Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
A new material is set to provide us with faster and higher resolution displays. Hokkaido University researchers explain what makes this material so special, opening the door to its application and further development.
All displays consist of a lattice of tiny dots of light, called pixels, the brightness of which can be individually controlled. The total number of pixels—and therefore, the resolution and display size—is limited by how many of these pixels can be addressed within a given fraction of a second. Therefore, display manufacturers try, in the pixel control units, to use materials that exhibit a very high "electron mobility," which is a measure for how quickly current will start to flow through a control unit as a response to voltage being applied—and thus, how quick the pixel is.
A new material called ITZO (for its constituent elements indium, tin, zinc and oxygen) promises to be up to seven times faster than the current state-of-the-art material. However, it has not been clear where this improvement comes from, hampering its adoption for industrial applications.
Hokkaido University material scientist Hiromichi Ohta and his team used their unique measurement technique to clarify this point. In their recent paper published in the journal ACS Applied Electronic Materials, they showed that the higher electron mobility results from the unusual fact that in ITZO films of sufficient thickness, free charges accumulate at the interface with the carrier material and thus enable passing-through electrons to travel through the bulk of the material unhindered.
The unique ability comes down to a very simple formula: The electron mobility is proportional to the free travel time of the charge carriers—electrons in this case—divided by their effective mass. And while the measurement of the electron mobility itself is a relatively standard technique, effective mass and free travel time cannot be measured as easily, and therefore it is difficult to tell what factor is responsible for the electron mobility.
But by measuring how the electric field inside the material changes in response to an applied magnetic field as well as to a temperature gradient, Ohta's team could deduce the effective mass of the electrons—and then calculate the free travel time as well. It turns out that both the effective mass is significantly smaller than in current state-of-the-art materials and the free travel time is much higher and, therefore, both factors contribute to the higher electron mobility.
More information: Hui Yang et al, Thermopower Modulation Analyses of High-Mobility Transparent Amorphous Oxide Semiconductor Thin-Film Transistors, ACS Applied Electronic Materials (2022). DOI: 10.1021/acsaelm.2c01210
(Score: 4, Interesting) by krishnoid on Sunday October 16 2022, @07:10PM (3 children)
As long a a display communication protocol can send incremental refreshes to parts of the screen, I'd be happy with slower refreshes and higher resolution. Unless you're watching video or playing games, why not make it possible for weaker graphics cards to drive nicer displays even if they can only run fast enough to update a quarter of the pixels in a given refresh period?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday October 16 2022, @08:01PM (1 child)
Does "faster" mean frame rate or something else like gray-to-gray response times? Displays are a lot more complicated than they appear.
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(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday October 17 2022, @04:29AM
That was my immediate response to this as well, what problem is this solving? Same-day-service LCDs were phased out at least fifteen years ago, most panels now have a 10ms or better response time and have had this for years so unless you've got some pretty exotic application this seems mostly a gee-whiz story.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 16 2022, @11:45PM
Bring back interlace
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Sunday October 16 2022, @09:19PM
Qualcomm bought some company in, shit it's been a while, '04? The result was called MEMS, and the powerpoint slides showed how butterfly wings looked vibrant in direct sunlight. The idea was you could leverage how those wings were so vibrant (hint lots of tiny mirrors) to see your phone screen nice and bright in bright sunlight. Which, as you and I know, never happened.
I worked at Qualcomm at the time and was good friends with one of the engineers they put on the project (they called it Mirisol or someshit). As in, my office was across the hall and we did a lot of "wanna do lunch? which we did a couple times a week" "Wanna meet after work?" was never asked nor denied....
His feeling was "it's too temperature dependent".
Of course I'm against DEI. Donald, Eric, and Ivanka.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by stretch611 on Sunday October 16 2022, @10:17PM (8 children)
As much as I can tell, I barely notice the difference between 4k an 1080p. I know 8k is out there, how much more do we need?
Don't get me wrong... I do notice a slight difference... especially with static pictures. But in full video with the resolutions, it is harder to tell a difference.
8k is already out there... How much higher can it go before no difference is noticed at all?
Lets be honest here... How many people can look at a movie playing on two screens, one 4k and the other 8k and notice a difference in quality if they are not told which is which? At what resolution does it stop mattering? Also there are other factors such as 10 bit color, sharpness and even how things like brightness, contrast, and true black matter more than resolution. Even today, those last few items can matter more than resolution on how good an image/movie looks on a monitor/tv.
If the tech makes things less expensive than great... But surely just getting a higher resolution means less and less every day.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday October 16 2022, @11:48PM (7 children)
I came up with 16K resolution over a 220º horizontal, 150º vertical field of view for a VR headset, as an approximately 1/4 slice of 32K 360-degree video.
For ordinary displays, there is an obvious push coming for 8K. Nvidia tried to market the RTX 3090 as the world's first 8K gaming GPU, to mostly ridicule, single board computers using the RK3588 allegedly have the capability to decode 8K video, etc. Pro displays can go to 10K (expect market confusion with 21:9 ultrawides [wikipedia.org]) to have an 8K window with UI around it.
We are seeing junk tier 4K TVs in the ballpark of $150, so it will displace 1080p as the budget option at some point (you can still buy new 720p TVs today for some reason).
12-bit color will slowly move onto the market. It's apparently in smartphones [gsmarena.com]. I'm not sure about anything above that, but H.266 / Versatile Video Coding [wikipedia.org] may support 16-bit color (that's 48 bits, about 281.5 trillion colors).
Brightness, contrast, and true blacks are tied to the display technology, with certain pros and cons. OLED gets you to the "infinite" contrast and darkest of blacks, but has relatively low brightness and the burn-in fears. Mini-LEDs add dimming zones to try to compensate for lack of per-pixel brightness, but it's imperfect. I think it led to bad reviews for one of the recent iPads. MicroLED seems to be the holy grail but getting the "micro" part down and in turn increasing pixels per inch will be a struggle. Then there are little variations on each and other technologies in the mix.
For some of these, maybe you have to sacrifice resolution or frame rate. High-refresh OLED is relatively new to the market [theverge.com]. The first desktop-sized MicroLED displays probably aren't going to be 8K.
https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1568632777 [flatpanelshd.com]
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(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday October 17 2022, @12:30AM (5 children)
How many of those high-resolution TV's fail to report home to the manufacturer?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday October 17 2022, @12:43AM (4 children)
All of them. Show me the TV that can't be setup and used without connecting to a network. From what I'm reading in the reviews, even Amazon's "Omni" TV will work as a dumb display when it has no connected Amazon account and Internet connection.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2022, @05:02AM (3 children)
Well, not all of them [amazon.com]...
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday October 17 2022, @05:49AM (2 children)
As the link that you provided produces a different web page for almost everybody I'm not sure it helps you convince others that such displays exist. Which one were you looking at in particular?
That link gives me the second page of 17 on a search for digital signage displays in a completely different country to mine, but even so many of the items do not need an internet connection. In fact, many of the items on that page are not even displays.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2022, @07:48PM (1 child)
But many of them are displays, with simple HDMI and display port connections. They can't "phone home". Are you really having a problem sorting it out? Very strange.. Just go to your country's link and pick one
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday October 18 2022, @03:45AM
You replied:
This suggests to me that you were contradicting and countering takyon's statement. However, you provided a amazon.com webpage which did not contain a TV that had to be setup with an network connection. Not a single one. There were many other devices on that page, but they were not TVs and therefore irrelevant to the discussion.
It now seems that you are in full agreement with takyon's initial claim. Yes, I am having a problem - and it is I am trying to work out the point that you are attempting to make.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2022, @01:50AM
I hope the higher bit depths come for free with the advancing technology and are not driving it, because our eyes can't perceive beyond 10 bits, and you have to make a good argument for those 10 bits as well.