Laptop Thoughts: Nanosys Screen Technology: A Quantum Leap Forward in Colour Accuracy?

"When Nanosys CEO Jason Hartlove pulled two iPads out of his bag and turned them on one looked like when I first saw my first Kodachrome slide while the other looked muddy and crappy in comparison (I pulled out my own iPad and saw my screen looked muddy and crappy in comparison too). The new one was clear, beautiful, stunning, with richer colors than I had ever seen on a screen before."

I highly value great display technology and based on what I'm reading about Nanosys, this could be a major leap forward. The challenge here is that since none of us are going to watch this video on a Nanosys display, we can't actually tell how much better it is. While I don't think "our lives will change forever" as the hyperbolic Robert Scoble puts it, it looks like Nanosys is positioned to make a big splash in the display industry. The Nanosys system allows for just over 60% of the colour gamut that the human eye can see. In comparison, a typical tablet is 20%, a typical HDTV is about 35%, and the NTSC broadcast standard is about 50%.

A lot of technology like this goes nowhere, but the Nanosys CEO says their technology will be in a tablet by the end of the year, and in TVs in 2012. Since this is a film, it should technically work in essentially anything with an LCD screen: phones, tablets, laptops, TVs, etc. I'm looking forward to this, especially since the CEO says their product is essentially cost-neutral so industry pick-up should be swift.