The Nikkei Business Daily reported today that Canon Inc. has developed a 10.4-inch prototype LCD with a pixel density 50% higher than that of conventional LCDs of similar size, which allowed the company to pack 1,536 horizontal pixels onto the screen instead of 1,024. As a result, photos and videos can be seen with improved fine detail.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor
of HDTV Retailer

Canon increased the pixel density by reducing the number of color sub-pixels from three (red, green, and blue) to two (green and magenta). What the Nikkei article didn’t mention is how it is possible to generate a full range of colors with only two color primaries. The answer is: It isn’t.

But it is possible to produce that third primary in time instead of space; that is, to combine the two basic ways of creating color in pixellated displays: the spatial addition of colors found in conventional LCDs and plasma displays with the field-sequential addition of colors found in, for instance, DLP-based projectors.

Such an approach with green and magenta sub-pixels has been well described by Lou Silverstein (”Color and Displays in the Space-Time Continuum,” Information Display, October 2005″), among others. Here, the backlight alternately flashes with a yellow and cyan color. When the yellow light shines through a blue-tinted sub-pixel, it produces red; when it shines through a green-tinted sub-pixel, it produces green. When the cyan light shines through these sub-pixels, it produces blue and green ­– and we have our red, blue, and green primaries.

Company sources said that Canon will try to commercialize the product for use in electronic dictionaries and other equipment, but it’s not clear why a company with no display-manufacturing capabilities of its own thinks this is a good business opportunity. Of course, this consideration has not stopped Canon in the past. In 1995, Canon tried to commercialize display panels for notebook computers using ferroelectric LCD technology — an embarrassing failure. The company seems to be doing better with its surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) technology, which it plans to manufacture through a joint venture with Toshiba beginning late in 2006.

So what does this all mean? It means that clever new display technologies continue to evolve and innovation is not dead by any means. This will continue to propel the industry, but what is lacking is better business acumen in the evaluation of these innovations and commercialization decisions.