7" Pixel Qi transflective display handled on video, higher resolutions in the pipeline

The Pixel Qi display is an amazing story of itself, with its founder Mary Lou Jepsen undergoing brain tumor surgery at the age of 29, and trying to prove that this doesn't affect your ability to think and create. Being on shots twice a day now to battle the post-surgery hormone deficiency, she finished her PhD degree six months after the operation. While she was overseeing the One Laptop Per Child project, Mary Lou came up with the idea for a mass adoption of the OLPC's LCD display that uses the reflections of ambient light around it to show a picture, and founded Pixel Qi.

The CES show is a treasure trove to bump into such startups with huge potential - over at Pixel Qi's booth a video was taken of the company's downsized 7" display. The only difference from the 10-incher they have now, which is going in the likes of Notion Ink Adam, is the size, the resolution is the same 1024x600 pixels. The company's founder said they are working on upping the resolution to 1280x800 pixels for a new 10-incher, as well as for a 9.7" version, which will be produced for a "partner".

The technology in a nutshell - backlighting is turned off, when there is enough ambient light (outdoors, for example), and the power consumption is a tenth of what the screen consumes in regular mode. The icing on the cake is that the stronger the light outside, the brighter the screen gets, thus overcoming the main drawback of mobile displays under direct sunlight - legibility.

The flip side is that the display is not able to represent the full color gamut, as is clearly visible from the video below, when the backlighting goes off, and also the resolution is a tad low, but these issues are already being addressed for the next generation Pixel Qi displays. We can't help but wonder what is preventing a brand-name company to adopt this type of screens, but we are hearing that there are others working on their own variations of the transflective technology, so that might be the reason.

Suffice it to say that Dr Carlin Vieri is on the team over at Pixel Qi, the guy who previously worked for Apple, and helped engineer the first iPhone's capacitive touchscreen that took the world by storm in 2007.

source: Liliputing & Engadget