Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer
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Japanese invent an LCD that melts 10 per cent fewer glaciers
THE TECHNOLOGY industry has always been a greedy consumer of fossil fueled power. In global warming terms, they take icecaps, and turn them into solutions. According to this lot anyway.
Now the Japs have done something about it.
A Japanese firm has invented a new screen technology that melts 10 per cent less glaciers.
Nikkei.net (needs a subscription) reports today that Toray Industries has made a high-performance reflective film for LCD televisions that can boost screen brightness by 10 per cent. That means 10 per cent less electricity is used. So London will take 10 per cent longer to become engulfed by rising waters.
How have they done this? The reflective film is placed behind the backlight to help evenly illuminate the LCD screen. For LCD TVs, which need to present a bright picture, the reflective film is essential.
They make these films by mixing fine particles of a special olefin-type resin into polyester. Then they draw the material out into a sheet with bubbles that reflect light.
The resulting film has a bubble ratio of 55 per cent compared with the usual 40 per cent, and a reflectivity of 99 per cent compared with the conventional 95 per cent.
Since no special materials are required, Toray can manufacture the new high-performance reflective film cheaply too.
Samples are already with the box makers. A commercial version is expected in 2008. µ
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LED backlighting will eventually be more efficient than other methods, but currently most LED backlights use more power than the technology they're replacing. The efficiency of normal white LED's is only about half that of florescent lights, which would put them around the same as cold cathode florescents, and most, if not all, colored LED's are less efficient. However, LED's are becoming more efficient and prototypes of white LED's are approaching 2/3rds of their maximum efficiency, or higher (I double checked wikipedia's year old numbers when they were current, but I can't find anything newer). OLED screens will beat them all with efficiency, since there wont be a backlight and something to filter out the light. They will just produce whatever light they need in making the picture.

The big gains from LED's are that you can get an improved color gamut and they don't burn out very easily. People don't like it when they spend $1000's on a screen and the light dies after about 5-10 years, costing about as much to fix as replace.
Yes it does.
Maths <------ See?
Mathematics has an s on the end. Not the abbreviation.
It's maths.
Nice invention, but somehow sad that it indicates once again that they a) plan to continue with LCD and find a better technology and b) that LED backlight is not moving forwards as much as one would hope.
And isn't LED backlight much more energy-efficient anyway? 

Still, even when LCD's are replaced with something better as one would hope I think this stuff will find its uses, so it would still be pretty good.
For those of you who aren't good at math, if you have a value, we'll call it x, and increase it 10%, if you take it back to the orginal value, it hasn't gone down 10%. See, when it went up, it went from 1x to 1.1x(adding .1, since .1 is 10% of 1). If you take it back down, the starting value is 1.1, so going to 1 means subtracting .1. Well, .1/1.1 is 1/11th, which is 9.09%.

Apparently, journalists who are either lousy at math or like to fudge figures also work for newspapers other than those here in the US.

The pattern seems to be that countries with a lot of whites are getting dumber, blacks are getting poorer; and the Chinese and Japanese, races I see so little of that I can't even tell them apart, are getting smarter and richer.