More on the Pixel Qi Display - CES 2010

We’ve seen a few Pixel Qi videos over at CES 2010 but Charbax from Techvideoblog has one with founder Mary Lou and squeezes out some new information that I haven’t heard previously.

Over the coming months, the goal is to get power consumption down to about 0.1W. We’ve heard previously it’s using around 2.5W in normal color mode, and 0.5W in black & white mode currently. Optimizations that they will be working on include trying to put the processor to sleep (Intel processors) and reducing screen refreshes.

According to very early news on Pixel Qi displays, I was under the impression that these displays would be much cheaper than the average LCD display, turns out that is not the case, it’s actually the opposite. Pixel Qi displays will cost a small premium over standard displays. Probably has to do with the small number of displays out there currently and as larger numbers of these displays are produced they should get cheaper.

Mary Lou wouldn’t go into battery life figures for a netbook. Not even rough figures. Probably because the improvements aren’t so radical. Chippy from UMPC Portal goes over this and says on average you’re probably looking at about 10% improvement in battery life, on a netbook.

D.I.Y kits hopefully out before end of Q1 2010. We are supposed to be hearing something about D.I.Y kits this week so we’ll have to wait and see.

Question time with Mary Lou:

Charbax’s thoughts on the Pixel Qi display: