
Surface-conduction electron-emitter display - Lammy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_electron-emitter_display
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DiabloD3
SED would have been fucking awesome.

Yet again, a broken patent system fucks things up for America (and also one of
my favorite examples of it that I've been using for years).

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egdod
... except that the patentee lost.

>On 25 July 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed the
lower court's decision and provided that Canon's "irrevocable and perpetual"
non-exclusive licence was still enforceable and covers Canon's restructured
subsidiary SED.[23] On 2 December 2008, Applied Nanotech dropped the lawsuit,
stating that continuing the lawsuit "would probably be a futile effort".[17]

>In spite of their legal success, Canon announced at the same time that the
financial crisis of 2008 was making introduction of the sets far from certain,
going so far as to say they would not be launching the product at that time
"because people would laugh at them".[

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aidenn0
It's arguable that the litigation delayed SEDs to the point where they were no
longer mass marketable, but I could go either way on it.

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hcarvalhoalves
Kinda of VFD technology, but nanoscale?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluorescent_display](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluorescent_display)

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jasondclinton
Interesting. The purported specs of the technology are competitive with OLED
contrast ratios (deep blacks) and response times. Would this tech have been
less prone to burn-in than OLED's are?

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dbtx
I expect it would be on par with CRT tech in both respects, just for also
having electron-excited phosphors. It seems OLED + everything ultimately
competes with CRT for contrast/color/speed-- rather like programming
languages' best-case compute performance usually being "nn% as fast as C." The
least optimal thing about the image (for me) was it not being perfectly
rectangular and stable, while everything else nails that right down, including
this.

It _is_ pretty neat... the market turning away is roughly as disappointing as
a phosphor-based flat display is appealing. I feel like its reduced complexity
and power usage could make it ideal for HMDs-- if/f it shrinks well. And
probably nobody cares. :shrug:

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throwaway77384
Presumably microLED will be the holy grail. When I first heard of OLED it was
another 20 years or so before it started to really show up. So, I'd expect
microLED to be making waves in 2030-2040 lol

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dbtx
I hadn't heard of that, but having daydreamed about "just a huge array of LEDs
on a single die", I hope it turns out.

