Pixel Qi’s dual mode LCD display

Pixel Qi makes LCD displays that are unlike any you’ve ever seen. When you turn the backlight off, the screen is still readable in a high contrast black and white mode. They actually look like e-Ink displays, but they’re not. Turn up the backlight, and you have full color saturation.

The net effect is that you can put a Pixel Qi display in a netbook, tablet, or eBook reader and have a device that you can read indoors or outdoors. It can handle full motion video. And there’s non of that page refreshing effect that you experience with eBook readers like the Kindle and Nook.

One of the other side effects of using the Pixel Qi display is reduced power consumption. In full color mode, the LCD uses about 2.5 watts of power, which is about what you’d get from any other LCD screen. But when you cut the backlight off, that drops to about 0.5 watts.

The other thing I was surprised to learn is that while Windows treats Pixel Qi’s 3qi display as a 1024 x 600 pixel screen, it’s actually a 3072 x 600 pixel screen. Those extra pixels help make the text easier to read if your using Roman, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, or a number of other languages. For Chinese, Pixel Qi is working on higher vertical and horizontal resolutions.

Up close with Pixel Qi