You have a line of very thin tranparent tubes as your display, with colored/uncolored liquid injected into them at correct spacing to create the desired view.
Let's talk about black/white: There is a transparent (or white) liquid which is kept separately from the black liquid because the two liquids do not disolve into each other (e.g. one is oily the other water). These small amounts of liquid are injected into the tubes with the correct colors in their correct spacing until the tube is full and the colors are in their correct space. It is like sending the black pixel down a tube until it reaches it's correct position on the display. It would look a bit like watching a bubble travel in a medicle needle. Only it would work much faster, so that you get the illusion of a static display.
For color you have three different color tubes, on each line.
The display works hydraulically. Once the correct position is reached the tube can be locked. So when you are watching static parts of the page no flicker/movement is needed.
Also eye strain is eliminated because there is no need for backlighting. This could be used as a completely passive screen! You could put this type of matrix in store windows, and cause the window to become a display or go back to transparency wherever and whenver you wish to.
An improvement would be to have a matrix (the tubes are transparent) so that only the active parts of the screen (like a video playing) would have to work.
This could also be used for semi permanent signs like e-ink ideas.
Last but not least, this technology could be used for 3d displays, I'll explain that in the Computer: Display: 3d section.-- pashute, Oct 29 2002 Colored liquid tubes 3d display http://www.halfbake...ubes_203d_20displayDifferent idea (3d is yet to be solved well) based on same technology [pashute, Oct 04 2004] Thanks for the extra detail. I was on the right track.
This is similar to an idea I had to use colored solid objects (something along the lines of beads) to create a very slow but persistent display.
One trick, among many, would be separating the colored fluids back in to separate containers for reuse. (Assuming that the colors are reusable not consumable)-- half, Oct 29 2002 Wouldn't work with oil and water. Because they're different densities, even if you inject the "pixels" in a random order, the oil would all float to the top, leaving you either with an all black-on-top, white-on-bottom picture (for vertically mounted tubes), or horizontal bands of varying shades of gray (for horizontal tubes.) What you'd need is non-mixing liquids of equal densities, but unfortunately I don't think that's physically possible.
What might work is to have each pixel rep'd by the cross-section of a coaxial tube (which might not exist, but if they did, they'd look like coaxial cable, only with transparent stuff and empty space taking the respective places of plastic and metal). liqud could be jetted into thecenter part of the tube, and drained back into the reservoir via the outer ring.-- nick_n_uit, Oct 29 2002 I don't have the foggiest idea of how this thing would actually operate. Each frame would take several seconds to load; even with very high pressure the shear friction of fluids in very small capillary tubes is much too high to ever give the illusion of a static display. Another question: how are the colors activated / deactivated? Do they travel through the tube as white and then for some magic reason change black at a specific point? Otherwise you don't have a pixel, you have a black tube.-- RayfordSteele, Oct 29 2002 RS: I think the idea is to squirt in a given amount of liquid for each pixel, but to get it from a different reservoir of colored liquid. Each progressive squirt would add a pixel to the far left and push the already present pixels further to the right (or vice versa).
Hmm...now that I think about it, the system might not work with liquids, but it would for a somewhat more viscous substance. I think our resident chemical engineers need to find away to produce a highly-cohesive, non-adhesive form of custard.-- nick_n_uit, Oct 29 2002 Thank you for your remarks. nick, you understood correctly, injecting small amounts of color/transparent or color/background in same tube.
I believe if the tubes are capillary tubes, there won't be the floating effect. (similar to a gas buble (sp?) which doesn't travel in certain cases in a capillary (Have to check that out).
In any event you don't need such high speeds for static displays (at least). I hope you CAN reach high speeds with this, which would allow for dynamic displays as well. There is no refresh here, only the speed of picture display, and that too can be done using compression, so only the parts that need be refreshed, are refreshed, as explained in the idea.-- pashute, Oct 30 2002 Would you mind getting rid of the other incarnation of this idea [pashute]? (link)-- phoenix, Oct 30 2002 do you still think it's another incarnation? [phoenix] If so I'll remove it.
3d is a whole different field. In this idea I put many spots in 2d creating an image. In the 3d idea I have a way to put spots in 3 dimentional space creating a 3d shape. The way the tubes are set up and the calculations are a totally different scale of operation. This idea should be a simple one to implement. That one would probably be complex in any case.-- pashute, Nov 03 2002 My apologies [pashute]. I thought this was a re-wording of your other idea. Sorry.-- phoenix, Nov 03 2002 random, halfbakery