Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "TechAltar" channel.

@tuunaes TN displays were high-tech around year 1998 when passive LCD displays were still the most common LCD technology and ability to refresh the whole screen rapidly (that is nearly instant to human eye instead of slow fade), TN technology was invented and brought to consumer market. At that time, then-high-end LCD panel were marketed as "active-matrix TFT". So if you wonder why TN displays look so bad, it's because that technology is already 25 years old and it was the first version deemed acceptable at all in monitors in year 1998.
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@tuunaes I agree that age alone doesn't matter. The CRT monitors of late 1990s were the peak of the whole CRT technology whereas TN was the minimum bar of usable display technology for LCD technology. OLED monitors are first true replacement for CRT technology and OLED monitors still suffersfrom burn-in a lot more than CRT monitors ever did. The only way to make OLEDs usable from computer use is to shift around the image and to modify the image to now show what was actually computed but somewhat nearby approximation using colors that do not damage the OLED display. Modern OLED monitors can maybe last long enough without modifying the image signals if you limit max brightness to 100–150 cd. I don't consider that acceptable so I'm using IPS monitors for now. It's the same thing with cars. The cars that used state of art implementation of any long lived technology are always the ones that last longest for practical use.
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@jatoxo Three decades is a short time when the thing we're speaking was successfully done in a lab, not as a consumer product. For example, first working Li-ion battery cells were created in laboratory in 1965 and first consumer cells were brought to consumer market by Sony in 1991. And that's only about having an electrolyte with anode and cathode materials, nothing as hard as manufacturing millions of identical devices on a flat plane on a scale where a human can see each result (that is, you cannot just put all in very small area like transistors in a CPU) and even a single failing pixel near middle of the screen is considered a defect bad enough to return the whole device as failed. For a single blue led, we went from a single led in a lab (in 1972) to single led in a consumer device (Bluray player) in 2005. Here the problem was that blue leds were very inefficient for a long time. Even in year 1989 high-end blue leds had efficiency around 0.03% (that is, 99.97% of the input power was converted into heat) which was obviously good for research use only, not for any kind of real product.
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@Kabivelrat The material that emits the actual photons is made out of organic compounds (the letter "O" in OLED) and that's the wear item. Because each pixel has individual light source, each pixel will wear at different rate depending on what the display has been used over its whole lifetime. Running the display very bright causes individual pixels to be run with higher current which causes more wear to each pixel. Basically the best OLED manufacturers can do is to estimate wear for every pixel and automatically compensate for the wear. In practice, this is implemented by logically having pixels that could emit 500 cd when run at full blast and the display normally limits the max brightness around 300. After the pixel has displayed enough light over its lifetime, its estimated brightness is used to compensate for the actual output and to emit 300 cd for an old pixel, it may require current that would have resulted in 450 cd as new. However, this technique requires running the pixels with forever increasing current levels when the display ages and the more current you pump to individual pixels, the faster those pixels wear. As a result, you can prolong the life of the display only so much with this trick. In addition, if the compensation algorithm has poor match with the reality, the display will show some burn-in artefacts even with compensation being active. In the future, we'll hopefully have microled based displays where each pixel is run with direct semiconductor LED elements which do not have similar wear during use. Of course, LED elements fail over time, too, but the failure typically happens much later and not because of wear but simply as a result of poor luck. However, microled displays are really really expensive to manufacture today because nobody has figured out how to make huge semiconductor elements for cheap.
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Speech recognition and text to speech features probably work without internet connection, everything else requires internet. That said, I've been saying for 20 years already that a computer without a working internet connection should be considered a broken computer.
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12:50 Enchance!
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@Kabivelrat The problem with photolithography is that a single silicon wafer (circle with diameter close to 300 mm) costs between $10K and $30K. A single PC monitor display made using photolithography to create the micro-LED surfaces would definetely work but even a smallish monitor would need 4 wafers to build. So a single micro-LED monitor made this way would cost between $40K and $120K which is a bit more than an average consumer is willing to pay for a PC monitor. That's why I wrote that if somebody can figure out how to manufacture micro-LED displays for cheap enough, then it will be the winning technology. If you're willing to replace OLED monitor every 1000 hours, you can keep using OLED monitors without any burn-in prevention methods that affect the image quality so that's the maximum cost for any new display technology. Any tech that would be more expensive than replacing OLED monitors every 1000 hours would be too expensive to manufacture. (This is because if you accept that OLED monitor has lifetime of 1000 hours only, you can run it bright enough regardless of damage to organic componds so that you have only the good sides of OLED technology.) The reason for looking for more vibrant color primaries is ability to produce more vibrant colors. Modern displays cannot produce e.g. really vibrant green or yellow because the maximum green or maximim red are not vibrant enough to cover the whole abilities of human eye. Current monitor tech can only show bright (that is, lots of photons) red and green. If you want to improve this, you need either more vibrant primaries or more than 3 primaries. And it turns out that using more vibrant primaries e.g. with quantum dots is easier way forward considering the existing technologies and software. The problem with using more vibrant primaries is that the current 8–10 bits per subpixel color spaces are too small and cause visible banding if the color space tries to cover the more vibrant primaries. However, it's much much easier to change software from 8 bits per subcolor to 16 bits per subpixel than to convert to 4–6 primary colors so my guess is that we'll see 16 bits per subpixel (48 bit in total) color spaces in the future. In practice, the color data will probably use 64 bits per pixel with 16 bit padding to make each pixel start with 64 bit boundary which is easier for the memory address computations.
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If I've understood correctly, microlens array will make the display very sensitive to viewing angles so it's a double edged sword.
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@coreC.. I'm old enough to have learned to program before I could access internet. However, once I could program and access the internet, it seemed obvious to me that a computer was lacking such an important part if it didn't have a working internet connection. Maybe I should have written that a modern computer should be considered incomplete or partial if it's missing an internet connection. And there's a world of difference between no connection at all vs a slow connection. The practical difference between 64 Kbps connection and 10 Gbps connection is much less than the difference between no connection (0 Kbps) and 64 Kbps. Slow connection will slow down things but no connection will prevent any progress in your communication.
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@sameerghayya3203 Modern lithography (e.g. 3 nm) requires using floating plasma droplets as a lens and interference of light to create the correct pattern because wavelength of directly shining the light towards the mask would be about 100x too coarse. One could probably create a working microled displays by making display from multiple square or hexagon shaped parts made with ~100nm lithography on pure silicon. However, that would still be way too expensive because all practical sized displays would need at least 4 wafer slices and even 100nm wafer slices are maybe $10K a piece.
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Repent-and-believe-in-Jesus "And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything." – Douglas Adams
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@mdfahimahsan7475 I think it's too soon to declare that we cannot create better silicon chips. We're getting close to the limit that you cannot improve density in 2D features anymore because we're running out of atoms per wire, but chips already have multiple layers and I would guess we'll see a lot more layers in the future. The problem with increasing the layer count is that yield per exposure must be insanely high or multilayer structures will fail as a whole. In addition, cooling a big multilayer design will be quite a hard problem but I think we're going to use smaller and smaller currents for the chips. The way Intel has been milking a bit more processing power from their recent desktop chips by doubling or trippling the current is not the long term solution. Recent Intel chips are already entering the world of dimishing returns and they could improve processing speed maybe 10–20% by doubling or trippling the power consumption.
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@lemonking3644 Which TV you're talking about? Please, tell us the manufacturer and model for a TV which you think is a micro LED and actually available for buying.
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@kms3530 Microchip foundries can use lithography to build the chips. It requires expensive machinery and running those machines at high speed is hard but the problems are pretty much solved already. We still don't have any method to build microled arrays which would result in e.g. TV sized panels with 4K resolution costing less than $30K. It's still unclear how hard this problem is so it must be a harder problem than lithography which has already been solved. We already know that a microled display would be superior to all the existing display technologies so we would want to build those displays we still don't know how.
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@paulbunyangonewild7596 The problem is that you cannot use the same lithography process for creating microled arrays as we use for the CPUs. This is caused by the fact that a single wafer costs around $20K and even if you used all of a single wafer to create a single panel, maximum panel size you could create would be 11.8 inches. Not many would be happy to pay $20K for 11.8 inch display, no matter how good that display is. As a result, using lithography to directly manufacture the microled display panels is out of question because of the costs.
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@tuunaes SED still required phosphor coating which will suffer from burn-in if you try to show bright static images for prolonged time. I think microled displays are the future but it remains to be seen if microled displays can be manufactured with reasonable cost. The SED patent (USRE40062E1) has already expired so anybody would be free to build SED monitors if they believe it's better than OLED.
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If Fairphone had conformal coating for all the PCBs, not having water resistant case wouldn't be that bad a thing.
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Even if you don't care about your privacy a bit, ChatGPT level AI should be considered the minimum bar for a virtual assistant using voice interface. It's no wonder that much less intelligent AI in previous attempts failed hard. And even ChatGPT hallucinates way to often to be trusted to handle money, purchases or making any decisions.
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The biggest problem with Fairphone is that it will lose software support equally fast to Samsung S series phones (currently 5 years from the release, if Fairphone actually increases the software support period for real, it's a great news). It doesn't matter if you can easily repair the hardware if you cannot get even security updates anymore. In addition, thanks to hardware DRM requirements in some new software, you cannot replace the OEM firmware with LineageOS without breaking some software. (There's no technical reason for DRM to fail, only political reasons to not accept open source digital signatures.) If the manufacturer has previously supported their devices but do not explicitly & publicly promise longer support than given amount (e.g. 5 years), you shouldn't assume you'll get any extra support. That said, many people believe in Apple delivering software updates for iPhones even though Apple has never promised any support for any iOS device, so those should be considered best effort support without promises of any kind.
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As I see it, Samsung Super-AMOLED is the closest of real consumer level microled displays we currently have. Those displays are still too small, though. I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung can improve their technique to create real microled displays in the future. If cost wasn't an issue, you could already create true microleds making the whole display from hexagons made out of wafers what have the pixels. That would require using multiple wafers per display and considering a typical silicon wafer costs around $30K to manufacture, it's not a reasonable way to manufacture consumer level displays.
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I think Microsoft is correct about importance of AI but they are making a major mistake if they try to force people to use Windows to use their AI. It makes way more sense to sell license to use the AI from any operating system plus that doesn't get EU to fight against their plan.
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