Samsung rolls out 22in see-through screens Samsung has started to churn out 22in LCD panels. Nothing remarkable about that, you might think, but no - these ones are transparent. The South Korean giant is making monochrome and colour versions, both of which have a modest 1680 x 1050 resolution and a 500:1 contrast ratio. Samsung see-through LCD Both panels rely on a …
Yeah, I remember thinking "WOW! I'm living in the future!" when those animated LCD advertising displays started to pop up on the underground. Now when I see them I'm more likely to muse on just how much power they waste compared to posters, and how many tonnes of CO2 per year that equates to.
And was, I believe, preceded by a good number of others.
You just carefully dismantle an LCD screen. Strip off the backlight, remove the diffusers, and remove a couple of other bits and pieces. You're then left with a transparent, colour, high-res display that requires a backlight behind it. The electronics normally just fold back on ribbon cables and can be hidden at the edge of the screen.
A bit of duct tape later, et voila! You've got a bedroom window that has the current time and weather overlaid on it, as well as being able to make it opaque or transparent at will.
Paris because... well, let's just say that she's not someone to watch on a window-screen that your neighbours can also see. Whoops!
Neat, but the only use I can see for them is in advertising. Therefore they are pointless and should be scrapped at once.
It's bad enough having moving lcd adverts on every surface without also having them ruining the experience of window shopping.
The world is turning into the web. I need adblock for my eyes.
You'd have light shone through the screen (so it doesn't really need a transparent screen), through a lens, and onto a one-way-mirror positioned in front of the eye.
The one-way-mirror would mean that only the bits of your screen that were brighter than the outside world would show up (same idea as when you can see your phone reflected in the windscreen while driving at night).
The lens would modify image so that the flat image from the LCD appeared to be much further away (say, at a distance of 2 feet or so). This is the reason that when wearing a head-mounted display you don't feel like you're focussing on a display 1" from your eyes.
I guess that using liquid lenses and something to monitor where your eyes were looking you could have it dynamically refocus to match the depth that your eyes were looking at.
If you remove the reflective layer from an ordinary TFT it is mostly transparent but the colour filters tend to refract the light differently and you end up with a diffraction grating sort of effect and objects you see behind it have coloured halos either side. Presumably Samsung would have had to develop the materials in order to cure that.
Oddly this is not apparently the case with CSTN displays, so it could be that these are actually oversized dual -scan LCDs which would be adequate if they are only displaying static images. I doubt that's the case though.
A telly with a mirror behind it - It can be backlit (or use natural reflection when bright enough) when turned on if you have a 2-way type mirror dealy (possibly). When turned off you have a mirror hanging on your wall rather than a big gray rectangle. Much better.
I think that's just unfortunate coincidence. Transparent screens are hardly a "tech breakthrough"; I'm sure if they wanted to make an April Fools joke, they would have come up with something a bit more high-tech.
There are transparent OLED screens in prototype form, by the way.
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