14 DAY TRIAL // Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology Co., Ltd. has announced that they have started the mass production of their 5-inch monochrome, highly reflective TFT LCD. This LCD has a high resolution and uses a 16-level grayscale display. The product is mainly designed for monochrome applications such as electronic books and dictionaries.
Is seems that behind TMDT's decision lie some interesting facts regarding the market share of electronic dictionaries. For example, in Japan, an increase in the demand for such devices was registered during the last years with more than 2.5 million units being sold in 2005. And that's not all since small monochrome TFTs can also be integrated in several other devices such as the upcoming e-newspapers.
The new TFT LCD was optimized for e-book use so it was designed to work without a backlight. Since the display itself emits enough light, the absence of a supplementary source translates into lower power consumption. Additionally, the device has been tuned to be pretty responsive to image updating, meaning you won't have to wait for it to refresh when you're quickly scrolling through the text lines.
The display measures 5.01 inches and will have a native resolution of 640x480 (VGA). The panel has a rates response time of 20 ms and consumes about 4 mW when you use it in binary mode and 20 mW in 16-gray scale representation. There is no information available about the time when it will come out or how much it will cost, but officials from TMDT say that it will go on mass production as soon as possible. Also, at the moment, we don't exactly know just how thin this new LCD will be. And that's pretty important since its main target is the e-book format.