IBM Research has developed a display screen that is so precise it's as clear as the original paper document. The new display is the culmination of a research project code-named Roentgen.
The new Active Matrix Liquid Crystal Display (AMLCD) is based on breakthrough research that allowed the IBM team to use aluminum and copper instead of the metals traditionally used in displays, molybdenum and tungsten. Aluminum and copper are better conductors, and make low-cost, higher resolution possible.
Users who need to view large volumes of complex data will benefit from 200 pixels-per-inch (ppi) high-resolution and high-content displays. The new screens are expected to vastly improve digital libraries -- databases of scanned images such as those stored by hospitals or insurance companies -- and graphic design and electronic publishing applications. The new screens can display six times the information that can
currently be shown on a conventional XGA monitor, which reduces the number of times that a user must pan and zoom to find the desired information.
The new display has 6.6 times as many pixels as the XGA (1024x768 pixels), the most common personal computer display, and four times as many pixels as the SXGA (1280x1024 pixels). At 200 ppi, Roentgen's pixels are finer than those on a typical Cathode-Ray Tube (CRT) monitor, which has between 80 and 100 ppi. A 10-point character on the new display has four times as many pixels as the same character on a CRT monitor, which translates into sharper edges and crisper images. The new display brings advanced technology to today's computers and applications.
Scientists at IBM Research have worked on AMLCD since the mid-1980's. An early focus of this work was developing techniques to control yield loss in AMLCDs. The results from this work provided IBM scientists with the insight to create highly complex displays.
Another challenge the researchers overcame was to build a graphics adapter capable of handling a display with more than five million pixels. Once this was designed, the team had to write the device drivers necessary to connect it to Windows NT.
IBM has developed AMLCDs with 80, 100, 120,150 and 200 ppi. At each level of development, users continue to see improvements in the screen images. With the improvement from 150 ppi to 200 ppi, kerning -- the micropositioning of letters used in typesetting to make words look better -- improves, the details of letters improve, and the ability to discern small characters is improved. This is particularly useful for reading ideogram-based Asian languages. The human eye can detect much smaller size differences than 200 ppi, but achieving these higher-resolution technologies is still not cost effective.
IBM's 200-ppi display was code-named for Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, the German professor who discovered X-rays in November of 1895. On the evening of November 8, Wilhelm was drawn to a glowing screen on a nearby table. He immediately determined that the fluorescence was caused by invisible rays originating from the partially evacuated, glass Hittorf-Crookes tube he was using to study cathode rays (i.e., electrons). Surprisingly, the mysterious rays penetrated the opaque black paper wrapped around the tube and the first X-ray was discovered. One of the goals of the 200-ppi project was to see if it was possible to make a display with resolution high enough to make it suitable for reading X-rays.
The breakthrough that resulted in the Roentgen display builds on a previous display project, code-named "Monet," after the famous French impressionist painter. Monet is a 10.5 inch diagonal 150 ppi SXGA.
