Aris Silzard

Now, it looks so much easier… It has taken us over forty years to achieve dominance with flat-panel display technologies.  Along the way, there were serious doubts that we would ever get there.  Only a relatively few years ago, the conventional wisdom within the display community was that LC displays would only be able to be made in sizes up to about 20 inches and that the larger size television displays would have to be either plasma panels or rear projection systems.   How wrong that turned out to be.  Both LC and Plasma displays are now available at affordable prices in sizes up to 60 inches — with a few even larger.  Given the many years of struggles to get us to this level of capability, it’s especially interesting to take a look at what we now have and how much effort it took to get here. Let’s take a look at a few of these larger flat-panel televisions.  Should we start by taking the back cover off and see what we find?  On either a plasma panel or LCD television, the opened chassis greets us with a very logical circuit board layout.  There is, of course, a readily identifiable power supply.  Then we see the various video inputs – way too many in my opinion, but that’s more a reflection on the difficulty of establishing any kind of industry standards than on any lack of skill on the part of the design engineers.  The video circuitry is similarly easy to locate and identify.  Next, we can locate the circuitry that converts the video signal to the format needed to drive the rows and columns.  From here we can follow the signal paths to the row and column drivers along the edges of the display panel.  The panels themselves look quite simple except for the flexible circuitry that seems to carry an impossibly high density of signal lines.  These lines are fed from driver chips that are either on the edges of the chassis or built right into the flexible circuits that connect to the panel. If we take our observations one level higher and begin to probe the various circuits, we find the rows of these displays being driven with sequential activating signals and the columns carrying the video information in proper synchronization with the rows as each is activated in turn.  It all seems so logical – and yes – even easy.   Plasma panels may look a bit more complicated with their time sequenced gray scale signals, but once we appreciate the concept of 8 or 10 sub-frames providing the brightness modulation, the addressing becomes similarly easy to understand.    So why did it take us so long to achieve this level of elegant simplicity?   Do you remember CRTs?  They were once the dominant display technology – as a matter of fact, for many years, the only one.  In the mid-60s, I took on the challenge of assembling a 27-inch television from a kit sold by a company that only some of you may remember – Heathkit.  I spent many hours placing and soldering the various circuit components into the boards and then mounting all of these into place in the chassis.  It was a moment of sheer terror when I finally flipped the power switch to see what would happen.  To my great relief, a video image of sorts appeared on the screen.  The next steps were to “align” the picture and to adjust the “convergence” boards.   Without these steps, the video image was geometrically distorted and the three colors were badly out of registration.   The convergence board contained at least 24 adjustments that acted on the various parts of the screen – sort of.  The adjustments interacted with each other so that it was necessary to repeat the process over and over until finally the colors were all properly aligned with each other.  Even after all this adjusting, vertical lines were only more or less vertical and a full-screen circle was noticeably not quite a circle.  Well, the years passed and CRT technology continued to improve.  In the mid-90’s I acquired a 32-inch Sony Trinitron television.   Well over ten years later this same television is still working perfectly.  The image has stayed perfectly converged – with no help from me.  Colors are still as pure and as perfect as the video signal can make them.   Lines are straight and circles are as perfect as I can observe.  Not only that, this CRT television has experienced several relocations with no change in its operating characteristics.  What a contrast to the Heathkit television that I built thirty years earlier!  Thus, it seems that every technology needs time and effort to achieve its eventual full capabilities.  And so it has been and will be with both LCDs and Plasma panels.  It has taken many years to work out the optimum way to do each step, be it the way the pixels are laid out in an LCD or how the discharge is controlled in a plasma panel.  The combinations of materials and driving waveforms have similarly taken years of effort to optimize.   But once this optimization is achieved, the final product is exceedingly robust, elegant in its simplicity, and capable of many years of reliable operation.  The good news is that even with the excellent performance that we have already achieved from both LC and Plasma displays, we still have much that can be done before we get to full product maturity.  LC displays, for example, are beginning to transition to LED backlighting and Plasma panels are becoming more efficient, brighter, and achieving highly reliable long-life operation.  The past forty years have brought us to full product success.  It is likely to take another ten to twenty years before LCDs and Plasma panels achieve their full technology maturity.  It will be exciting to see just exactly what those displays will look like.  Should you wish to comment on this column, you may contact me directly from this site

We’re Not There Yet… At the end of May, display engineers from all corners of the globe will gather in San Antonio for the annual SID Display Week.  There the newest research results will be presented and the latest progress in display technologies will be showcased.  Perhaps we will see an increasing use of LED backlights, higher frame-rate LCDs, and further progress in OLEDs, flexible displays, and pico-projectors.  And maybe there will be a few surprises.  The displays that will be demonstrated at SID Display Week, will all show images of superb quality – high resolution, well-balanced colors, excellent brightness, with virtually undetectable artifacts of any kind.  So what is there left to do?  Are we at a stage where only minor refinements are going to be possible?  Unfortunately, it seems to me that currently there is a major disconnect between what we get to see on the displays at industry trade shows and what the typical consumer experiences when they bring home their first “great new digital flat-panel television”.  Right out of the box, the first likely problem is that their new television has been pre-set to a “vivid” mode with overly saturated colors — that may have looked eye-catching in the big-box store showroom but that are harsh and unpleasant to watch for extended periods of time in a home environment.  And the typical menu of alternate choices is not all that helpful either, with words such as “sports”, “movies” and yet other curious names.  The next challenge is that the wide screen format is not compatible with most of what is currently being broadcast.  Most likely the consumer will not be able to figure out which of the several modes to use to accommodate the differences between 4:3 and 16:9 image formats and will wonder why all the actors look like they have gained weight.  It’s really quite amazing to see how quickly we adapt to seeing these distorted images and begin to accept them as “normal”.  Of course, there are other “minor details” such as setting the resolution and trying to figure out what “HDMI-l, 2, and 3” mean.  The back connector board of the typical flat-panel television looks like it could be the receiving end for a very healthy porcupine.  Nevertheless, let’s say that in spite of these challenges our typical consumer has figured out how to get their new flat-panel display up and running in reasonably good fashion.  The next step should be to access a television program and be astounded by the superb quality of the HDTV images.  But our typical consumer is most likely getting their television signal via cable.  As we all know, the cable companies have been telling us in ads and through mailings that nothing needs to be changed when the transition occurs to digital broadcasting.  Thus reassured, our consumer punches up a favorite channel and instead of a spectacular HDTV image gets something that does not even do justice to an “old fashioned” analog NTSC signal.  The images are usable, but it is not until our consumer happens to try out a DVD or Blue-Ray player that the dramatic image improvements become apparent.   It is sad to say, but we display engineers have created products from which only a tiny percentage of consumers are getting the full benefits.  Why have we been working so hard to develop 240 Hz frame rates and to achieve the ultimate in image crispness, when the typical consumer is watching fast-action sporting events on a flat-panel display that is being fed from a cable signal – a signal that does not even rise to the level of a typical NTSC broadcast?  Curiously, this seems backwards from what we grew up experiencing with analog television.  Historically, television stations put out a signal that was superbly controlled for color and image quality.  Such monitoring was done on a continuing basis.  The home televisions were never as good as the color monitors in the television studios and broadcast centers.  Getting as close as possible to the broadcast image was a goal we could strive for but never quite achieve.  Now, this strange inversion seems to have taken place.  Using my major cable provider, I get my best images using an older 32-inch Sony CRT television with a built-in line-doubler.  This circuitry seems to be able to extract an image from the analog cable signal that begins to approach HDTV in overall appearance.  The larger flat-panels that I have tried on this same cable signal don’t do nearly as well – even when these panels can produce absolutely stunning images from a Blue-Ray player.              Perhaps, over the next five years or so this disconnect, between the inherent capabilities of the flat-panel televisions currently being sold and what is actually being experienced by most consumers, will begin to resolve itself.  Is it reasonable to expect that flat-panel television manufacturers will begin to provide set-up menus that are more helpful to the typical consumer in achieving the picture quality that they thought they were buying? The greatest obstacle, however, may be the cable companies’ desire to maximize advertising revenue by pushing more and more channels over the same bandwidth.  This will work against improved image quality.  Is it possible that we will see a resurgence of over-the-air broadcasts as consumers learn that they can get a superior image with a simple antenna?  These issues will not be resolved as quickly.  This inversion between flat-panel display quality and signal source deficiencies will be with us for at least the next five years and could take as long as the next ten years to resolve.  In the meantime, displays will continue to improve, but most likely at a slower pace.  We are entering a period of technology maturity with both LCDs and Plasma panels.  Manufacturing methods will continue to improve, but display quality is beginning to approach what will be considered “good enough” for most consumer applications over the next decade. Should you wish to offer your thoughts on how

How Much Better?… Tonight I am enjoying a few hours of quiet time in a well-known hotel in the heart of Washington DC.   The “travel sprites” have been especially kind to me on this trip since I have been given a suite that typically costs considerably more than the rate I am paying.  Because of this fortunate happenstance my accommodations are especially plush and pleasant and I am sure that I will be reluctant to leave these luxurious surroundings in a few days.   As usual, I have the television on – tonight not for serious viewing but to catch up on the news and for background “companionship.”  However, what I find peculiar about this television is that it still has an “old fashioned” CRT in it — and not even an especially large one.  How can a hotel of this luxury and prestige level get away with not having the latest in flat-panel display technology?  Well, one practical reason seems to be that the vintage early American credenza in which this television is situated cannot readily accommodate anything much larger.  But even with that limitation, what is going on here that makes it acceptable for this “old dog” of a television to still be used by this high-class hotel?  And not only that, I find myself perfectly comfortable watching this technological museum piece.   I don’t miss not having a flat-panel high-definition digital one!  Hmmm…    While thus enjoying my evening, I read through the day’s e-mails and notice a column about what we should expect regarding future generations of high-resolution video displays.  The writer predicts that soon resolution will increase to 2,000 lines, with the first use in movie theaters and then — not long thereafter – this technology will migrate to home use and be combined with 3D stereo images.   So here I am comfortably watching a small-screen CRT television showing NTSC video and I am being told that I need to begin to plan for a soon-to-happen next generation television system that will double the resolution of HDTV.  My present comfortable environment makes these technology predictions seem far-out and contradictory.  Is it any wonder then that I am led to some serious contemplation of where display technology — and where the companies that promote and sell new display products — are taking us?  If I am perfectly comfortable spending an evening with an “old” CRT television, what is it that I am missing?   What would a presumably enhanced viewing experience provide me that I am not already getting?   Certainly the CRT television I am watching has a much smaller screen than most of today’s flat-panel televisions.  However, the brightness is nicely adequate and the color is especially pleasing – better than most flat-panel televisions I have experienced in typical hotel rooms.  The resolution is adequate for this image size and quite sufficient for the casual viewing that is my intent this evening.   I do not feel the need for anything better or that I am missing something important by not having a larger or higher resolution screen.  The program material, on the many channels offered, does not seem to be of a quality to demand anything better.  Watching CNN, the Weather Channel, or the opening monologue of the Tonight Show does not appear to suffer in any way from not having a larger screen or higher resolution.  The nice color, good brightness, and modest resolution appear to be entirely adequate to provide me all the viewing experience the program material has to offer. Now, I suppose if I had planned to do some serious movie watching I would have wished for a larger screen and higher definition, but that is a very infrequent activity in my life and is never something that I would do while on travel.  If this old technology is working so well and is acceptable for the guests in this prestigious hotel, then why did we so quickly give up on CRT-based televisions and how much are we realistically expecting to gain from HDTV?   It seems that what really attracted buyers to the new flat-panel technologies was the larger screen size and “flatness” of these displays.  As it turned out, we consumers apparently did not pay all that much attention to the “real” resolution and color capabilities.  We apparently did not understand that most cable viewers were not going to get HDTV (without additional equipment at extra cost) no matter what kind of “new digital flat-panel technology” they had just purchased.  And the typical purchaser did not understand, or know how, to evaluate the color gamut or gray scale capabilities of the new technologies, or to compare them to what a CRT could do – or even to each other.   And now, even before we have been able to work out and correct these misunderstandings and deficiencies, we are already being told that we should begin to anticipate the arrival of 3D and even higher resolution.  What will we do with them when we have them?  I am sure there are always those technology enthusiasts who wish to have the latest and best of everything.   These are the same folks who installed home theaters and created a demand for front and rear projection laser-disk systems and line doublers in the previous decade.  However, for most of us who spend time in casual viewing of typical television shows, there is little to be gained from these new advancements.  Perhaps sports enthusiasts will disagree with me, and dedicated movie watchers will also appreciate the full viewing experience that HDTV, and beyond, can bring. Perhaps we in the display community will soon come to an understanding that not every viewing experience requires the same capabilities.  That should allow for a range of products to be designed, promoted, and sold to targeted audiences with performance features that match the users’ needs.  As an example, the digital camera manufacturers seem to have adopted this approach with good success.  Cameras fall into a number of convenient categories that are directed

Lost in the Noise… Delete, delete, delete… Take a quick look, delete…  Another quick look, another delete…  Oh, here’s one that needs to be read…  Perhaps this next one I will get to later…      And so it goes.  The electronic din is growing louder by the day.  My automated spam filter dumps nearly 500 messages each day.  But at least 50 junk ones get through anyway – on my e-mail service especially if they are in French.  But even those that may have a potentially useful message are mostly deleted because there is no time to read them.  Other more pressing e-mails are already coming in — demanding an answer.  Searching the Internet for a particular piece of information or looking for a particular product has become ever so much easier than the old-fashioned way of having to go to a technical library, semi-randomly searching through old conference proceedings, or having a bookshelf full of mostly out-of-date catalogs.  But such directed searches are most useful for bits of information or products that we already know enough about to start the process.  This is incredibly helpful and as it should be, but is this enough to keep us up-to-date with new developments or to learn about products that are so new that perhaps we don’t even know that they exist? For many years technical magazines, available at no charge to those in a particular industry, have been the predominant way for us to keep up with industry news and new product developments.  The cost of producing the editorial content, of printing, and mailing these trade publications has of course been supported by advertising revenue.   But in recent years, this advertising revenue has been dropping as businesses have changed their focus to creating a presence on the Internet.  Clearly, it is important to be prominently visible on search engines and to have a convenient presence in the form of an electronic catalog.  After all, what could be more convenient that being able to type in a few words on a search engine and instantly be presented with dozens or perhaps hundreds of choices for a product we seek.  For many of us hardware types, another recent and immensely valuable technology purchasing tool has been Ebay.  In earlier times, it was necessary to have insider knowledge of multiple sources that could help us locate reasonably priced used instrumentation or other scientific equipment.  Now, one can have hours of fun sitting at a computer finding all kinds of interesting items from all parts of the world.  Having a ready access to items from a worldwide supplier base sure beats the personal-contact-based process of times past.  Likewise, it’s a great benefit to sellers who now have a reciprocal worldwide customer base.  What does all this portend for our trade publications?  Does this mean that printed technical magazines are about to become historical relics?   Will they survive in electronic formats only?  Or not at all?   I’ve always found that having something to take along with me to read while on an airplane or other such confining activity was the best way to catch up on what new technologies, products, or services may soon become available.  For me, airplanes provide a great opportunity to kick back and browse the ads and just enjoy discovering what new surprises may await on each succeeding page.  But are there enough others who still feel the same way?  On a typical Sunday morning at the neighborhood coffee shop, I find most of the tables occupied with laptop computers instead of newspapers or magazines.   Browsing is certainly going on — but it’s being done electronically.  It does seem that we are in a period of rapid transition.  Some print publications have been affected by these changes more than others.  For example, each month I receive several photography magazines and they seem to have adapted well to promoting the new digital technologies.  Photography, whether film or digital, is a visual medium and for showing the latest developments the printed page still appears to be the best format.  For these publications, there has not been a noticeable drop in advertising pages.  Other print publications are not doing nearly as well.  Advertising revenue for some technical trade publications is dropping at a pace that will not allow the print versions to survive.  Then what? Will the electronic versions be sufficiently compelling to allow them to become suitable replacements?  For me it’s much harder to find time during the business day to read technical publications online.  I can perhaps manage a short newsletter — or two — but that’s about it.   Yet they keep filling up my incoming e-mail by the several dozens and at an ever-increasing rate.  They shout at me for attention.  Yet, I simply push “delete”.  Should I have a separate inbox on my computer to put some of the more interesting ones for later perusal on my next airplane flight?   Perhaps it’s time to create such an electronic “corner” to facilitate the changeover that is obviously occurring.  The reality is that printed technical publications may not be around much longer. Now, I just have to figure out how to create that special electronic in-basket that is as convenient as the corner of my desk where the printed versions currently go — until that next trip to the airport.   If you would like to share your ideas for an electronic magazine inbox with me, please respond directly from this site, by e-mail at silzars@attglobal.net, or by telephone at 425-898-9117.

The $1000 Jar of Jelly… A few years ago my wife and I were shopping for plants at a nursery to add to our ever-evolving landscape.  And by evolving what I really mean is that some plants unpredictably grow more and faster than expected while others don’t seem to do nearly as well – and for seemingly no good reason at all — expire.  Among all of the decorative plants we were perusing at this large nursery there was one little bushy one that caught my eye – a red currant.  Now why would I want one of those?  Well, perhaps because it is a very well known and appreciated plant in my birthplace of Latvia.  There they are called “June berries” because that’s when they bear their incredibly bright red and perfectly round little berries that are attached to stems in row upon row like miniature ruby-red pearl necklaces.  A nice reminder of my heritage I decided.  And this particular plant must have felt the same way about me because it has grown and thrived.  With each year the plant has become more and more prolific in the berry production department.  In previous years, I found that picking and eating these tart little berries right off the vines was quite sufficient.  And I was more or less willing to share this harvest with visiting birds that seemed to like the berries even more – at least they were more diligent in making sure that they were all consumed.  However, this year I decided that I would get a bit greedy and keep this harvest all to myself.  So with a quick trip to the local hardware store up went a tent of bird netting.  Enough of this unauthorized sharing of my berries!  The late June harvest yielded two large bowls full of these ruby-red little gems.  I’m sure you will appreciate that a “harvest” doesn’t just happen.  In this case, the harvesting consisted of at least an hour’s worth of stooping and crawling around this bush to get at all the “low hanging fruit”.  And here I had always been told that “low hanging fruit” was easy to get at.  (At least that’s what my bosses always told me when I tried to explain that new business was hard to find – “Well, Aris just go out there and find some ‘low hanging fruit’”).  With the “harvest” done, the next obvious step was to decide what to do with two large bowls full of berries – clearly more than my digestive system would accept in any reasonable time span.   Aha, let’s make red current Jelly suggested my wife.  “OK, if you can find a recipe I’m game to try this experiment.”  Shouldn’t be any harder than a lab experiment in Chemistry 101.   Well, what will we need besides the berries already on hand?  In what will we put the finished product?   Oh yes, we need jars – little jars if possible.  We will also need plenty of sugar.   And don’t forget the paraffin for the top seal.  With “only” two stops to buy the needed ingredients, we were all set to do the real work – the making of the Jelly. The first step was to remove the berries from the stems.  Little berries on tiny little stems don’t give up their attachments all that easily.  With both of us working we got this task accomplished in a bit less than an hour.  Next came the mashing.  Unfortunately, all we had available was a standard-issue potato masher.  That turns out to be too coarse for effectively smashing such tiny round objects.  Nevertheless, after another half-hour or so we had something that looked workably “smooshy”.  Then came the step of bringing the “smoosh” to a boil and squeezing it through a cheesecloth-lined strainer.  Do you have any idea how long it can take for a thick liquid to drip through such an arrangement?  Not having tried it before I didn’t realize either.  Another half-hour or more later, we were ready for the next step of adding the sugar and bringing the mixture to one more serious boil.   The final step in the Jelly fabrication process was adding the thickening agent and then pouring the finished Jelly mix into the jars.  But we weren’t quite done yet.  We still had to melt the paraffin — using a boiling water bath — and pour a thin coating over the top to seal the Jelly so it could be kept for more than a few weeks in the refrigerator.  Finally we were able to stand back and admire our accomplishment.  There in front of us stood a total of three medium size 12-ounce jars of the most beautiful red-colored Jelly that one could possibly imagine.  No electronic display would ever be able to capture and reproduce the intensity and beauty of this product!   How could it?  How could one possibly capture the result of three trips to the store, the bringing in of the harvest, and the time and labor to create such a perfect product?   As we stood watching the Jelly cool and the paraffin harden, we continued to admire the results of our afternoon’s efforts.  Then a thought crossed my mind.  What if someone else wanted to have one of these jars of Jelly for their very own?  Well, then we would have to at least cover our expenses and the time invested.   Doing a quick estimate for the total hours spent in this effort and converting this to a modest billing rate, the total for the three modest-size jars would be at least $1,000.   So with a reasonable profit margin and overhead costs for “facilities” the price on each jar would need to be at least $500.  Would you be willing to pay $500 for a medium size jar of intensely red and flavorful red currant Jelly?    This simple experiment was an excellent reminder of how much we all depend on and benefit from the cooperative efforts of all of humanity.  By

Information Communication… A few years ago, some innovative engineers among us must have decided that technology “convergence” was a good thing, and therefore, we should try adding a digital camera to a cell phone.  At the time, to most of the rest of us, this seemed like a really dumb idea.  Digital cameras were already compact and easy to carry about.  Cell phones were pretty good at making phone calls – although not as reliably as those with landlines.  So why would anyone want an inferior low-resolution digital camera as part of their cell phone?  If you want to talk to someone, use a phone.  If you want to take a photograph, use a camera.  Why combine these two distinctly different activities?   Well, engineering logic did not prevail and the combination of cell phone and low-resolution digital camera continued to be offered as a product.  Soon we began to see images on the evening news of such events as train crashes and oncoming tornadoes that had been captured at the moment they were happening on cell phones that had been the handiest image capture devices at the time of such unexpected and dramatic events.  And as time went by, more of us figured out how to download and/or send more ordinary images to our friends and families.  The ability for us to record and communicate in pictures as well as by voice began to take root and has now grown into a mainstream capability.    The latest example of how far we have come is an article in the July issue of Popular Photography magazine that provides a review of a new cell phone with an 8.1 Mpixel imager that is comparable in quality to many stand-alone digital cameras.  This cell-phone/camera combination was developed by Sony/Ericsson and currently sells for about $350.  Clearly this convergence of voice and image capture capability is becoming an accepted way for us to interact with other human beings. With our ingrained experiences firmly rooted in telephones as a way to “talk” to each other, it has been difficult to appreciate that we may not only want to talk but we may also want to “show”.  Wherever we may be, when we wish to tell our friends something interesting about where we are or what we are doing, it is natural to want to show them what is going on as well.  Most of us missed this fundamental communications concept when cell phones first started showing up with cameras.  And of course at the time – and even now – the communications technology has had a struggle with how to provide sufficient bandwidth to allow for all this additional information flow.  Nevertheless, the future direction is now firmly established.  We have discovered the benefits of tele-communicating by pictures as well as by words.  The cell phone is no longer just a cell phone.  It’s becoming a communications device that encompasses video as well as audio.  This of course means that the displays that are an integral part of these devices will need to have excellent resolution and the images will have to be bright and sunlight readable.  And that of course means plenty of opportunities for further innovation and the introduction of new display technologies.  And beyond that, we still have further opportunities in the innovative use of touch for the image capture side of this business.  Today’s digital cameras are mostly menu-driven with multiple levels of access that slow down the photography process.  I’m anxiously awaiting a touch screen that allows me to select the settings on my digital camera with a few touches of my finger instead of the multi-level entries that I now have to make to get the camera to do my bidding.  Have you already made this “convergence” leap to a high-quality imager and camera on your cell phone?  Or have you become equally adept at sending and down-loading images from you current lower-resolution cell phone?  If you would like to comment on these or related topics, you may reach me directly from this site, by e-mail at silzars@attglobal.net, or by telephone (via old-fashioned landline) at 425-898-9117.

Bump… Oh, excuse me. Thump… Whoops. Crash… The above was the title of my column published in September 1997 in Information Display magazine.  The column opened with the following:  “The sounds you have just heard are those of the Information Society in full operation just a few years from now.  They are the sounds of errant information packets colliding with stationary objects, moving objects, and with each other.” Further into that column I predicted the following scenario for September of 2001 – only four years into the future.   “The new ‘in-thing’ is constant communication person-to-person.  The form that the communication devices have taken is now known to have first been revealed at the 1997 SID Symposium in Boston.  Having been rather abruptly transported into this world, we are somewhat startled by what we see.  Everywhere we look, people are looking into their cell-phones, peeping into their pagers, or gazing into small mirror-like units attached to their eyeglasses.  In this new Information Society, walking down the street has become quite hazardous.   People haven’t yet quite gotten the hang of walking while looking into their communicators.  Audible signals have been added at street crossings and most light poles have now been padded with a material similar to that used for football-field goal posts.  Nevertheless, there are numerous bumps and bruises being inflicted as the busier downtown areas try to learn how to cope with this new trend in combining business activities with moving about.  A new medical practice has sprung-up to treat what has become called ‘communicator’s black-eye’.  There has even been some talk about making these communication devices illegal or at least restricting their use.” Well, as with most predictions, I was too optimistic in how soon this new world- order would be upon us.  Instead of four years, it has taken roughly a dozen.  And instead of near-to-the-eye displays, we have ended up with audio ear-pieces seemingly permanently imbedded in peoples’ ears.  And of course, it may take a few more years before padded light poles finally get installed. But other than these minor details, the world-of-the future from my 1997 perspective has come upon us just about as expected.  No matter where we go, we now have to deal with the impact of non-stop communication.  Recently, I was visiting clients in a large US city and we needed to walk a few blocks to another facility.  The downtown streets were busy with mid-day traffic and crossing the wide streets required a certain level of prudent attention.  Nevertheless, several of my colleagues were concentrating on answering e-mails while we were walking and — not once but several times we came uncomfortably close to testing the theory that — “Surely the speeding car will stop if I just step into the street”.  The future has arrived – very much as predicted.  No matter what the situation or what the activity, it now must be combinable with a cell-phone or a text message reader/sender.  Are you boarding your flight and trying to put your overloaded carry-on in the already full overhead compartment?  Well, for goodness sakes, don’t even think about interrupting your phone conversation or the sending of your latest text message to do that.  Others can wait.  Perhaps they won’t even mind all that much because they are doing the same thing.  Has the flight attendant asked you at least three times to turn off your communication device because the plane is about to take off?  If it’s only been twice, she must not really mean it yet.  Have the wheels touched the ground on landing?  Oh, good.  There must be many urgent messages that have piled up during the two-hour flight that need immediate attention.  What could be more important than to transmit the following urgent information – “Oh, hi.  We just landed.  We’re taxiing to the gate”? Have we reached the saturation point yet?  We should be getting close because there are only twenty-four hours in the day.  Once these are being fully utilized is there any way to do more?  Perhaps the answer is that we will begin to try to implement a version of parallel processing – such as is happening with computers.  We can’t go faster and there is no additional time that can be created so we will just have to access several devices at the same time.  Why not text message and talk on a cell phone at the same time?   That’s not nearly as challenging or dangerous as driving at seventy miles per hour while text messaging.  And once that skill is mastered, why not read an electronic magazine on a laptop computer, while talking on a phone, while sending a text message?   With this new approach the possibilities are nearly unlimited.  Perhaps we will all become like the juggler who keeps adding balls until finally they all crash to the ground. Nevertheless, this is all a wonderful trend for the display industry.  Each of these communications devices utilizes a display — and the better and brighter the display the easier it will be to use in all kinds of outdoor and indoor environments.   Further increases in the efficiency of light generation, increased brightness, and full color with excellent resolution – these are all useful improvements to introduce to this growing jumble of communications devices.  All this is guaranteed to promote further development of display technologies for at least the next decade and well beyond. Should you wish to express your thoughts about the proliferation of communications devices and where the future may lead us, you may reach me directly from this site, by e-mail at silzars@attglobal.net, or by telephone at 425-898-9117.

You Can’t Get There from Here… Perhaps you have heard the story of the young man who stops his car along a small country road somewhere in New England to ask for directions from a crusty old farmer repairing his fence.  After a thoughtful pause, the farmer replies with a tone of finality, “Well son, you just can’t get there from here.” In my opinion, there is something akin to this situation that is currently happening in the world of display technology.   Either that or perhaps I too have become like that crusty old New England farmer.   But before I get to what is bothering me, let’s first look at where we have come over the past 50 to 100 years with imaging technology – and for purposes of this discussion I will consider not only electronic displays but also photography and printing technology.  More than a century ago, we started out with monochrome photographs and then fifty or so years later began to explore electronic displays.  Over time we were able to improve both imaging methods to exceed the resolution capabilities of the human eye.  Photography achieved this through the use of larger film formats and high quality printing papers.  By the middle of the last century is was possible to produce large hang-on-the-wall photographic prints that were as detailed as our eyes could perceive – at least at the anticipated viewing distances.  Electronic displays also were eventually able to achieve nearly the same resolution levels with monochrome CRTs for specialized applications such as medical imaging.  Once technology surpassed the resolution capabilities of the human eye, there was no compelling need to go further.  We had achieved all there was to achieve. Next came color.  Color technology followed the same path of progress that had taken place with improvements in monochrome imaging.  In the early color photographs, the colors were not very good.  The same was also true for the first electronic images on the early color CRTs.  However, over time they got better and better.  Color prints and color photographs became more accurate and eventually could be used even for critical color matching applications.   Over time, color reproduction technologies have been able to get so close to what we see in nature that our eyes are not readily able to tell the difference.  When we combine the capability of eye-limited resolution with accurate color reproduction, we begin to feel that the images have a “three-dimensional” quality.  In other words, our visual systems become convinced that what we are observing is an extremely accurate representation of reality.  When we see movies made using such high-resolution techniques, we can easily become “immersed” in the experience.  The movement of the camera can provide us with a surprisingly compelling 3D effect.  When viewing scenes such as from a helicopter flying over the edge of a canyon, we get the realistically scary feeling of being thrust into open space with nothing below.   Over the years, imaging technology has taken us to the limits of resolution and color reproduction capability – matching or exceeding the best that our eyes can appreciate.  Of course we don’t get this level of excellence in all images that we encounter.  Our flat-panel televisions don’t yet have the color capability that approaches printed material or photographic film.  Most movies are not made using the ultimate resolution that film, or electronic-imaging technology offers, but they are nevertheless adequate for the typical movie-going experience. Having achieved such good results with still and moving images, isn’t the next logical step to add the third dimension and finally create something that is truly indistinguishable from the reality we see around us?  Isn’t 3D imaging the logical extension of all that we have already accomplished?   And even if it’s not quite perfect in the early stages, isn’t it going to get better and better until it’s just as perfect as our eyes can perceive?   We did it with resolution and color, so why not with 3D?   Unfortunately, this is where we come face-to-face with the story about the farmer saying “Son, you can’t get there from here.”  Realistic 3D is more than just presenting two images to our eyes – no matter how well we do it on a movie screen or a flat-panel television, with or without glasses.  To do realistic 3D we will need to add depth-of-focus and also to compensate for head movement of each viewer.   And since these effects depend on where each viewer is looking and how they are moving their heads, there is no way to do this for a large audience – or even for two viewers at one time.   The technology may exist for one viewer (using eye-movement sensing and head-position tracking) but we have no currently known way to do it for an audience of two or more using only two stereo images.   The best that we can end up with is a three-dimensional effect that conveys a feeling of depth that is interesting and entertaining but will always be perceived as “not quite right.”  This should not be a problem for gaming applications, for animated or computer generated movies, or for fantasy movies such as science fiction.   But for general viewing that is supposed to represent real-world scenes, our brains will simply not accept these images as accurate depictions of reality.  Stereo images that don’t present the right depth-of-focus and that don’t respond correctly to our head movements will cause our visual systems to struggle with these subtle conflicts and will result in eye/brain fatigue and an eventual loss of interest in using this technology.  Photography has struggled with 3D images for many years.   Adequate resolution and accurate color reproduction have not been the limitation.  In the mid-50s, stereo Viewmaster slides were quite popular as vacation souvenirs.  But even with good quality 3D projectors, there wasn’t sufficient additional value to create a sustainable market for these products.  Here is what the Editors of Popular Photography Magazine had to say about 3D photography in the August

They Converged – Unexpectedly… It seems like a long time ago – and yet it’s not so very long ago. Can you remember when your PC was mostly a word processor and a spread sheet creator, with maybe a few simple games thrown in for good measure? Then along came Windows 3.1, e-mail, and subsequent versions that added to and enhanced these basic capabilities. This all happened during a decade near the end of the last century. As the PC was growing in popularity, so was Microsoft. This company’s influence grew and it soon became dominant in the world of PC operating systems and “office” applications. And as the leader of this domain Bill Gates was developing a vision of the future and the role he wanted his company to play in creating a new world-order. I can still vividly remember seeing an interview on a major network news program in which Gates described how PC technology would soon be converging with television technology to create a unified computer/television user’s experience. To explain this new world-order, he had positioned himself sitting next to the television set and was pointing out how the typical PC functions could be performed by connecting a PC to a television. Also prominent in the presentation was how various household functions such as heating, lighting, and home security systems would soon become integrated into a centralized PC that would make all of these functions programmable and remotely controllable. Should we be surprised that his vision was PC centered? Of course not. That is, unfortunately, what happens to all of us. We extrapolate our successes and sometimes those linear extrapolations can get us into trouble. Something new may come along that we didn’t expect because of our success-narrowed vision. While I watched this interview, a number of puzzling thoughts went through my head. The first was — how would I do word-processing from my normal TV viewing distance on a screen that had barely 400 lines of resolution? Big print, I guess. (Remember this was before HDTV and before the larger screens with higher resolution had become available.) My second thought was — why would I even want to do that? Combining television entertainment with work-like activities seemed like a bad way to spend an evening. And what about other family members? Would they want to watch me create some document that perhaps was interesting to me but not to them? Next, came the rather obvious question about tying home heating, lighting, and security systems into a PC that needed to be rebooted and/or scanned for viruses every few days. One other “minor detail” was the two- to three-year life expectancy of a typical PC compared to the 30-year or greater life of home heating and lighting systems. How would one maintain such a “combination-system” that was subject to frequent technology upgrades and new product generations that were often incompatible with the previous ones?Consumers must have had similar thoughts and doubts. The Microsoft vision of the home-of-the-future and the PC-driven convergence of computers and television did not happen. But something else did happen, and it’s creating a new world-order far more interesting and exciting than the one envisioned during the intense growth period of PC technology. A number of events that were just barely visible ten years ago have come to pass and have combined in previously unexpected ways to create these changes. The easiest one to see and predict was the evolution of HDTV. More than ten years ago, the display industry was already on a path to create high-resolution images on screens of just about any size. Electronic communications (now known as e-mail) were also beginning to become important and further expansion could be (and was) predicted. But perhaps the biggest and least predicted new influence was Google and all the related search capability that has grown with it. Who would have believed a few decades ago that in just a few years we would be able to get an answer to just about any question, on any subject, by simply typing a few words, or even numbers, into our computers? Are you looking for an obsolete vacuum tube? Just “Google” the tube number and every likely source anywhere in the world will instantly be before you. Need the definition of a technical term? Just type it in and there it is. And along with this rich information resource has come the ability to purchase any of these items with similar ease. Of course Ebay has also helped this process along by creating the world’s largest market in new and used “stuff” of all kinds.This interactivity and information-availability has encouraged the development of web-sites that today provide us with the latest news and other items of interest that we formerly found in daily newspapers and various trade publications.With all this interesting information now at our fingertips – literally, the computer has evolved into more of an information resource and entertainment tool. While the traditional PC functions are still there, they are no longer dominant. Suddenly, the convergence of television and computers begins to make more sense. If I’m already accessing video clips about various events and items of interest on my computer, why not do that on a large-screen television in between watching favorite programs? That way I can entertain myself with a conventional video program, with a recorded movie, with an electronic game, and combine those activities with surfing the Internet for interesting items. The bridge between video entertainment and computer-accessed information has now been completed. There is a continuum of uses from pure video entertainment on one end, to a combination of computer-accessed information in the middle, to the more traditional PC–like world on the other end.Could we have foreseen this more than a decade ago? Most of us did not. The key to this change was not the vision that Bill Gates had of pushing the PC into controlling the home. The key, instead, was what Google made happen with information

How Will We Remember?… This morning I stood in front of my bookshelf and pondered.  Hmmm…  I was looking for something optics related.  It was in the general area of how light behaves in non-linear media.  Not having a precise idea of what I was searching for I didn’t quite know where I should begin.  A book that had been used as a text for one of my courses in graduate school soon caught my attention.  A cursory browsing through the pages quickly led me to several topics of interest.  As I perused, I began to recall some of the lectures and general concepts that had been taught in that course – quite a number of years ago.  Soon I was engrossed in a review of the topic of my current interest and the foundational concepts that were going to prove of great help in putting it all into proper context.  How quaint!  Doesn’t this way of finding information sound a bit “old fashioned” to at least some of you?  Wouldn’t it have been quicker and more up-to-date to just do a Google search?  After all, Aris, this is the 21st century!  Aren’t printed books on their way toward obsolescence?  Some colleges are apparently already beginning to introduce electronic books as a replacement to traditional printed texts.  Since I spend a good part of my day in front of a computer screen and Google searches are very much a part of my routine activities, I don’t consider myself totally in the dark ages.  However, the push toward having all of our information in electronic form does create a new world-order that may require that we come up with some new ways to adapt.  The traditional ways that we have had available to organize our knowledge base and how we quickly access it may disappear.  We may have to come up with something new to replace the convenient visual clues of printed books; books with pages that can be quickly and conveniently browsed to locate a piece of information that may be difficult to describe with sufficient specificity for a search engine to give us what we are looking for.  Another interesting aspect of electronic information is where it currently resides and where it’s likely to reside in the future.  With my printed books, I know exactly where they are and no matter how long they are around they can be read.  The information will be just as accessible in ten, twenty, or fifty years as it is today.  So far this has not been the case with electronic data storage media.  Do you still have a computer that can read a 5 1/4” floppy disk?   Do you still have capability for reading and writing to a 3 ½ “ disk or a “zip” drive?  If your favorite college text had been stored on any of these media, you would either need to have it converted or the information would be gone forever.   So far we have been on about a 5 to 10-year cycle with new incompatible electronic storage media replacing whatever has come before.  The next generation of electronic storage appears to be independent of hardware as we enter the age of “cloud” computing.  This has already been presaged by the search capabilities that allow us temporary access to information that is stored somewhere in some giant server farm.  We can, of course, save the results of our searches if we wish, but the concept of remotely centralized data storage is growing with each passing day.  Historical context and the ability to quickly overview the technical fundamentals already known is of great value when tackling difficult new technical problems.  That kind of knowledge has traditionally existed in printed books, technical papers, and in the minds of senior engineers who are respected for all the ways they know how “not to do something”.  Losing that connection to the body of previously hard-won knowledge would indeed be very unfortunate. Perhaps over the next few years we will learn how to integrate the best of electronic search capabilities and electronic storage media with traditional printed media so that a balance is reached.  This balance should provide quick access to the current knowledge base while keeping ready access to historical perspectives and guided learning opportunities. Are you ready to envision a world without printed books?   Do you think that day will come sometime soon and if so when?  Are you expecting Santa to bring you an electronic book-reader this Christmas?  I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this topic or others.  You can contact me directly from this site, by e-mail at silzars@attglobal.net, or by telephone at 425-898-9117.