The targetted price is $199, mass manufacturing to start in March. It’s an LCOS based headmounted 800×600 display connected with an Android box that you can put in your pocket. That Android powered box runs apps, such as the Biggifi remote controlling app, it can also output Android to your HDTV using the MHL connector. It can tether through your smartphone for internet connectivity and stream the video from the headset to any Android supported live video streaming services, be it ustream, google+ hangouts, justin.tv and more.
Category: Displays
Pixel Qi at CES 2012
The 1280×800 10.1″ Pixel Qi screen is ready, here it is demonstrated under a bright spotlight simulating the sun as well as in some prototypes of upcoming Android tablets. Founder, CEO and inventor Mary Lou Jepsen talks about the latest news from Pixel Qi, where they are going, what they are up to.
E Ink On Every Smart Surface
Posted by – January 15, 2012
Exclusive 17-minute interview with E Ink’s CMO at CES, where they showed me a Triton color display for signage with color so saturated that it looked like an LCD except that it was thinner than OLED, sunlight readable, uses no backlights and uses very little power. I also saw the SURF display used in a hand drill which has not been filmed before. The 11.5″ 300DPI eDocument reader made in collaboration with Epson. The Triton color display based Ectaco eReader that had just won the CES innovation award, it is being deployed in Russian schools. New E Ink watches from Phosphor and Seiko. Finally, the Eton Ruckus music player with E Ink display that was launched this week was demonstrated, it is considered to be indestructible.
E Ink has shipped over 25 million E Ink screens for e-readers alone in 2011, that’s up from 10 million screens in 2010 and 4 million screens in 2009. Now E Ink is also working to expand into new markets, signage, appliances, everywhere. The idea is that more and more devices and surfaces may get an E Ink screen on them that thus by being bi-stable can show the informations for a long time without using any battery. While many electronic paper technology companies show samples, E Ink is actually in mass production with monochrome, color and segmented displays and they claim that no technology in the world comes close to the reading experience on E Ink’s displays and these displays are easy on the eyes since they don’t have a shiny background or light emitting backlight.
E Ink also provided me with following amazing video featuring the actual E Ink Pearl roll display material used in Nook, Sony, Kindle etc. The video was shot alongside the Charles river in Cambridge/Boston and you can see MIT (E Ink is MIT spin off) and Boston skyline in the background. The display is a few feet wide and can go one kilometer (it was 500 meters in this video):
Related articles
- Etón Corporation launches Rukus, the solar-powered Sound system (armdevices.net)
- Ectacto Jetbook Color eReader already available in Russia (liliputing.com)
- E Ink thinks its displays belong on pretty much everything (dvice.com)
- CES 2012: Color e-Ink readers are finally a reality, though not in the U.S. (news.consumerreports.org)
Sharp ICC 4K Technology, 1080p to 4K upscaling on 55″ Sharp 4K TV to be released soon
Posted by – January 15, 2012
Sharp is about to mass produce a 4K2K 55″ HDTV. Their secret sauce is the ICC technology (Integrated Cognitive Creation) which is an upscaling technology, somehow sharpening and adding details to 1080p sources to make them look more amazing on the 4K HDTV. With this, people might want to consider re-watching all their Blu-ray movies to re-experience the same 1080p source files in more amazing quality. That until each of the movies are also available in the native 4K2K resolution on Blu-ray, hard drives, streaming and other potential 4K media.
Motorola Kopin Golden-i at the Verizon booth at CES 2012
Posted by – January 14, 2012
Category: Displays, Cameras, Wearables, Smart Glass, Other, Exclusive videos, Texas Instruments, CES, Kopin, Windows
The Motorola Kopin Golden-i is being showcased at the Verizon booth at CES 2012, demonstrating hands-free wearable computing user interfaces for Industrial uses such as Construction, Medical, Public safety, Utilities and more. I’ve been using this for the past 2 months to attempt to have a wearable computing augmented video-blogging system, using Google+ Hangouts On Air with the headmounted display showing a live chat and live status updates from Google+, Twitter, Email alerts and more.
Samsung 70″ 4K2K Quad-HD TV
Posted by – January 12, 2012
Here’s a presentation by one of the lead engineers at Samsung on the 4K2K HDTV project. With some details about the cost of the technology.
Samsung LED TV Series 6 and LED TV Series 7
Posted by – January 12, 2012
New performance in LED backlit HDTVs, better refresh rates, better colors, more contrast, faster processing and much more.
LG 55″ OLED TV shown at CES 2012
Posted by – January 10, 2012
The biggest OLED TV in the world, the colors, sharpness, contrast and thinness are pretty awesome. This is a quite impressive HDTV. Of course the price may be very high as this type of screen is not yet mass manufactured.
E Ink is giving away E Ink watches (US residents only)
E Ink is giving away 4 E Ink wrist watches worth $195 every Tuesday until the 13th of December on their Facebook page. All you have to do is “Like” the E-Ink page on Facebook and enter your name, email and click to let it grab your Facebook contact info. E-Ink wrist watches are pretty awesome, I got mine since June 2010 that I wear every day, I only had to install the batteries once in the beginning and it’s still running on the same small wrist watch battery. It’s nice to be able to change the design of your wrist watch, have it display the date and all in a very sunlight readable way. It’s just cool to know you’ve got an E Ink e-reader type screen on your watch. Check out this video where I show my E Ink wristwatch:
Here is more information about the $195 Phosphor E Ink watch that you can win on the E Ink facebook page: http://www.phosphorwatches.com/E-Ink-Digital-Hour-Clock-Watch-Stainless-Steel-p/70510565280.htm
Charbax Cyborg: How I video-blog, Live and On-demand
Posted by – October 29, 2011
This is how I was walking around the ARM TechCon 2011, with the OMAP3530 Powered Kopin Golden-i Headmounted display (voice-controlled and with head-tracking) to monitor the live Ustream IRC chat, a USB webcam on my head streaming live video to Ustream through the Marvell Armada 618 Powered OLPC XO-1.75 in my bag (using another netbook when Marvell was showcasing the XO-1.75 at their booth), a T-Mobile 4G Mobile Hotspot ($50/3GB/month/prepaid/$141-Mifi), and my nearly 4-year old Sanyo HD1000 (9mbitps 720p) with the external Sennheiser MKE400 shotgun microphone.
Source: ti.com
I also have the new higher quality JVC GC-PX10 but its 24/36mbitps 1080p50 recording bitrate is too high to upload on the relatively slow upload speed at this conference. At the San Francisco Downtown University Campus last weekend, the upload speed was 100mbitps so there I filmed all 16 videos at the OLPC Summit with that camera, for most of which you can even download the full original camera sample video file using Google Docs separately linked under each video.
Sharp, Toshiba and Sony release 4K2K Quad-HD TV and Projectors
Posted by – October 12, 2011
At the recent CEATEC consumer electronics show in Japan (which I had tried to attend and video-blog at but I did not find a sponsor in time), Sharp, Toshiba and Sony showcased their first consumer-oriented 4K2K screens and projectors, perhaps finally leading up to more 4K2K for the mass market. Eventually more affordable, because Toshiba’s 55″ Regza 55×3 Quad-HD is announced to be priced at over $10 thousand. Sony’s VPL-VW1000ES Quad-HD projector is even more expensive at upwards $20 thousand. Sharp did not yet announce a price for their 60″ Quad-HD TV, but they showed what they call their new so-called Integrated Cognitive Creation (ICC) processor for what they claim to be higher-quality Quad-HD upscaling.
4K2K is awesome. And putting it on 55″ or 60″ screens and in projectors sounds like a good target. They need to sell 4K at sub-$2K. They need to price 4K at $2000 and below and not $10K and they need to mass produce 4K2K as a priority now instead of 3D.
The 4K content solution:
On the Internet, the most downloaded 1080p movies are below 10GB per movie. That means 4K movies can be compressed at a below 40GB file size. That means that a 4K movie can fit on a current Blu-ray disc. That means that more than 50 4K movies can fit on a $50 2TB hard drive.
There is no 4K distribution problem.
YouTube supports 4K streaming at below 20mbitps today.
The most downloaded 1080p movies are encoded at below 9mbitps bit rate. That means that a 4K movie can be streamed with a 36mbitps or faster Internet connection (at same “full” quality level per pixel), which more and more people can access today using a regular VDSL Internet connection over copper wires and even faster over the coaxial based network. Millions of consumers already have Fiber internet to the home, and millions more could easily get it. Those people can get 1Gbitps over the connection, that is more than enough to stream any 4K content needed.
Hollywood has already digitized most of their 35mm movies to the 4K2K format, which is already becoming the digital standard for Cinemas worldwide. And most of the new movies are being recorded using 4K2K cameras anyways and are already natively recorded in that format. So it would actually be a piece of cake for the film industry to provide every movie ever made in the 4K2K format, easily distributed on Blu-ray, on hard drives or streamed using 36mbitps or faster home internet connections and progressively downloaded using slower connections (if you only have a 20mbitps download ADSL connection, you may wait about half an hour before the 4K movie can start. Or you can get the 3K version at half the bitrate and that still would look 2x better on a 4K display than the same content in the 1080p format).
It is very common for all consumers to take digital pictures at 8megapixels or higher. Most new digital picture cameras take 8Mpix pictures or higher today. Even most new high-end smartphones take 8Mpix pictures. put the SD card from those cameras in your 4K2K TV, and for the first time, you can see the full quality of your digital photographs. Just to display your personal photography onto those 4K2K displays wil be worth the enthusiasm, even if you do not have fast enough Internet, even if you can’t get a lot of 4K content on Blu-ray or directly onto hard drives, then still just as a picture viewer, the demand for 4K2K is worth it now.
Dear TV industry, please stop making 3D now and start mass producing 4K2K screens and projectors now! Get the price down below $2000 as soon as possible, than you.
Related articles
- Sharp 8K4K TV, 7680×4320 resolution, 85″, the future of HDTV (armdevices.net)
3M Invests in Pixel Qi
3M (NYSE: $54 Billion current valuation) just announced together with Pixel Qi that they have invested in Pixel Qi Corp.
3M is the leading developer of innovative optical films for LCDs, probably the world’s largest. Together with Pixel Qi, they are capable of many interesting things. This should accelerate the availability of this screen technology to the mass market. First generation Pixel Qi screens are in over 3 million OLPC laptops being used by kids in the developing world, and Pixel Qi is ramping up deliveries of some of their latest screens to Chinese companies such as ShiZhu Technology and we should be seeing much more of that, hopefully also soon reaching the European and the US mass consumer market.
ST. PAUL, Minn. & SAN BRUNO, Calif. & TAIPEI, Taiwan, Sep 12, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) — 3M, through its 3M New Ventures organization, has invested in Pixel Qi Corp., a developer of next generation LCD panels with operations in Taiwan and California. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Founded by LCD pioneer, Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen in 2008, Pixel Qi designs unique, innovative LCD screens that solve problems not addressed by conventional screens. Its first products are sunlight-readable, low-power LCD panels aimed for mobile device applications.
As consumers increasingly rely on connected, mobile devices in their daily lives, there is a growing, unmet requirement for display devices that offer portability, connectivity, long battery life and excellent indoor/outdoor readability in one device. Current displays are not able to solve all of these challenges simultaneously. Pixel Qi’s unique technology platform eliminates the need for trade-offs and enables high quality, outdoor or sunlight viewing with excellent battery life and portability in one device. The combination of its technologies with those of 3M will create excellent new opportunities for both companies.
“Pixel Qi’s full-function color screen technology, for the first time, gives consumers an outdoor-readable video display with exceptional battery life, usable anywhere, anytime. It’s a first in the industry. In our collaboration with 3M, we have the ability to accelerate this into mass adoption,” said Mary Lou Jepsen, co-founder and CEO of Pixel Qi.
The funding led by 3M New Ventures will play a key role in enabling Pixel Qi to develop its product offerings into volume consumer markets as well as digital signage and touch applications. The investment, which successfully concludes Pixel Qi’s second (series “B”) investment round, will also allow Pixel Qi to build and to strengthen its engineering and sales capabilities.
Stefan Gabriel, president of 3M New Ventures said, “Pixel Qi’s technology enables displays of such lower power and high usability that the vision of ubiquitous displays comes much closer to realization. In combining Pixel Qi’s disruptive display technology with our technology platforms, we can create new business opportunities in the consumer and commercial markets for 3M.”
3M’s Optical Systems Division is a world leader in the specialized films used inside liquid crystal displays to optimize the light throughput. Pixel Qi’s innovative LCD designs use such film technologies, and other advances, to create novel displays and enable the best outdoor readable, power efficient displays available on the market. “By addressing the energy consumption and sunlight readability challenges in one package, Pixel Qi provides a ground-breaking solution for the next generation of displays,” said Jim Bauman, vice president, 3M Optical Systems Division. “The combination of Pixel Qi’s low energy, reflective display technology with 3M’s innovative technologies will create exciting products for the mobile, handheld, tablet and other display markets.”
Source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/3m-invests-in-pixel-qi-corp-2011-09-12
HannsG Wireless USB from an Android Tablet to a Touch Monitor
They have some kind of wireless USB dongle on the tablet, that can beam the Android screen and UI to a wireless USB touch monitor. The frame rate is not yet optimized but this seems to work.
HannsG HU193, 18.5″ Wide USB 3.0 Monitor
Posted by – September 5, 2011
This 18.5″ monitor runs just on the power from the USB 3.0 or 2.0 connector. This is quite amazing to see such a large monitor that can run exclusively on that power, this means it’s an easily portable monitor solution, with just one cable.
LG Super LED E2391VR, thin new LED technology at IFA 2011
Posted by – September 4, 2011
LG is showcasing their new Super LED computer monitors, showing off the thin form factor of their E2391VR, showing the IPS v6 wide viewing angles, the extra good color reproduction, the upscaling processor that is built-in and the new lower power consumption of their new LED.
Latest news from E Ink at IFA 2011
Posted by – September 2, 2011
Sriram Peruvemba, Vice President of marketing at E Ink, gives us the latest news from E Ink, they announced that they will ship between 25 million and 30 million E Ink screens this year, just for the E Ink e-readers like the Kindle 4 and Nook Touch. Yup you read right, 30 million of those devices to be sold this year.
Sharp 8K4K TV, 7680×4320 resolution, 85″, the future of HDTV
Posted by – September 2, 2011
Sharp is demonstrating the most insane HDTV ever, at 8K4K, they recorded a bunch of demonstration videos, the quality is amazing. Here’s a video interview with a product manager. They say that the sources for 8K4K content are missing, but we can all at least upscale our 20 Megapixel consumer photo camera pictures on there, and I think they should just tell Hollywood to transfer the 8K4K versions of all movies onto cheap soon to cost $50 2TB hard drives.
E Ink in Credit Cards
Posted by – September 2, 2011
You push a button behind the credit card, it displays a unique security code which can be used as pin code for payment security. The battery in that credit card lasts for up to 2 years, it’s the same size and weight as a normal credit card and it is unbreakable.
Toshiba shows a live 55″ Quad-HD HDTV demo
Posted by – September 1, 2011
Quad HD is cool, here is Toshiba’s latest Quad-HD TV technology.
Panasonic UniPhier, 1.4Ghz ARM Cortex-A9 for HDTV/Set-top-box
Posted by – June 12, 2011
Category: Set-top-boxes, Displays
New Panasonic ARM Processor
The Panasonic UniPhier MN2WS0220 is claimed to be one of the fastest to use for HDTV and Set-top-box will begin sample shipments this month.
Panasonic’s new chip will open the way for a new generation of smart TVs that allow users to simultaneously enjoy two TV broadcasting channels, as well as Internet-based content and applications in high-resolution at the same time. In addition, the new chip is able to reduce power consumption of and the number of components used in smart TVs, which will help drive smart TVs to spread in the global market.
I would find it normal for Google to qualify this Panasonic UniPhier MN2WS0220 ARM Dual-core chip to be used to run the Google TV software, and I would find it normal for Panasonic to start using Google TV for their Smart TVs instead of that proprietary Viera SmartTV stuff. I think all future Panasonic HDTVs should include Google TV, to provide for the best software for WebTV, interactive features, I think it’s the best full integration of the web in the TV.
I am not sure how big ARM has been thus far on being inside all those HDTVs, but now it seems all the major HDTV makers have serious ARM Powered HDTV plans underway, LG is definitely using ARM for their next SmartTVs, Samsung has their ARM Powered Google TV plans, what is Sharp, Philips going to do? How soon until Sony’s HDTVs shift from Intel to ARM for Google TV? How soon until all the major HDTV makers agree that Google TV is the software that they should all use?
Source: panasonic.co.jp
Found via: engadget.com
Related articles
- ARM Powered Google TV now confirmed officially by Google (armdevices.net)
- Panasonic, ARM work on 1.4GHz dual-core chip for set-top box (electronista.com)
- Panasonic targets smart TVs with 1.4GHz Cortex-A9 SoC (linuxfordevices.com)
- Panasonic’s 1.4 GHz dual-core Smart TV chip is industry’s fastest, should load Netflix quicker (engadget.com)
