 A Boogie Board Versa Board | |
| Design firm | Kent Displays Incorporated |
|---|---|
| Type | eWriter tablet |
Boogie Board is a product line of paperless note taking tools, utilizing an LCD in conjunction with a stylus, finger, or other implement to replicate the functionality of pen and paper.
Boogie Board was developed by Kent Displays Incorporated, based on research conducted at Kent State University. [1]
Boogie board is based on reflex display technology, [2] i.e. LCDs that use cholesteric liquid crystal technology to reflect light in one state, and to be dark (non-reflecting) in the other state. [3] The dark state occurs when a flash of voltage re-orients the molecules to a non-reflective state.
Responsiveness has been compared to that of writing on paper. [4] Drawings can be hard to see without illumination. [5]
Battery lifespan is estimated at 50,000 erasures. [4]
Some higher end models add a digitization panel, allowing the user's input to be saved as a PDF. [6] The board itself does not allow direct review of stored pages.
On models lacking internal digitization, capture is achieved through a smartphone camera using a Mobile app, though quality through this method is low. [4]
Boogie Boards are marketed as having uses like writing, drawing, and taking notes. Some models are designed to replicate the form factor of specific notetaking devices, such as the sticky note. [7]
One model was released exclusively in Brookstone stores. [8]
Electronic paper or intelligent paper, is a display device that reflects ambient light, mimicking the appearance of ordinary ink on paper – unlike conventional flat-panel displays which need additional energy to emit their own light. This may make them more comfortable to read, and provide a wider viewing angle than most light-emitting displays. The contrast ratio in electronic displays available as of 2008 approaches newspaper, and newly developed displays are slightly better. An ideal e-paper display can be read in direct sunlight without the image appearing to fade.
A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat-panel display or other electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers to display information. Liquid crystals do not emit light directly but instead use a backlight or reflector to produce images in color or monochrome.
A thin-film transistor (TFT) is a special type of field-effect transistor (FET) where the transistor is made by thin film deposition. TFTs are grown on a supporting substrate, such as glass. This differs from the conventional bulk metal oxide field effect transistor (MOSFET), where the semiconductor material typically is the substrate, such as a silicon wafer. The traditional application of TFTs is in TFT liquid-crystal displays.
A flat-panel display (FPD) is an electronic display used to display visual content such as text or images. It is present in consumer, medical, transportation, and industrial equipment.
An LCD projector is a type of video projector for displaying video, images or computer data on a screen or other flat surface. It is a modern equivalent of the slide projector or overhead projector. To display images, LCD projectors typically send light from a metal-halide lamp through a prism or series of dichroic filters that separates light to three polysilicon panels – one each for the red, green and blue components of the video signal. As polarized light passes through the panels, individual pixels can be opened to allow light to pass or closed to block the light. The combination of open and closed pixels can produce a wide range of colors and shades in the projected image.
A television set or television receiver is an electronic device for viewing and hearing television broadcasts, or as a computer monitor. It combines a tuner, display, and loudspeakers. Introduced in the late 1920s in mechanical form, television sets became a popular consumer product after World War II in electronic form, using cathode-ray tube (CRT) technology. The addition of color to broadcast television after 1953 further increased the popularity of television sets in the 1960s, and an outdoor antenna became a common feature of suburban homes. The ubiquitous television set became the display device for the first recorded media for consumer use in the 1970s, such as Betamax, VHS; these were later succeeded by DVD. It has been used as a display device since the first generation of home computers and dedicated video game consoles in the 1980s. By the early 2010s, flat-panel television incorporating liquid-crystal display (LCD) technology, especially LED-backlit LCD technology, largely replaced CRT and other display technologies. Modern flat-panel TVs are typically capable of high-definition display and can also play content from a USB device. In the late 2010s, most flat-panel TVs began offering 4K and 8K resolutions.
A thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display is a type of liquid-crystal display that uses thin-film-transistor technology to improve image qualities such as addressability and contrast. A TFT LCD is an active matrix LCD, in contrast to passive matrix LCDs or simple, direct-driven LCDs with a few segments.
A cholesteric liquid-crystal display (ChLCD) is a display containing a liquid crystal with a helical structure and which is therefore chiral. Cholesteric liquid crystals are also known as chiral nematic liquid crystals. They organize in layers with no positional ordering within layers, but a director axis which varies with layers. The variation of the director axis tends to be periodic in nature. The period of this variation is known as the pitch, p. This pitch determines the wavelength of light which is reflected.
The twisted nematic effect (TN-effect) was a major technological breakthrough that made the manufacture of large, thin liquid crystal displays practical and cost competitive. Unlike earlier flat-panel displays, TN-cells did not require a current to flow for operation and used low operating voltages suitable for use with batteries. The introduction of TN-effect displays led to their rapid expansion in the display field, quickly pushing out other common technologies like monolithic LEDs and CRTs for most electronics. By the 1990s, TN-effect LCDs were largely universal in portable electronics, although since then, many applications of LCDs adopted alternatives to the TN-effect such as in-plane switching (IPS) or vertical alignment (VA).
A transflective liquid-crystal display is a liquid-crystal display (LCD) with an optical layer that reflects and transmits light. Under bright illumination the display acts mainly as a reflective display with the contrast being constant with illuminance. However, under dim and dark ambient situations the light from a backlight is transmitted through the transflective layer to provide light for the display. The transflective layer is called a transflector. It is typically made from a sheet polymer. It is similar to a one-way mirror but is not specular.
George William Gray was a Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Hull who was instrumental in developing the long-lasting materials which made liquid crystal displays possible. He created and systematically developed liquid crystal materials science, and established a method of practical molecular design. Gray was recipient of the 1995 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology.
Large-screen television technology developed rapidly in the late 1990s and 2000s. Prior to the development of thin-screen technologies, rear-projection television was standard for larger displays, and jumbotron, a non-projection video display technology, was used at stadiums and concerts. Various thin-screen technologies are being developed, but only liquid crystal display (LCD), plasma display (PDP) and Digital Light Processing (DLP) have been publicly released. Recent technologies like organic light-emitting diode (OLED) as well as not-yet-released technologies like surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) or field-emission display (FED) are in development to supersede earlier flat-screen technologies in picture quality.
A defective pixel or a dead pixel is a pixel on a liquid crystal display (LCD) that is not functioning properly. The ISO standard ISO 13406-2 distinguishes between three different types of defective pixels, while hardware companies tend to have further distinguishing types.
Interferometric modulator display is a technology used in electronic visual displays that can create various colors via interference of reflected light. The color is selected with an electrically switched light modulator comprising a microscopic cavity that is switched on and off using driver integrated circuits similar to those used to address liquid crystal displays (LCD). An IMOD-based reflective flat panel display includes hundreds of thousands of individual IMOD elements each a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based device.
A blue phase mode LCD is a liquid crystal display (LCD) technology that uses highly twisted cholesteric phases in a blue phase. It was first proposed in 2007 to obtain a better display of moving images with, for example, frame rates of 100–120 Hz to improve the temporal response of LCDs. This operational mode for LCDs also does not require anisotropic alignment layers and thus theoretically simplifies the LCD manufacturing process.
Digital newspaper technology is the technology used to create or distribute a digital newspaper.
Electrically operated display devices have developed from electromechanical systems for display of text, up to all-electronic devices capable of full-motion 3D color graphic displays. Electromagnetic devices, using a solenoid coil to control a visible flag or flap, were the earliest type, and were used for text displays such as stock market prices and arrival/departure display times. The cathode ray tube was the workhorse of text and video display technology for several decades until being displaced by plasma, liquid crystal (LCD), and solid-state devices such as thin-film transistors (TFTs), LEDs and OLEDs. With the advent of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs), integrated circuit (IC) chips, microprocessors, and microelectronic devices, many more individual picture elements ("pixels") could be incorporated into one display device, allowing graphic displays and video.
3LCD is the name and brand of a major LCD projection color image generation technology used in modern digital projectors. 3LCD technology was developed and refined by Japanese imaging company Epson in the 1980s and was first licensed for use in projectors in 1988. In January 1989, Epson launched its first 3LCD projector, the VPJ-700.
IPS is a screen technology for liquid-crystal displays (LCDs). In IPS, a layer of liquid crystals is sandwiched between two glass surfaces. The liquid crystal molecules are aligned parallel to those surfaces in predetermined directions (in-plane). The molecules are reoriented by an applied electric field, while remaining essentially parallel to the surfaces to produce an image. It was designed to solve the strong viewing angle dependence and low-quality color reproduction of the twisted nematic field effect (TN) matrix LCDs prevalent in the late 1980s.
An active pen is an input device that includes electronic components and allows users to write directly onto the display of a computing device such as a smartphone, tablet computer or ultrabook. The active pen marketplace has long been dominated by N-trig and Wacom, but newer firms Atmel and Synaptics also offer active pen designs.
