A E3 this year, a company you’ve probably never heard of, Chunghwa Picture Tubes or otherwise known as CPT, has managed to produce the largest truly transparent displays has seen to date.
As reported on USENET newsgroups, it’s only 15.6-inches but, unlike many other larger models, it’s really see-through and not just semi-transparent.
Shown at this year’s Display Taiwan, at 1600 x 900 pixels the resolution of CPT’s 15.6-inch transparent screen is also higher than what we’ve seen so far on this size of panel, and CPT claims that it offers better contrast than the competition, boasting a contrast ratio of 555:1.
The brightness isn’t so great though, being a meagre 200 nits, but surprisingly CPT claims that the panel has an NTSC colour gamut of 114 percent, which is better than most standard desktop displays.
CPT’s demo came in the form of an animated advertisement, with some figurines behind the panel that were used in an interactive way with the animations and text displayed on the screen.
It was a rather impressive little demo of fast-moving animation, with the true transparency shown by opening up windows to display the figures at the back.
The only apparent downside of this display appears to be a very fine mesh that is visible, but we’re not sure if this is actually part of the panel or not.
Impressive stuff, sure, but it does beg the question of what this technology can really be used for in the real world. Do we really want see through notebook and how well can you read USENET newsgroup posts with this type of rendering?