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That Was Then, This Is Now: Amazing PC ProgressJuly 30th, 2009With all the talk about how prices on this, that and the other thing are always going up, let’s stop a moment and bow, or at least give a polite nod, toward Silicon Valley, Poughkeepsie and Boston’s Route 128. Over the past 40 years, the tech titans of the FPCE (Founding PC Era) have given us the greatest ongoing upgrade at the biggest continuing discount ever. The saga of the personal computer is as fantastic a tale as any sci-fi story ever. Truth isn’t just stranger than fiction—it’s often got more magic and miracles in it, too.
The longer you’ve been using computers—and some of us had the original Apple, Tandy (Radio Shack) and Timex Sinclair models in the 1970s—the more you can appreciate the astonishing speed of progress. This is a tale that everyone working with computers really should know, and uses terms that everyone really should understand. If you don’t understand a kilo-this from a mega-that, you will never get the full impact of this amazing tale. So read on—you’ll be glad you did. You can consult the accompanying Glossary whenever you see a new term (in red for its first appearance), but we’ve written the blog in such a way that you should understand much of it in context. Some of you, of course, are true experts, so if we’ve erred in any way, by commission or omission, drop us a line. We’re going to demonstrate just how much technological progress has been made in “personal computing.” It really is an awe-inspiring tale. Basic computers in 1981 IBM introduced its first consumer-level personal computer in August of 1981, running on an Intel 8088 CPU with a clock speed of 4.77MHz, or 4.77 million cycles per second. It came with either 16 or 64kB of RAM, expandable to a whopping 256kB. It connected to a TV or a monitor, and gave you storage options that included one or two 5¼ -inch floppy drives, an optional 10MB external hard drive or your own cassette recorder. The software bundle? It came with an operating system. Nothing else. With a monitor and a single floppy drive (giving you 180kB storage per single sided disk) it cost $3005 in 1981 dollars. Depending on how you figure it—Consumer Price Index (CPI) is one common method—today it would take about $2.50 to buy what a dollar bought in 1981. Translation: that IBM-PC computer would cost $7,512.50 (in today’s dollars). Now let’s see what type of desktop computer you can get today. High-end computers of today Entry-level computers today are thousands of times faster and more productive than the IBM-PC. The H-P xw8400 workstation that CRE rents is a high-end model – it comes with dual 2.66GHz quad-core Xeon processors, meaning eight separate CPUs. A single one runs almost 600 times faster than the IBM CPU, so we’re talking almost 5,000 times as fast with a rough clock speed comparison. Its 160GB hard drive holds close to million (932,000) times as much data as that single floppy. There are now hard drives 2TB in size selling for $200, a cost per MB of 1/100th of a cent, versus the floppy’s $30 per MB. That’s 300,000 times less expensive. For the monitor, the comparison is between today’s 16 million crisp clear colors, precisely displayed by about 2.3 million pixels, with about 9,700 pixels per square inch—and a black-and-white TV with 480 wiggly lines for the entire screen. Bottom line on PC’s Today Today, you can store a million times as much, crunch numbers thousands of times faster and watch videos in beautiful, high-definition color. For a few hundred bucks you can buy a pocket-sized netbook incalculably more powerful than the room-sized, air-conditioned behemoth that helped send Apollo 11 to the moon—and you don’t have to be a programmer to use it, either. If your needs are a little more down-to-earth, like a kiosk for a trade show or some extra video-editing workstations, CRE is here with solutions. Fill out the CRE quick one-click quote, call us toll-free at (877) 266-7725 or send an e-mail for a swift, thorough reply. - – - – - – - – - - Glossary bit: abbreviated lower case “b”; the smallest unit measure for area occupied by data, measuring both where it is processed (RAM) and where it is stored (memory “media” such as tape, floppies, hard drives, SecureDigital and other flash memory, etc.); 8 bits = 1 Byte Byte: abbreviated upper case “B”; 8 bits = 1 Byte; 1024 Bytes, in metric terms, is a kilobyte (kB, see below) clock speed: CPU speed as measured in hertz (Hz), or cycles per second CPU: Central Processing Unit, a computer’s “brains,” the fancy calculator FPCE: Founding PC Era, a name and acronym for the years circa 1970-1985; we just made this one up, how do you like it? GB: Gigabyte, 1024MB, or 1024 x 1024kB (1,073,741,824 Bytes); often considered “a billion” Bytes k: lower case “k” means “kilo”; often considered a thousand (more precisely, 1024) of a unit kB: kilobyte, or 1024 Bytes; often considered “a thousand” Bytes MB: Megabyte, 1024kB, or 1024 x 1024 Bytes (1,048,576 Bytes); often considered “a million” Bytes medium/media: a substance used for electronic storage of audio, video or data, from wire in early wire audio recorders to such magnetic media as recording tape; computer media progressed from soft-sided to hard-sided floppy disks, then to hard drives with multiple platters, Compact Disc (CD), DVD and, now, Blu-ray memory: a term for both RAM and storage media, measured in Bytes pixel(s): term created from “picture element” to describe the basic unit of programmable color in a computer image or display RAM: Random Access Memory, the “head” or space where the CPU “brain” does its calculations TB: Terabytes, 1024GB, or 1024 x 1024MB (1,099,511,623,680 Bytes); often considered “a trillion” Bytes Hollywood and Linux: Riches in the Niches?July 28th, 2009Every couple of years since the early 1990s, sometimes more often than that, you’d see an article in the Sunday paper or some magazine about Hollywood jumping on the personal computer bandwagon. Often the pieces were Macintosh-centric, as the creative community—from graphic designers and audio engineers to fashionistas and filmmakers—really did take to the Mac. When you see the kind of power in the Mac Pro line, which CRE proudly provides to professional power users, it’s fun to recall that PC partisans accused early Macs of being underpowered.
Movie studio tech Although it’s difficult to confirm, it still appears that just one major movie studio, Dreamworks, has deployed Linux throughout its whole operation, from the editing bays to the receptionist’s desk. It’s not the only OS the company uses, however, and every studio has its own mix of operating systems, hardware and commercial applications. They also create their own high-tech tools. In the render farm niche, particularly, many production companies run proprietary software that is written in-house, while relying on Avid and/or Final Cut Studio for their primary video editing application. Founded in 1997, SpectSoft developed a Linux-based DDR (Disk Drive Recorder) called RaveHD for storing raw, uncompressed video. In a conversation with Linux.com’s Robin Miller, Founder Ramona Howard says RaveHD contains “some editing functions” but is by no means “a full-blown video editor.” She sees a “Swiss Army knife” model for the creative and technical sides of movie production, with a modular approach bringing the right tools to the right place (and time). “We could take everything we’ve done and apply it to an editor,” she says, “but it’s pointless to compete with Avid or Final Cut,” and seems to have concluded that any riches will be found in the niches. Niches for all Those niches are adding up now. Neither the resurgent Windows platform nor the new interest in Linux is detracting from the Mac’s solid spot in the creative arsenal, so there appears to be room for “all kinds.” Any entertainment industry pro doing modeling, video game development or special effects with CRE’s “render farm toolbox”—an 8-core Mac Pro with an additional 16GB of RAM and a 23-inch Apple Cinema Display—can attest to the Herculean strength of Apple’s desktop towers. Truth be told, plenty of audio, video and high-end graphics jobs are also being done on CRE’s powerful, flexible iMacs. A particularly potent and productive workstation can be fashioned by adding a 23- or 30-inch Apple Cinema Display to the iMac rental, creating two huge windows into the virtual world where you can work on animation, film and video editing, multitrack recordings or print production. And this same sort of power and flexibility is coming to computers running “the other” OS’s, too. This is good news for all creative folks. Another metaphor used by entertainment industry creatives is the jigsaw puzzle. Depending on the task at hand, producers will bring the requisite equipment online to get the job done. Deadlines and job requirements can change at a moment’s notice—truth be told, often without any notice at all—which is why companies large and small call on CRE for AJA Io HD rentals and Pro Tools HD 3 systems to get the video processed, the drum tracks recorded and the finished job delivered. When you need the last few pieces to put your production puzzle together, call one of our CRE Account Executives at 877-266-7725 (toll-free), send a quick e-mail or fill out a rental quote web form. We’ll get right back to you, so you can get right back to work with the high-powered tools you need to get the job done. QuickTime Pro: Going, Going… Gone?July 23rd, 2009QuickTime (QT) has been part of the Macintosh Operating System (OS) for so long that some people think it’s always been there. Not so. It was introduced in 1991, toward the end of System 6’s life, so the first OS into which it was fully integrated was System 7. For those of you who go back that far with the Mac, like we do, System 7 will be remembered as a true milestone for Apple and its user base. Many of System 7’s features survive to this very day, in Mac OS X, the system that powers CRE’s rental inventory of Macintosh laptops, desktop towers and servers. System 7 introduced cosmetic changes to the GUI (Graphical User Interface) as well as plenty of changes “under the hood.” That little right-pointing triangle in front of folder icons, the one that reveals and hides the folder’s contents? Introduced with System 7. AppleScript and aliases, both powerful tools and both still going strong, also debuted with System 7. Still, the major contribution that it made was QT. By version 2.0, it was available for Windows, too, where it found generally good acceptance. The “Pro” debut Way back when—Mac OS 8.5, when QT was at version 3—Apple developed a new QT distribution scheme. It would now come in two distinct flavors, QT and QT Pro. With the basic version, you get a basic set of A/V capabilities that enable watching QT movies and working with a few other sound and image formats. That’s about it, except for a handy QT plug-in for your web browser. QT Pro, however, empowers you to create and edit QT movies and sound recordings, as well as do a lot of handy tasks that have endeared it to A/V professionals everywhere. QuickTime (Basic) With the version of QT that is included with Mac OS X, you’ll get such solid if unsurprising capabilities as: • Viewing all versions of QT movies both on and off the Internet • Working with different audio and video file types • Changing the resolution and display size of movies • Printing movie frames • Watching QT TV programs QuickTime Pro When you pay for the QT Pro upgrade, more features become available. One of the most popular and powerful features is the ability to record and edit original QT movies (they’re called movies whether they contain audio, video or audio-and-video). QT Pro not only gives you all the capabilities of the basic version, but some very potent features such as: • Full-screen video playback • Viewing files from a greater number and variety of formats • Recording original QuickTime movies (audio, video or both) • Editing and saving movies in multiple formats • Copying and pasting material of different formats into QuickTime • Enabling QuickTime movies to be streamed over the Internet • Doing sharpening, color tinting and other effects and filters • Creating a slide show from a sequence of still images If you work with multimedia files, just the ability to save what you open into other file formats always made the upgrade worthwhile. However, it is not at all clear that Apple is continuing the two-tier QT distribution model. Today, as Apple prepares to release Snow Leopard 10.6, its new iteration of OS X, rumors are flying that “QuickTime X” will be one no-cost version with some, but not all, of the A/V bells and whistles that many media pros rely on every day. A lot of our creative friends, the kind who do a month’s worth of work in a week or two with a CRE PowerMac G5 plus Kona card, are going to miss QT Pro, and in a big way. Not a sword, a Swiss Army knife QT—whether basic, Pro, X or some version still under wraps—was never developed to be a full-fledged movie editing application like Final Cut Studio, Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas. It is not a four-foot, gleaming, razor-sharp battle sword with which to slay mountains of digital video. Still, the final word has yet to be given on its fate. Apple is mum for now, but developers who are working with pre-release versions of Snow Leopard are leaking some details. The most leaked news concerns the apparent abandonment of QT Pro, and the migration of only part of its great tool set to the new QT X. So, will this be another one of those “downgraded upgrades” from Apple HQ, like the recent removal of Firewire ports from the laptop line that has since been remedied? (Need Firewire ports? Rent a MacBook Pro laptop from CRE). It could be much noisier than that one, as there are more people using QT than use their Firewire ports. Whatever happens, we’ll cover it for you, although you just might hear the screaming all the way from the Apple boardroom. Best Green Practices: A Checklist For Event PlannersJuly 21st, 2009Conference Planning
Transportation and Logistics
Registration, Communication & Logistics
Presentations, Meetings & Meals
Home Theater Projectors vs. Business Projectors, Part 2July 16th, 2009Part 1 covered Overview, Brightness, Contrast, Color, LCD or DLP and Portability, while Part 2 concludes with Connectivity, Resolution, HD Issues and Image Aspect Ratios. Video Projector Connectivity Although most consumer electronics eventually settle on a “standard” set of inputs and outputs, the confusion in marketing focus between “business” projectors and “home theater” projectors has slowed that process in this segment. It really is important that you understand what I/O your video projector has, otherwise you will find it difficult or impossible to connect. For business use, you will normally connect with a PC or laptop, which CRE rents for just that purpose (among a thousand others). Business users occasionally need to connect a DVD player, too, while a home theater unit needs to be ready for DVD, an iPod or similar “media player,” an HDTV set-top box or a satellite feed. Connectivity requirements between the two video projector categories we are discussing do, in fact, vary. Most, but not all, business and “prosumer” models support composite, component, S-video and VGA connectivity. A new connection type, and most appropriate for business users, is the M1 (or EVC, or P&D) standard, most commonly called M1 or M1-DA. This connector is similar to DVI, which is a digital single or dual link (or analog in the case of DVI-I). The M1 adds USB or FireWire connectivity, which allows you to send commands through the projector’s remote control to your PC. This gives you total control over your presentation—scrolling through PowerPoint presentations, pausing movie streams and so forth. Best practice? Simple. Always ensure that the projector has the appropriate inputs for your intended use. Projector Resolutions: SVGA, XGA and Two Kinds of “Widescreen” Unless qualified beforehand, the term “resolution” means “native resolution” (also called “optical,” “fixed” or “built-in”) and measures the amount of picture detail that the projector supports without having to compress (down-sample) the number of pixels in the video. Compression inevitably degrades the picture quality because it actually “throws out” content. Resolution is the most important attribute setting business models apart from home theater projectors. Frankly, it is not the amount of pixels but rather their arrangement when projected on a screen like the Fast Fold Da-Lite available from CRE. The height and width of the arranged pixels on the screen gives you both the resolution and the “aspect ratio” of your projected image. For portable projectors the highest resolution available is SXGA (1280×1024), and these units continue to be rather expensive. The most common projector resolutions available in the 4:3 aspect ratio (“old style” TV screens) are SVGA (800×600 pixels) and XGA (1024×768 pixels), although the new-ish widescreen versions (16:9 aspect ratio) of SVGA and XGA formats are becoming more widespread. Widescreen SVGA is known as WVGA, with an 854×480 pixel image, while widescreen XGA is called WXGA and has 1280×720 pixels. Reasonable conclusions
If you want the biggest picture possible in your home theater, then get the highest resolution you can afford. You are far less likely to suffer pixelation issues this way. Of course, one can always move farther from the screen to address pixelation, but in a home theater the idea is to move in close for a wider viewing angle and a more immersive theater experience. There is a great deal of exciting home theater R&D going on today at projector manufacturers. It is not widely publicized, but some of that energy is also going into the development of single units that can handle both business and home theater demands. The industry is also working diligently to bring HD capabilities to projectors—simply, straightforwardly and cost-effectively. Watch for an upcoming blog entitled, “How Projectors Handle HD Content.” After that, and considering the fact you just worked through a college-level course in the last two blogs, you can consider yourself on your way to becoming a true projector expert. Even if you aren’t, you can always contact one of CRE’s projector experts to clear up the confusion for you. At CRE, we don’t charge people to answer questions—never have, never will. Home Theater Projectors vs. Business Projectors, Part 1July 14th, 2009Part 1 includes Overview, Brightness, Contrast, Color, LCD or DLP and Portability, while Part 2 will include Connectivity, Resolution, HD Issues and Image Aspect Ratios. The popularity of video projectors such as CRE rents needs no explanation, as it is a simple matter of decreasing price and increasing image size. Compared to other big screens—like the plasma screens that CRE also supplies to numerous businesses—a square inch of image real estate is a bargain. Connect a Blu-ray DVD player for the most “movie theater-like” experience in home theater. Hooking up a different high-definition (HD) source, like a cable box or satellite dish, gets you a mammoth 100-inch HDTV for 50-inch-plasma money. Denizens of corporate boardrooms have already seen enough to know that the new digital multimedia projectors have saved business presentations from the slideshow graveyard. That these new models deliver massive, bright, color-saturated images even in normal room lighting conditions is a dream come true for veterans of the “overhead projector” days. Still, home theater and business projectors have to meet entirely different expectations and work in markedly different environments. Some of the “specs” of home and business models are close if not precisely equal, while others differ dramatically. Let’s take a look. Brightness Brightness as measured in lumens indicates the level of light produced by a projector. Since many presentations take place in conference rooms with standard office illumination, rather than the reduced ambient light of a (home) theater’s “semi-darkness,” brightness is more important for business use. The projected image will look washed out if it is not bright enough. In small rooms with normal daytime ambient light, a brightness level of 1000 to 2000 lumens is typically sufficient. For safety’s sake, factor into your projector brightness requirement the projected screen size and ambient light level. In home theaters you can pretty much forget all this, as high brightness levels are not necessary. In fact, some home theater projectors allow users to dim the light source when watching in a darkened room, as it helps to produce richer blacks and more saturated colors. Contrast A high contrast ratio of 5000:1 sounds very impressive until you watch a minimal amount of ambient light make the image appear as if it were 500:1 instead. Although a certain minimum amount of contrast is required for the human eye to perceive brightness, high contrast is not an important factor in business use—and is only needed in the home theater if you will completely darken the room during viewing. The fact is that the eye cannot perceive much more than a 400:1 contrast ratio unless the viewing environment is completely darkened. In addition, the eye’s “contrast sensitivity scale” means that, say, a 1000:1 ratio is not perceived as being 2.5 times “better” or “clearer” than 400:1. You should only pay more for a high contrast ratio in your home projector, and only then when viewing will be done under tightly controlled lighting conditions. Color and Smooth Video Playback These attributes are more important to the home viewer. Color accuracy is extremely important for natural skin tones and for achieving “the film look,” characteristics important when viewing movies and TV shows and less so when reading pie charts and graphs. A projector’s ability to display smooth video playback without “motion artifacts,” in fast-action sports and movie scenes, is certainly important to home theater viewers. Any modern projector is going to do a decent job, at any rate, so spending extra money on these features in a business projector is not necessary. LCD or DLP
DLP, of course, remains the favorite technology with home theater users due to its “blacker blacks” and “smoother” looking projected images. These characteristics help DLP projectors more nearly approximate the movie theater experience. Portability Now this is a major consideration when it comes to business projectors. “Small and light” is good, particularly for people who travel to make presentations. Many business projectors weigh but a few pounds and come with carrying cases that hold cables and a cordless presenter, too. In this “lightweight travel” category of multimedia projectors, models typically have integrated speakers, and various option features. Portability is a complete “non-issue” to the home theater enthusiast. At home, the projector might even be semi-permanently installed into the ceiling, wall or custom cabinetry. The typical home theater projector is never removed from the home—until it’s replaced with a new model, that is. Watch for Part 2 of this article, appearing on July 16, 2009, which will cover Connectivity, Resolution, HD Issues and Image Aspect Ratios. More Hot Summer Trade Shows, Conventions & ConferencesJuly 9th, 2009From August 2-6, San Diego’s Convention Center is this year’s home for the SPIE Optics+Photonics 2009 conference This event is, without question, the largest multidisciplinary technical conference in the world, with a single fee granting you access to four separate symposia, over 3000 papers, 26 expert-studded plenary sessions, over 200 exhibitors, and networking opportunities galore. Members of SPIE—which calls itself “an international society advanced light-based research” and whose slogan is, “Connecting minds/Advancing light”—include the inventors and developers of plasma TVs like the leading models that CRE stocks today. The NanoScience + Engineering symposium will cover transformative technologies like carbon nanotubes and metamaterials. The emerging field of plasmonics could lead to computer chips as powerful as the Quad-Core Xeon in the blazing Mac Pro that CRE rents, but at a fraction of the size and cost. The Solar Energy + Technology symposium will focus on solar hydrogen, thin film technology and sustainability enhancers like the latest photovoltaic cells. The Photonic Devices + Applications symposium will showcase technologies that leverage organic and photonic materials, such as Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (OLEDs) that will eventually pass even LCD monitors in clarity and color accuracy. The fourth and final symposium, Optical Engineering + Applications, will introduce conference-goers to the latest in optical design, remote sensing, x-ray technologies and space applications. Siggraph 2009, Siggraph draws an international audience, one from across all the many disciplines working in the young (but rapidly maturing) field of computer graphics and interactivity. The technology behind the touchscreen monitors that CRE stocks today was patented the year of Siggraph’s first event, and the people gathering at 2009’s conference are hard at work innovating the future, too. Exhibitors do not just hand out brochures on their new applications, computer graphics cards or artist-grade monitors like the Apple Cinema Displays available for rent from CRE. They also take the time to demonstrate software, hardware and systems at the ongoing Exhibitor Tech Talks. Highly informative Siggraph Courses, numbering nearly 30 this year, load attendees up with info, too. The offerings range from “Creating New Interfaces for Musical Expression” to “The Digital Emily Project: Photoreal Facial Modeling and Animation.”
LinuxWorld Conference & Expo has metamorphosed into OpenSource World and for 2009 is co-locating with two other conferences, Next Generation Data Center and CloudWorld, to offer a comprehensive, soup-to-nuts view of “enterprise technology within the data center.” The three-in-one event is being held in San Francisco on August 12-13 at Moscone Center West. OpenSource World will showcase innovative solutions to real-world challenges. Industry experts and innovators will present new Linux and open source insights and advances, providing IT end-users real, usable ideas that can save their enterprises real time, energy and money. Topics will range broadly from Enterprise Application Infrastructure, Deployment/Management and Mobile to Security, Desktops, Netbooks and Systems Troubleshooting. Next Generation Data Center (NGDC) is the one strategic IT event you don’t want to miss if you need to stay up to speed on established storage technologies, like RAID arrays, and the new ones that will power 21st century data centers. The third portion of the three-in-one conference, CloudWorld, focuses on the infrastructure, Web-centric software and services that proponents now deem ready to begin the move to cloud computing in the data center. Tech Tidbits: Quick Tips & Slick TricksJuly 7th, 2009Now this was a fun blog to write. Actually, “assemble” might be the better word, as it has little bits and pieces from all over the tech landscape. Be forewarned, however—you’ll only find it fun and interesting if you’re into PCs, Macs, the Internet, low-cost flash memory, high tech storage solutions, and the new solar-powered cell phones. Okay, so the last one’s a ringer (pun intended), but the fact is that we will have photovoltaic cells 100 times as efficient as today’s models by 2016 or so, the prognosticators say. Until then, you can make do with the latest generation of lithium-ion (Li-Ion) cells that are rechargeable hundreds of times, with each charge lasting four to six times as long as a comparable alkaline battery. Isn’t progress great? High-tech traveling using Flash Memory If you are traveling on business, and your destination is amply equipped with Internet-connected computers, you can leave your laptop behind. Just open a free online storage account from one of the many vendors and upload your working files for later use. MediaMax, File Qube, Mozy and ADrive all offer from 1 to 50GB, absolutely free. When you can’t use that web-archive option, perhaps for security reasons, then the next best thing is to take your files on flash memory. Sure, there are small form-factor hard drives, even ones that run right off USB power, but with SecureDigital (SD) and SD High-Capacity (SDHC) cards hitting 32GB in capacity—and the size of a postage stamp, or smaller—there is no more efficient storage. There’s always more to store Speaking of flash memory, for Pete’s sake don’t buy “thumb drives” with permanently embedded chips. They come in all shapes, colors and (mostly small) sizes, but the common factor is that they are not upgradeable. When you bought your cake-slice USB thumb drive, it had an insanely huge 256MB of storage. Definitely not up to today’s storage options. Need a cost-effective solution? Try the SD card and get 128 times as much storage and pop it into an SD card reader or carrier. This alone will upgrade your solution. Strategic Rentals – Laptop & Projector If you are traveling to make an important presentation, you need to be prepared for anything. First, will a projector or large-format display be available? Do you have everything to make the appropriate connections from a laptop? If unsure, play it safe, and rent a projector and laptop rental from CRE. Using your own laptop for an all-important presentation? Don’t leave anything to chance – why not rent a laptop to have as back-up, in case any technical issues arise during the presentation. Whether you need two identically prepped laptops or a single AJA I/O HD rental for that looming post-production deadline, contact one of CRE’s knowledgeable professionals today and get what you need, when you need it and exactly where you want it. CRE sweats the details so you don’t have to. The Greening of LCD DisplaysJuly 2nd, 2009At the annual Display Week 2009, a significant number of exhibitors, speakers and participants discussed myriad efforts to encourage greener manufacturing of more energy-efficient display technologies. “Sustainability,” “energy-efficient” and “Earth-friendly” are not new terms, but they are getting a great deal more attention now. As far as leading market research company DisplaySearch is concerned, this new interest is already driving the advancement of new technologies that will decrease environmental impact, increase sustainability and help firms go from “lean and mean” to “lean and green.” In 2008, some 20% of flat-panel display (FPD) units had “green” features, and this is expected to rise to as high as 70% by the end of 2012. It is also suggested that “green technology” will be standard issue for most LCD displays and monitors in 2014. CRE rents lower-power LCDs today, and when the new technologies start appearing in new models, we’ll have those available to rent, too. From buzzwords to real specs Among the R&D efforts currently underway are various approaches to developing new and better materials, light sources and system designs, as well as optimizing manufacturing. The broad aim is to reduce production waste, eliminate toxic processes and materials, lower energy consumption, conserve natural resources—and get the message out. Here’s a quick wrap-up of “The Greening of LCD Displays”: 3M’s Vikuiti “reflective polarizers” have been shown to increase LCD panels’ energy efficiency an average of 30% by recycling light through the backlight. The industry’s first glass substrates for LCD panels without added heavy metals or halides, Corning’s Eagle XG units provide additional opportunities for an LCD display to be green its entire life—before, during and after use. Removing potentially harmful heavy metals makes a device recyclable at the end of its useful life. LG Display showcased an eco-friendly line of products designed with fewer components to consume less power, from trendsetting plasma displays (CRE has plasmas for rent, too) Microsemi has pioneered several energy-saving technologies for its line of backlighting, color management and sensor products. The products enable all kinds of LED backlight systems to offer top performance in eco-friendly, economical ways. Applications include LCD TVs, netbook and notebook computers, vehicle dashboard instruments and many other display applications. The backlit touchscreens, such as on the Motion Computing tablet PC that CRE rents, are reckoned to be a huge emerging market for Microsemi’s cost-cutting approach. Qualcomm MEMS Technologies’ “mirasol” display technology is a nature-inspired, eco-positive design based on its IMOD (Interferometric MODulation) technology. It consumes dramatically less power than competing technologies, meaning devices will run longer on fewer, smaller, lighter, cheaper batteries—just as the laptop rentals from CRE run two to three times longer between charges than the average laptop of 2004. The energy-efficiency of the mirasol display derives from its use of reflective light, rather than backlighting, mimicking the way the human eye actually prefers to see. In a classic, well, display of “tech evangelism” numerous pundits are predicting that very soon, mobile devices will
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, featuring new research findings in solar power, nanoengineering, optical engineering and photonics—plus a celebration of “400 Years of Telescopes.”
officially entitled “
to its leading line of LCD panels. The company demonstrated a 32-inch LCD TV with the world’s lowest power consumption. By adding a white pixel to the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) array, and recalibrating the Optimal Power Control (OPC) system, the model cut its power requirement by 56 percent. In addition to this “White Plus” technology in several products, the company also showed “the greenest 47-inch LCD TV” ever—no arsenic or halogen in mechanical parts, no PCBs anywhere.
