Sunday, June 24, 2018

Max resolution?

Interesting article, primarily about changing properties of materials.

It does answer a different question for PicoP Technology.

I have often wondered what the maximum resolution of an image drawn with PicoP would be, and thought we might be close to maximum. 

Recently Microvision has announced a new High Resolution Mems Scanner. 

When does physics kick in and make it impossible to be better?

I have thought that the most significant upper limit would have something to do with how fast a laser can be turned off and on.

This may help get a ball-park on that upper limit.

Each pixel from PicoP is drawn individually. The mirror moves in a raster pattern and as it does, the lasers turn off or on as necessary to generate the correct color -- one pixel at a time.

So to do the math they have to be able to turn a laser off and on for each pixel of the image.

Recently they shipped samples of the next generation scanner.


MicroVision Ships Samples of Next Generation of High-Resolution MEMS Scanner

“The new MEMS scanner utilizes two mirrors, an ultra-flat piezo-electric 2mm diameter mirror, combined with a magnetic 6x5mm mirror, to achieve industry leading resolution of 2560 x 1440 for laser beam scanned displays. Providing users with a flicker-free experience, the new scanner operates at 120Hz.."


So, doing the math... 

To see how many time a laser may change in a second, we need to know how many pixels, and how many frames per second: 2560x1440 = 3,686,400 pixels. At 120 Hz the projector will be potentially changing the laser more than half a billion times per second. (589,824,000)

So, what would be the upper end resolution?

Rochester.edu

 but you will be able to generate currents faster than ever before,” Franco says. “You will be able to develop electronic circuits a few billionths of a meter long [nanoscale] that operate in a millionth of a billionth of a second [femtosecond] time scale. 

1,000,000 * 1,000,000,000 = 1,000,000,000,000,000 (That's millionth of a billionth time scale.)

8K at 120Hz = 3,981,312,000 pixels per second.

At a millionth of a billionth of a second that could be accomplished 251,000 times over.

I realize there are a LOT more factors at play, such as the precision of the scan, the time it takes to apply current to a laser before one gets light from it, and how long after current stops until the light stops as well, but given this, I suspect that display clarity will improve for a long time to come. (And each improvement will be a new product cycle)


Of course, by the time this limitation is reached, the ability to use multiple projectors at the same time to tile the image should be much improved, resulting in probably no limits.



Published on C|Net


SELECT LARGE-SCREEN RESOLUTIONS

Resolution nameHorizontal x Vertical pixelsOther namesDevices
8K7,680x4,320noneConcept TVs
"Cinema" 4K4,096x[unspecified]4KProjectors
UHD3,840x2,1604K, Ultra HD, Ultra-High DefinitionTVs
2K2,048x[unspecified]noneProjectors
WUXGA1,920x1,200Widescreen Ultra Extended Graphics ArrayMonitors, projectors
1080p1,920x1,080Full HD, FHD, HD, High DefinitionTVs, monitors
720p1,280x720HD, High DefinitionTVs
If I got any of this wrong, (engineers?) please set me straight.

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