Pixel Qi announces low-powered side displays – great for mobile devices

While we wait (and wait and wait) for devices like the Notion Ink Adam to ship with Pixel Qi displays, LCDs that are readable with or without backlighting, the company is moving forward with their own plans to offer their displays as add-on solutions, including a secondary display that can run entirely on USB.

Via a press release on their CEO’s blog, Pixel Qi announced a partnership with Display Solutions AG to produce the Display Solutions d-screen-Qi10. This secondary display runs entirely on USB and can even receive video via wireless-USB thanks to DisplayLink technology (you may recall we gave away two DisplayLink adapters after CES). The display sips only 1.5W, so it can easily run on your notebook’s USB power or on battery power if running wirelessly. The latter capability will be compatible with phones that support wireless-USB.

The screen itself will be 10.1-inch, 1024×600, and be able to display up to 262,144 colors in the transmissive mode with LED backlight. Pixel Qi magic enables a transflective mode that allows ambient light to pass through and supplement the backlight, as well as a pure reflective mode for 64-level grayscale viewing in direct sunlight. In grayscale reflective mode, subpixel rendering effectively triples the vertical pixel count, making the resolution 3072×600. (Each pixel is composed of three subpixels, red-green-blue, that act like separate pixels when not displaying color.)

The Display Solutions d-screen-Qi10 will supposedly go on sale in October. Display Solutions is a German company, so our friends overseas will likely see it before the rest of us. The press release also links to a movie clip showing the display in action against a standard LCD, but I can’t seem to get to it.

Via Engadget