Silicon Valley based company Clairvoyante developed a new display technology that uses 50% less power.
The display is based on a new pixel architecture dubbed PenTile. It consists of a pattern of red, green, blue, and white pixels (RGBW). The power savings come from dynamically adjusting the brightness of the display.
The added white pixel gives brighter whites, darker blacks, and sharper fonts.RGB displays render images by assigning a color and luminance (brightness) to an entire RGB-triplet as a whole pixel, adjusting its three RGB subpixels to set a single addressable point.
Images on a PenTile RGBW panel are subpixel rendered, meaning they are drawn at the subpixel level (the individual points of light), rather than to the whole pixels of an RGB stripe display. In fact "pixels" in the traditional sense have been eliminated in PenTile RGBW displays; individual subpixels are not restricted to use in one pixel group, but instead participate in multiple "logical" pixels in their surrounding vicinity.
Subpixel rendering dramatically increases addressability and enables the sophisticated image processing used in PenTile RGBW™ displays.
The PenTile display technology is especially interesting for mobile devices.
More details on the MIT Technology Review and on the Clairvoyante site.
