<-125x125 Button - right->A few days ago BenQ announced 3 new LCD displays featuring full High Definition technology and 16:9 aspect ratio, for September, on the European market.

E2200HD is a 21.5-inch display coming in glossy black finish featuring 10,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, 2ms response time, HDMI, DVI, headphone jack, stereo speaker and Windows Vista Premium certification.

The other BenQ LCD monitors are: 24-inch E2400HD with the same glossy black design and M2400HD in glossy white encasing. They deliver full 1080p native resolution, HDMI, DVI, 10,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, headphone jack, stereo speaker, just 2ms response time and the certification for the same operating system.

The M BenQ LCD monitors family has a 2MP web camera on top so the user to initiate video conferences over the Internet without bothering to search for a camera and spend time with the installation.

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At InfoComm 08 trade show in Las Vegas, Canon presented its new LCOS Reflective LCD Panel for the use in multimedia projectors.
Liquid Crystal on Silicon reflective LCD panels deliver very high resolution for images, free of lattice effect, and the 2 Canon models measure 0.71 and 0.55 inches thick featuring 1,920 x 1,200 and 1,400 x 1,050 resolution respectively.

The 0.71-inch WUXGA is the world’s first LCOS panel of its size to achieve such a level of resolution and the technology is based on the company’s Aspectual Illumination System optical engine meant to maximize the panels’ performance achieving high brightness and high contrast while maintaining a compact design. It even supports HDTV projection.
These panels will be used in design, simulation, medicine and other similar sectors where users need high performance imaging.

Liquid Crystal on Silicon technology uses liquid crystals on the surface of a silicon chip coated with an aluminized layer with a highly reflective coating, while LCD projectors work based on transmissive liquid crystal display chips letting the light to pass through the liquid crystal.
The technology produces higher resolution than LCD and Plasma and is more cost effective.

<-250x250 Square - right->I have to mention that I was one of those kids that grew up with the television shows. Now I prefer to spend my free time watching TV rather than reading a good book. A good book gives my subconscious time to create a world based on my brain’s imaginative capabilities, so I can visualize the characters and actions in the book, but television provides these visual interpretations of thoughts directly, saving a significant amount of my time. The thoughts are not mine, but who cares? As long as I receive the information I need, when I need, with images, and in the shortest time, I can interpret and remember it easier.
In the following lines I will give more attention to television as technology, and some details about the first TV displays, those devices found in everyone’s homes, that make the link between the broadcasted information and viewers.
According to Wikipedia, the word “television” means “far sight”, and is a combination of the Greek word “tele” and the Latin “vision”.

In this picture you are seeing what’s behind the display you are watching movies on, or better said, you used to watch, because this is a Cathode Ray Tube model and now you are probably using an LCD display. Anyway, the base technology is the same in both cases.
In order to produce images, the cathode, which is negatively charged, is heated to provide enough energy in order to emit electrons. The electrons are accelerated towards the anode, which is positively charged. Next, these electrons pass through the anode and spread randomly until they get through the cathode and the anode. An electric force is produced between the two plates and the generated beam reaches the back of your TV display, which has a phosphor layer. As this material glows when hit by electrons, the display lights up.
Now the interesting part: The beam of electrons, which looks like a line, is set to hit the screen in different parts and at different times, so after the lines for one picture are scanned in, the lines for the next picture are scanned in. Our brain can’t see this succession of dots coming so fast, but what we see is the whole image reassembled from dots. As the images come in rapid succession, we see them reassembled into a moving scene, because the brain can’t perceive the moment when dots for the next image arrive.

The first television, called mechanical television, used the Nipkow disk, which was an image scanning device invented in 1884 and consisting of a spinning disk featuring a series of equally distanced circular holes of equal diameter drilled in it, forming a single-turn spiral, starting from an external radial point of the disk and proceeding to the center of the disk. The holes take pieces of the image projected by a lens, and a sensor picks them in the form of light and dark patterns.

(Sources The University of Colorado ; howstuffworks)

This is a subject we could talk about for hours and that involves large physics knowledge, so in short words, the following are the steps made until the first live transmission took place:
1925 - John Logie Baird from Scottland demonstrated televised silhouette images in motion.
1927 - John Logie Baird transmitted a signal over 438 miles of telephone line between London and Glasgow.
1928 - John Logie Baird broadcasted the first transatlantic television signal, between London and New York, and the first shore-to-ship transmission.
1929 - John Logie Baird participated in the development of the first experimental electromechanical television service in Germany, and together with Bernard Natan of Pathe, created the first TV company in France, called Télévision-Baird-Natan.
…and in 1931 took place the first live transmission of the Epsom Derby.

The answer is quite simple:
The patent for the first electromechanical television system was published in 1884 by Nipkow, when he revealed the spinning disk.
Who invented the color TV? - Later in 1938, the first color TV technology was patented by Werner Flechsig from Germany, and the principle behind this project was the shadow mask. This technology adopted for CRTs to produce color images, consists of a metal plate with very small holes in it, which separate the colored phosphors in the layer behind the front glass of the screen, and which are drilled in the right places so that the electrons from each of the tube’s 3 cathode guns reach only the right-colored phosphors on the display. These 3 beams pass through the same holes but in different angles.

The first time television broadcast was in 1928 in the United States and the system was, of course, mechanical. In the United Kingdom and Germany it took place a year later, in 1929. After that, the following 7 countries welcomed the first TV transmissions: France and Russia in 1931, Poland in 1937, Japan and Italy in 1939, and Canada in 1946.

The invention of television lead at the existent display technologies including CRT, which is still used in some places, LCD, Plasma, DLP and OLED.

<-250x250 Square - right->N-trig is a company from Israel focused on developing new technologies meant to allow users to interact with computers and two of their innovative products are the first dual-mode pen and touch input device.
At SID Display Week 2008 in Las Vegas, N-trig showcased a new standard for multi-touch input on large format displays, based on its DuoSense technology with full multi-touch capabilities optimized for large displays.

“N-trig is again raising the bar on the meaning and application of full multi-touch capabilities for large format displays, which will enable OEMs and ODMs to create a user experience that is so immersive that the line between the digital and the physical blurs,” said Amihai Ben-David, CEO of N-trig. “By enabling an unlimited number of other people to use their hands to naturally manipulate digital on screen objects, images and more, DuoSense’s full multi-touch technology brings the user-computer interaction into a new realm, further breaking down the barriers between man and machine.”

A full multi-touch display measuring 22 inches in diagonal can now recognize all the simultaneous touch points from the users. On it you can manage documents like on a desktop computer monitor, moving and pushing these aside with your own hands, and even make sketches or write notes with a pen.

Another capability is of shuffling pictures with both hands. You can also play games in multiplayer mode on the same display, simultaneously.
Such a display, when it will be available on the market, would be useful in the following sectors: gaming, multimedia portable consoles, information kiosks, collaborative design, entertainment, broadcasting, and education.

“We’re provoking the imaginations of our customers, setting the stage for OEMs, ODMs, and ISVs to develop a huge range of new applications,” added Ben-David. “True multi-touch offers an unprecedented experience which takes people to new levels of what they’re able to do with computing devices.”
N-trig published this cool video on YouTube showing what this display can do:

<-250x250 Square - right->A new impressive display model stands out from the crowd, after it was exhibited at MacWorld, CES 2008 and SID 2008.

It is called a CRVD and comes from Ostendo Technologies. A CRVD is an ultra-wide curved display having a diagonal of 42.4 inches and backlighting provided by OSRAM Opto Semiconductors’ OSTAR-Projection high-performance LED light sources. These projection modules have 6 RGB LED chips generating outstanding brilliance and vibrant colors with pure surface emission and extreme brightness, based on OSRAM’s Thinfilm and ThinGaN chip architecture.
It features a high native resolution of 2880 x 900 pixels, meaning double WXGA+, and is designed for desktop computers.

It has a curved computer monitor design to wrap around the user and impress with billions of colors, 300 nits brightness, and incredible high contrast ratio of 10,000:1.
Main applications for which DLP-based CRVDs would be a great monitor include gaming, simulation, financial analysis, digital imaging, and web content creation.

“It’s an incredible display,” said Tom Shottes, president and CEO of OSRAM Opto Semiconductors. “This is the first display that provides such a wide field of view with such dynamic range and wide color gamut. We’ve worked with Ostendo since they began developing the technology. The high luminance and design flexibility of our OSTAR-Projection technology was a perfect fit.”

The curved computer monitor provides an extremely short response time of almost 0.02 ms, having 12-bit dynamic range, viewing angles of 90 degrees on horizontal/30 degrees on vertical, 0.36mm pixel pitch, 71 dpi, 3.2:1 aspect ratio, weighting 25 lbs.
It will be available on the market in quarter 4, 2008.