Startup Pixel Qi Will Soon Release Low-cost, Color E-paper / LCD Combination

Pixel Qi is a fabless ASIC company that specializes in screens. The screen is just a big ASIC chip – we work closely with the large LCD factories. The trick – we use their standard processes and materials and can produce new screens with radical new performance in about a year. Rather than just a demo – we can get all the way to high volume mass production in a year.

Pixel Qi screens will use 1/2 to 1/4 the power of a regular LCD screen, and when integrated carefully with the device can increase battery life between charges by 5-fold.

Startup Pixel Qi looks to have its first e-paper/LCD screens out in a couple of months. They will be 10″ diagonal screens for netbooks and ebook readers that will sample in mid-2009 and ship in high volume in late 2009. These screens rival the best epaper displays on the market today but in addition have video refresh and fully saturated color. The epaper mode has 3 times the resolution of the fully saturated color mode allowing for a high resolution reading experience without sacrifice to super color fidelity for graphics. In addition these screens can be used in sunlight. Look for them in the market in the second half of 2009.

Low Cost, sub-10 Watt HDTV

They have begun design of a sub-10 watt HDTV that can be used in hundreds of millions of households that don’t have steady, if any, access to electrical power. The typical HDTV uses more than 100 Watts and often draws several hunded watts. We are working on a way to massively lower the power consumption, and significantly lower the price with a target price of $100. Thus this HDTV can run off of battery that can be charged up when the power is on, or charged with a small solar panel

Wired has coverage of Pixel Qi.

Response time for E Ink displays are about 200 milliseconds. Pixel Qi’s displays are expected to show average response time between 5 ms and 30 ms. As the e-book readers market matures, companies are likely to seek a second display supply source and Pixel Qi could emerge as a viable alternative to E Ink.

Pixel Qi is creating a hybrid display that combines the best of E Ink and regular LCDs,” says Robert Barry, director of business development for Team Research, a company that makes an e-book reader called the Astak Mentor. Team Research has partnered with Pixel Qi to include the latter’s display into a new e-book reader codenamed ‘Spectrum.’