McFilter

The CHASE talk this month was given by Tom Jarman, CEO of Screen Technology Ltd.

The Technology

The company was initially founded to develop LCD screens with wider viewing angles, but developments in LCD technology overtook them and rendered their solution obsolete before it came to market. During development, however, they'd had to start tiling multiple LCD displays together, which gave them a new direction to follow, but even that wasn't a trivial change. Their tiling solution was too expensive to be commercially viable, so a final redesign has resulted in their current offering.

Because LCD displays have a border round the edge, in order to tile them seamlessly you need to enlarge the picture very slightly. Screen Technology injection-mould rows of clear plastic optic fibres, specially aligned to enlarge each pixel slightly - a 1.5mm input becomes 1.7mm at output. These rows of optic fibres are then arranged carefully to provide a panel to fit a standard 15" LCD display, and then these panels can be tiled to produce a display of any size you desire.

The Competition

The market for large displays is growing all the time; just witness the proliferation of big plasma screens in railway stations, or the mammoth LED screens used by the BBC at open-air viewings of recent World Cup games. But these displays have their problems: plasma screens don't do well in bright sunlight, and don't (yet) scale to huge sizes; and LED displays suffer from large pixels (around 6mm, plus they then need separate red, green and blue pixels) and a large black area between individual LEDs - making them hard to see close up.

Screen Technology's screens have overcome all of these problems. Their pixel size is 1.7mm and are closely packed meaning they can still be read easily from close range. The use of generic LCD displays behind the panels means that there are multiple pixels on the LCD feeding into each display pixel, so there's no need for separate red, green and blue pixels - increasing the effective resolution even further. And, more by luck than judgement, the fibre-optic panels reflect very little light so the displays look great even in bright sunlight.

After a slightly rocky start, things are looking very rosy for Screen Technology. Provided they can ramp up production successfully, expect to see their displays in more and more locations when you're out and about.