrooms and even, dare I say it, accepted teaching practice. If you add to this the fact that nearly every aspect of the OLPC technology is untested on a large scale – the screen, the mesh network, the “pull string” charger, the OS, the content – then perhaps you can see where my concerns lie.
The OLPC project is very risky and the risk is being borne by economies that are not necessarily strong enough to absorb the weight of it should the project fail to take off.
I would like to point out that I am not a Luddite and that I am interested in other ICT for development projects, notably, Sun Microsystem’s “Ray Bus”, Ndiyo’s Ultra Thin Clients and a 1999 initiative by the Malaysian government that created a mobile internet suite for rural school children. Ideally, I would like to see a project that combines aspects of these projects to provide real ICT access for rural schoolchildren in developing countries.
I live in Kisumu, Kenya. On Saturday, I went to a party organised by a friend who works at the British Council, where he runs partnering program for UK and Kenyan schools. At the party there were many school teachers. I talked to them about the computing facilities they currently have. None of the teachers I spoke to had computer labs at their school, although a few had the odd computer which tended to be used by the senior staff or the school administrators. I asked them if they were aware of the ICT in education paper recently published by the Kenyan Government which tables a plan to have a computer lab in every school by 2015. At least two of the teachers I spoke to said that they need to be connected to mains electricity first. One teacher told me that this will cost KSh1.8 million (US$24,000) for his school.
I went on to ask if anyone had heard of OLPC. They hadn’t. Not one person at the party that I spoke to had a clue what it was. Why is this? These people are teachers in a country which the OLPC is no doubt supposed to be heading. Why has no one talked to the teachers about it? Surely a successful technology project needs to talk to all stakeholders as it is developed?
As I go on to venture on the blog post you have quoted; once the following four words were seized upon, ‘One Laptop Per Child’ and the project named accordingly, the developers backed themselves into a corner ideologically. After all, with that name, they aren’t going to develop something that isn’t a laptop or that isn’t on a per person basis, no matter what critical problems they hit, are they?
This is also an exciting technology for the many of us out there who experience eye strain from using the typical computer screen and have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of this!