I am 36 years old and got to play with that color digital organizer as a hand me down from my dad. To this day I had always wondered about that odd lcd display the technology was so alien and unlike anything I'd ever seen since. You have singularly dispelled one of the great tech ghosts of my life. I am free now.
This video series really changed the way I look at LCDs. I started paying more attention to them in my daily life. Probably what fascinated me the most were the animations on the digital diary. It was someone’s job in the past to program that little man in there. They could have simply made a gadget with basic functionality, but instead they created a little business world where a little business man works.
Ah yes, the day when paychecks didn't provide more value than function and charm/fun It's either not having corporate bs back then or it's just the guy doing what they could with what they had
That Casio digital diary is so charming, I'm feeling nostalgic for something I've never owned or even seen in person! Great video, I've always been a bit of a tech nerd but this really gave me a new appreciation for these types of displays.
'mouse cursor history' popped up for me today and i fell into a bit of a rabbit hole afterward, learning about how cool these displays are. this is prime teaching material; interesting and presented well enough that the monotony doesn't just make it boring. honestly feels like a documentary piece at times. i also picked up your cursor pack and already love it. good content.
As martincitopants said: "Every video you make has a chance to pop off, and every time you don't pop off you have another video availble to watch once you do" and i think this applies to Posy. The video which poped off was the "Mouse cursor history", and all the other videos are also quality content you can watch ! :)
@@propanux Segmented is what popped off in May and got Posy from 4500 subs to 100k in a week, the rest is just a side effect of that :) Really glad that it did happen because he has so many great videos that didn't get the views they deserved previously
I remember my uncle had that Casio color organizer back in the 90's, at the time I was very confused by the thing because I had never seen an LCD that looked like that but as the years went by and color LCD's became more common I assumed it was just me being a kid and failing to notice the subpixels. It makes sense that the technology was abandoned in favor of more practical alternatives but it does make current tech a bit boring by comparison.
I believe I've figured out how the Casio color screen works Like you said, the display is capable of showing greyscale images and there is a magic "color filter" that changes the grey's into different colors. The filter is a birefringence layer. I won't pretend to understand how the physics of it works but in essense the birefringence effect is that as light passes through the material, it changes the angle of polarization proportional to the wavelength of light. So what is happening in the screen is that the calculator treats each color as different shades of grey such that when drawn, the angle the liquid crystal twists correspond to a certain wavelength being passed, which of course correspond to whichever color will be displayed. Look up patent US5585950A.
Sounds sensible. The whole twisted nematic bit is also the same tech used in mood rings. There the crystals change their length with temperature, which produces interference with different wavelengths.
Good explaination! But I'm still unaware, yet impressed, how these G-Shock pigmented displays are working. I've never encountered them in person (just the regular B&W ones), and my mind is blown about how the liquid-crystal matter can be fully transparent in one polarization, and fully scattering in another. More than, it's so confusing to see how the digits that appears scattering (thus cannot effectively transmit the light through the LCD packet) can be illuminated by backlight, wnile the remaining transparent regions (where you can see the mirror) cannot. And also how the two-layered digits (which appears red on the intersection) works, so would be interested to see an explaination from the engineers (with the full disassembly and removing both polarizers from the LCD packet)
Excessively detailed essay because I'm bored and this is interesting. The particular kind of LCD stated in that patent uses the TN-effect. That's Twisted Nematic. Standard TN displays filter light, twist it by 90°, then filter it again perpendicular to the first filter. That's the off state, since light passes through just fine. When you apply a voltage, the crystals line up front to back, the light doesn't twist, you get black. Now, the patented display uses a STN display. That's _Super_ Twisted Nematic! STN displays can twist light by more than 90°. In the patent, it says they used 180-270° of twist, presumably varied by voltage. The filters are parallel. Doesn't make much difference, but it probably made life easier. Between the STN layer and the front filter is a retardation plate. According to Olympus, the microscope manufacturer, a retardation plate twist light by specific amounts. One kind can twist different wavelengths by different amounts. The patent states 35-55°. Math time! Assumptions included. Don't worry, it's just arithmetic. Off is 180°, in phase. Light gray is 215°, 35° out of phase. Mid gray is 225°, 45° out of phase. Dark gray is 235°, 55° out of phase. Maybe. I'm just guessing. You'll see why those numbers in a sec. I think the 270° is either a red herring or a spec that isn't fully used. I didn't see any black, so probably the latter. For the colors, red is at one end, blue at the other, green in the middle. I'm going to say 1,2,3 since I don't know which end is where. 1 gets twisted by 35°. 2 gets twisted by 45°. 3 gets twisted by 55°. Probably. Reverse of the twist in the STN layer. Maybe 3 is blue because blue has more energy and bounces off the crazy optics harder? Just a guess. So red light gets twisted some such that it hits the crystals just so and winds up perfectly in phase. Magic. Green gets twisted by a different amount. Same story, magic. Repeat for blue. Witchcraft and sorcery. Pretty nifty, and probably way more efficient than TFT displays, but also something like a tenth as fast. I imagine it isn't used much because it sounds hard to do and Casio probably decided it wasn't worth it which explains the expired patent. If you did, thanks for reading :)
I suppose this means in theory this technology could produce any pure hue but couldn't change the saturation or per pixel brightness? Perhaps full colour could be achieve by having it able to UV which we can't see to create black and rapidly switching between primaries. For example 4 m/s UV (black followed by 8 m/s red followed by 4 m/s green would produce brown for example.
That "no subpixel" Casio screen actually turns grayscale into a rainbow. So of each hue there is only a single darkness and saturation. That makes it unsuitable to display a real life images. But it is good for graphics.
Interestingly to mention - the three color LCD technology, shown on 5:22 was also used in one of the first "color" screen mobile phones in the world - a Siemens S10 (released in 1998). Some time ago I managed to get both S10 as well as it's slider sibling, the SL10. As you rightfully mentioned, of course there were no practical purpose for those pseudo-color displays, but it was quite a cool marketing gimmick in a phone world where actual 4096-color RGB STN displays only appared some three years later.
Thanks when I saw the LCD I remembered the time Siemens brought them out but I forgot the SL10 name. I wanted one but it's not true colour but I found it nice anyway most of my friends were rocking the 3210, 3310, 3330 series of Nokia and this was quite refreshingly different. But as you point out, I went for the 7210 a few years later with its reflective STN.
There's definitely something that draws me to those awesome color LCD's, I really like how "soft" they are compared to a modern TN, IPS, VA and similar variants, I really love some Casio G-Shock inverted LCD's colors.
On the Casio CSF-7950, the fading persistency between the colors and the blending with the silver reflection layer and its grainy noise texture makes this display so beautiful. Digital, yet analog wonder of the 80s.
That Tetris example is neat, because it uses the same technique as the first color photograph, from 1861! The photographer took 3 separate photos of a ribbon, with a red, green or blue filter placed over the camera lens, to capture each color of light. Modern cameras actually still contain the colored filters! Though, they're much smaller, now.
@@pokepress Really? I've never heard of such a thing! Color on NTSC televisions was ultimately just hacked into the existing black & white video signal.
@@pokepress Field sequential color was proposed for a long time for active matrix LCDs, but the switching time of nematic mode was never fast enough across all transitions. If we could do it, we could remove both the colour filters and black area dedicated to driving three subpixels, resulting in a gigantic increase in power efficiency. They could use a fraction of the power. Optically compensated bend type LCD had the speed, but not the contrast. Blue Phase mode LCD has challenges with required voltage and temperature range.
@@Tattlebot There was, I think Technology Connections showed it, a very expensive professional colour monitor mean for film and TV production, that used an odd field-sequential CRT / LCD hybrid! Beautiful picture apparently. As you probably know, colour CRTs split the screen into RGB sub-pixels, where B&W CRTs don't have any "pixels" at all, it's just a smooth line, at least horizontally. Nice smooth uninterrupted picture. So they took a decent B&W CRT monitor, and stuck an LCD "colour wheel" in front. This LCD simply changed from transmitting red, to green, to blue, rapidly, while the monitor changed along with it, at a high speed. Field-sequential colour except a flat LCD panel replace the spinning wheel. Apparently very good, but too niche so not many were made. Interesting though, a CRT display without RGB subpixels, or indeed any colour display at all without subpixels. Same as the screen on the organiser in the video, just intrinsic colour. The monitor I'm talking about probably used LCD in the same mode. Wait... I found it! ua-cam.com/video/z-q8ehzHeQQ/v-deo.html
@@greenaum If IPS displays have 1 ms average response time these days, they should be capable of FSC operation. I wonder why they're still all WLED? It must be because, while FSC blocks much less light, RGB backlights are less efficient, and have temperature and unequal lifetime issues.
amazing comment! Posy should totally reach out to you to do visuals for one of your jam sessions to make the ultimate experience that will transport peeps to the ethereal plane or something. coolio
Nintendo made a "Pocket Pikachu 2 GS" virtual pet that had similar technology to the Casio 3 color diary. Instead I think the Pocket Pikachu showed black (super dark blue), yellow, and red as its three colors. It behaved the same way as that digital diary and it had a "Color" toggle that you'd need to adjust to get the colors to display correctly.
I came here to say the same thing, I was 15 at the time of having a Pocket Pikachu 2 GS and knew that typical LCD's used Red/Green/Blue subpixels, but was fascinated how a single pixel could change to different colors like that.
I had one of those 3-color organizers back in the late 90's. Because the different colors were slightly offset vertically, I suspected they had a 3-layer sandwich for each pixel color, if that makes sense.
You're cool Posy, keep it up. I'm still using your selfmade cursors every single day and am so pleased with the looks of them. Thanks again for that. :) P.s.: Nice jacket!
Oh my god a modern OLED color depth and intensity without sub pixels would be unreal. It must be basically impossible, or id think it’d be done already
Hey. Great video. Tip: take 3 polarizers and put one in from of each other(with a white light behind) now rotate two of them independently, and then you will see the colors from polarizing interference :) so that is generating the colors in displays!!!
In the gaming historian’s video on the development of the gameboy he mentioned Nintendo were offered to use one of those colored lcd screens and it’s crazy seeing what the gameboy might have looked like if mono screens weren’t so much cheaper
Appreciate the comment on reflective displays, I miss them too. I used to use PDAs with reflective displays to read ebooks on the bus before epaper matured. They may not have been the best color but they were far more practical in daylight for readability. It always seemed weird that this wasn't leveraged and that people forgot about the technology in the move to purely backlit displays - especially on smartphones.
This guy has the most unique content, the only other creator I can think of that is close which is Ahoy, but you have an even more diverse subjects, and sometimes involve yourself. I love your content I hope you see further success.
If you've ever taken apart 3D glasses, depending orientation of the lenses when placed on top of each other, they will go from orange to purple, but flipping one lens will "switch" it into a more usual greyscale mode. I'm not sure what makes one side of the polarizer different from the other, but it's cool seeing a screen that took advantage of that effect. Edit: Apperently it is caused by iridescence, the reflection of color based on interference at the size of the wavelength. As the polarizers are basically plastic with really tiny lines it makes sense that it would cause this effect and it only working on one side could be caused by the fact that the lines are only impressed on one side.
My Garmin watch has a reflective panel, it's an always on LCD that can easily be seen during the day under ambient light. Or at night with the back light. The newer models even have a solar panel under the LCD.
I remember my Gameboy sp (the ones that folded) having an LCD screen not needing a backlight - you could see everything perfectly well in sunlight n the backlight button was for dark rooms. Wish current mobile screens could be visible in sunlight
I have discovered this channel this evening by clicking on the new youtube button "show me something i don't usually watch" and I am super happy. I find your videos extremely soothing and calming, the way you capture the beauty of these technologies, the way you show how much work and imagination has been put into these designs that we call "pretty" "vintage", is really nice. Thank's for the sensitive, precise and beautiful work.
Was very surprised when the 3 color subpixel-less LCDs turned up that there was no mention of a relatively widespread usage/implementation of these, and a pretty decent one too: Siemens phones. Specifically S10D (Active), S11E and the later, much smaller S25
i'm in awe. I don't know what to say. Having grown in the 90's i remember when watches were all the rage and how colored liquid displays were all but a dream to me.
This is the first LCD video I've seen from you. I have taken these wonderful little things for granted, and you immediately began blowing my mind because of it.
Looks like the UA-cam algorithms are sharing your videos to a new audience -- I see I'm not the only one to have just found your channel. I've watched 5 videos already! Great video and I love the colour LCD - it would be a perfect low-power display option like e-ink, too bad it's not still kicking around because the retro appeal is awesome.
Same here, it's fascinating how this is not the first time I go down and find other people commenting exactly what I just thought. Was it you that stumbled upon Posy's channel and brought me here or was it the other way round? :D
This is one of the greatest UA-cam videos that I have ever seen. So much so, that I saw it twice. The music, the narration, the videography... absolutely beautiful. Bravo
I've seen one of those Casio screens in a educational toy when i was little.. since i already knew how the "TV made color" the screen didnt make any sense to me... and the memory of it has stuck with me for all these years, now i see your video and i finally found what exactly that was, and that it did indeed exist. This was kind of surreal to see a faint memory demonstrated and dissected in a video...
A friend of mine actually had the Casio Digital Diary when we were in middle school. I had a similar one that worked the same way but had three "scenes": The guy at the desk, an airport in a cityscape. They were called minidatabanker (mini databanks) in Sweden where we grew up and we (and nobody else) were crazy about them.
Gotta love your highly detailed and well thought-out videos about decomissioned electronics no one else in the world seems to care about. Thank you, sir!
I had a phone(Siemens S25) with the 5:11 type of screen when I was a kid. It looked so weird(in a good way), even my classmates who had proper(for the time) colour screens were like "wtf kind of display is that".
Oh yeah, I had that PDA back in its day, and the destop animations have burned themselves into the back of my mind. But there's another, maybe the most important use of this display technology: The Siemens S10 and S25 mobile phones, the latter even being the first cell phone to support WAP. I also had that, so it seems I really liked color LCDs.
Aboslutely love your content. visually mesmerising while also framing it in such a perfectly technical / layman balanced context. Look forward to many more uploads from you in 2021. Also the jacket looks great.
This is the first time I'm thankful to the UA-cam algorithm that it suggests your video to me. You have such a relaxing voice that made me feel relaxing watching your video while still learning about these things. Also, tiny jokes here and there are so spot on. Looking forward to your next video!
What a pity. Again the last part. But you are creative enough to find another fun subject to focus on. They are very nice videos and educational too. Keep it up!
I love love love how fascinated you are with all these magical things. I love the music you add. I love your jokes. I love your enthusiasm and competence and artistry. You are an incredible creator, I want you in museums.
I think the one that actually changes colours is based on the concept that the liquid crystal rotates (twists) the polarization different amounts, depending on the voltage across it, but it also rotates the polarization different amounts depending on the wavelength of the light. Like a prism. So you vary the voltage to change which colour is rotated the right amount to pass through the polarizing filter.
the technology right between the old school and the current gen technology was always so beautiful to me growing up. I got to see the limits of 90s display technologies pushed to breaking before we finally moved onto the standards we use today, like mostly LED
I have a watch where the backlight is polarized, so in the day it looks like a black positive lcd but when you hit the light button it looks like the pink screen but green instead. Its so cool how it switches polarization.
There's one type of LCD for which I still need an explanation for how it works. Specifically how the electroluminescent backlight of the LCDs used in the Palm Pilot III worked exactly. With that backlight the display would become "inverted", but only for the backlight. With the backlight on, but under bright illumination conditions the contents would appear normal. So in some way the backlight did illuminate only those parts of the LCD that were active darkened. My hunch is, that there's another polarizer sandwiched between the backlight and the reflective mode LCD arranged so that the backlight would enter the LCD at 90° to the normally reflected light and hence pass through the "darkened" parts of the picture shown.
Wow that digital diary is beautiful! The blue and green pixels reminds me of an old Learning "Laptop" for kids, but I think those where just one color and my mind plays tricks on my.
I remember my school throwing away storage bins of Casio graphing calculators with this display type. My librarian knew I liked to collect tech so she gave them all to me. Little me thought I was going to figure out how to play my SEGA Genesis on the displays somehow xD I was amazed how something so cool was considered “outdated” compared to the greyscale TI-83’s they replaced them with. I’ve noticed the color was dependent on the voltage sent to the display.
The Track at the beginning is "Almost Right" on his The Great Four Tracks Release :) Had that stuck in my head since watching this, great videos! Can't wait to see more from you!
Thank you! I've seen the basics of LCDs many times, but this went way beyond and was fascinating! Another interesting entry is the early Pixel Qi display on the OLPC XO-1 laptops! As I understand it's a sharp, crisp greyscale reflective background LCD, but it has a diffraction grating on it and when backlit, the effective resolution is reduced, but it splits the light into RGB and looks a little fuzzy. It's a brilliant way to have a good colour screen on the cheap, AND it's fantastically clear in sunlight - it's just not both at once haha
It's only fuzzy because it uses 4-groups of square pixels as "subpixels" on the OLPC. Other Pixel Qi panels that were produced had the usual RGB subpixel pillars in a single square pixel.
The watches appear to be a different technique, wherein the typical reflector is replaced by a material that reflects light of one polarization while passing through light of the other. Thus the pixels that are "off" look like a mirror, and the pixels that are "on" look like a window. What you put on the other side of that window is what makes it really interesting. If it's black, it'll look like a regular display, but it could be fluorescent orange, an EL panel, or even an RGB diffuser panel. I've done a lot of hypothesizing on this, much like you have... I had only seen *one* display using this technique, prior, and frankly it wasn't particularly well-implemented (Palm V PDA) due to the technologies at the time... the el backlight was too dim. The three-dimensionality of it looks amazing up-close, and its potential for clear displays seems really promising. I really wanted to see where this technology could've gone, but having no idea what to search for, hadn't come across Any other examples until this video. Thank You! I'd love to see a vid like these about that, specifically!
Yet another channel with low sub count that has earned my subscription, Never before did I think I’d be sitting watching a three part series on the LCD!
This man talks about colour lcd's like it's a nature documentary and I love it
Somehow remind me COSMOS with Carl Sagan ...
LCDs**
All these colors are just part of their mating ritual.
Color*
amogus******
I am 36 years old and got to play with that color digital organizer as a hand me down from my dad. To this day I had always wondered about that odd lcd display the technology was so alien and unlike anything I'd ever seen since. You have singularly dispelled one of the great tech ghosts of my life. I am free now.
I'm 36, and I got the same hand me down from my aunt! I (briefly) used it to track homework assignments.
“one of the great tech ghosts of my life” i love this terminology and i hope i use it some day thank you.
Enlightenment has no path, no hour.
What are your other tech ghosts?
This sounds like some Scientology thing taken out of context
This video series really changed the way I look at LCDs. I started paying more attention to them in my daily life. Probably what fascinated me the most were the animations on the digital diary. It was someone’s job in the past to program that little man in there. They could have simply made a gadget with basic functionality, but instead they created a little business world where a little business man works.
Ah yes, the day when paychecks didn't provide more value than function and charm/fun
It's either not having corporate bs back then or it's just the guy doing what they could with what they had
That Casio digital diary is so charming, I'm feeling nostalgic for something I've never owned or even seen in person! Great video, I've always been a bit of a tech nerd but this really gave me a new appreciation for these types of displays.
My mom had one of those in the 90’s to take notes at work on
right? what an absolute vibe. the novel color display and its impact on the interface are great, of course, but all of the animations are _amazing_
'mouse cursor history' popped up for me today and i fell into a bit of a rabbit hole afterward, learning about how cool these displays are.
this is prime teaching material; interesting and presented well enough that the monotony doesn't just make it boring. honestly feels like a documentary piece at times.
i also picked up your cursor pack and already love it.
good content.
As martincitopants said: "Every video you make has a chance to pop off, and every time you don't pop off you have another video availble to watch once you do" and i think this applies to Posy.
The video which poped off was the "Mouse cursor history", and all the other videos are also quality content you can watch ! :)
@@propanux every. single. one. I agree
I think it was segmented displays followed by the mouse cursor, for me :D
@@propanux yow tf do we all watch the same creators?
@@propanux Segmented is what popped off in May and got Posy from 4500 subs to 100k in a week, the rest is just a side effect of that :)
Really glad that it did happen because he has so many great videos that didn't get the views they deserved previously
I remember my uncle had that Casio color organizer back in the 90's, at the time I was very confused by the thing because I had never seen an LCD that looked like that but as the years went by and color LCD's became more common I assumed it was just me being a kid and failing to notice the subpixels. It makes sense that the technology was abandoned in favor of more practical alternatives but it does make current tech a bit boring by comparison.
Dude I think you've summed up everyone's feelings. That last sentence has it!
Such an underrated channel! And it does suit you.
I believe I've figured out how the Casio color screen works
Like you said, the display is capable of showing greyscale images and there is a magic "color filter" that changes the grey's into different colors.
The filter is a birefringence layer.
I won't pretend to understand how the physics of it works but in essense the birefringence effect is that as light passes through the material, it changes the angle of polarization proportional to the wavelength of light.
So what is happening in the screen is that the calculator treats each color as different shades of grey such that when drawn, the angle the liquid crystal twists correspond to a certain wavelength being passed, which of course correspond to whichever color will be displayed.
Look up patent US5585950A.
Ty for the information. Sounds dope
Sounds sensible. The whole twisted nematic bit is also the same tech used in mood rings. There the crystals change their length with temperature, which produces interference with different wavelengths.
Good explaination! But I'm still unaware, yet impressed, how these G-Shock pigmented displays are working. I've never encountered them in person (just the regular B&W ones), and my mind is blown about how the liquid-crystal matter can be fully transparent in one polarization, and fully scattering in another. More than, it's so confusing to see how the digits that appears scattering (thus cannot effectively transmit the light through the LCD packet) can be illuminated by backlight, wnile the remaining transparent regions (where you can see the mirror) cannot. And also how the two-layered digits (which appears red on the intersection) works, so would be interested to see an explaination from the engineers (with the full disassembly and removing both polarizers from the LCD packet)
Excessively detailed essay because I'm bored and this is interesting.
The particular kind of LCD stated in that patent uses the TN-effect. That's Twisted Nematic. Standard TN displays filter light, twist it by 90°, then filter it again perpendicular to the first filter. That's the off state, since light passes through just fine. When you apply a voltage, the crystals line up front to back, the light doesn't twist, you get black.
Now, the patented display uses a STN display. That's _Super_ Twisted Nematic! STN displays can twist light by more than 90°. In the patent, it says they used 180-270° of twist, presumably varied by voltage.
The filters are parallel. Doesn't make much difference, but it probably made life easier.
Between the STN layer and the front filter is a retardation plate. According to Olympus, the microscope manufacturer, a retardation plate twist light by specific amounts. One kind can twist different wavelengths by different amounts. The patent states 35-55°.
Math time! Assumptions included. Don't worry, it's just arithmetic.
Off is 180°, in phase.
Light gray is 215°, 35° out of phase.
Mid gray is 225°, 45° out of phase.
Dark gray is 235°, 55° out of phase.
Maybe. I'm just guessing. You'll see why those numbers in a sec. I think the 270° is either a red herring or a spec that isn't fully used. I didn't see any black, so probably the latter.
For the colors, red is at one end, blue at the other, green in the middle. I'm going to say 1,2,3 since I don't know which end is where.
1 gets twisted by 35°.
2 gets twisted by 45°.
3 gets twisted by 55°.
Probably. Reverse of the twist in the STN layer. Maybe 3 is blue because blue has more energy and bounces off the crazy optics harder? Just a guess.
So red light gets twisted some such that it hits the crystals just so and winds up perfectly in phase. Magic.
Green gets twisted by a different amount. Same story, magic.
Repeat for blue.
Witchcraft and sorcery. Pretty nifty, and probably way more efficient than TFT displays, but also something like a tenth as fast. I imagine it isn't used much because it sounds hard to do and Casio probably decided it wasn't worth it which explains the expired patent.
If you did, thanks for reading :)
I suppose this means in theory this technology could produce any pure hue but couldn't change the saturation or per pixel brightness?
Perhaps full colour could be achieve by having it able to UV which we can't see to create black and rapidly switching between primaries.
For example 4 m/s UV (black followed by 8 m/s red followed by 4 m/s green would produce brown for example.
This is wonderful. I'm glad your channel is getting the recognition it deserves :)
That "no subpixel" Casio screen actually turns grayscale into a rainbow. So of each hue there is only a single darkness and saturation.
That makes it unsuitable to display a real life images. But it is good for graphics.
Interestingly to mention - the three color LCD technology, shown on 5:22 was also used in one of the first "color" screen mobile phones in the world - a Siemens S10 (released in 1998). Some time ago I managed to get both S10 as well as it's slider sibling, the SL10. As you rightfully mentioned, of course there were no practical purpose for those pseudo-color displays, but it was quite a cool marketing gimmick in a phone world where actual 4096-color RGB STN displays only appared some three years later.
I had the S45. A great phone for the time.
Thanks when I saw the LCD I remembered the time Siemens brought them out but I forgot the SL10 name. I wanted one but it's not true colour but I found it nice anyway most of my friends were rocking the 3210, 3310, 3330 series of Nokia and this was quite refreshingly different. But as you point out, I went for the 7210 a few years later with its reflective STN.
I actually thought the Game Boy color used this technology, but in that case I just failed to see the subpixels.
There's definitely something that draws me to those awesome color LCD's, I really like how "soft" they are compared to a modern TN, IPS, VA and similar variants, I really love some Casio G-Shock inverted LCD's colors.
On the Casio CSF-7950, the fading persistency between the colors and the blending with the silver reflection layer and its grainy noise texture makes this display so beautiful. Digital, yet analog wonder of the 80s.
Your tone and the music make these videos feel like lost relics of the 80s, except not aged, and hi-res, and it does wonders to my nostalgia centers.
This channel goes SO HARD oh my god. You have the kind of voice I'd listen to for hours watching How Its Made in the UK in the 2000's/2010's.
That Tetris example is neat, because it uses the same technique as the first color photograph, from 1861!
The photographer took 3 separate photos of a ribbon, with a red, green or blue filter placed over the camera lens, to capture each color of light.
Modern cameras actually still contain the colored filters! Though, they're much smaller, now.
Actually, the strobing of the colors makes it a bit like an odd color-wheel system that was proposed for color TV.
@@pokepress Really? I've never heard of such a thing!
Color on NTSC televisions was ultimately just hacked into the existing black & white video signal.
@@pokepress Field sequential color was proposed for a long time for active matrix LCDs, but the switching time of nematic mode was never fast enough across all transitions. If we could do it, we could remove both the colour filters and black area dedicated to driving three subpixels, resulting in a gigantic increase in power efficiency. They could use a fraction of the power.
Optically compensated bend type LCD had the speed, but not the contrast. Blue Phase mode LCD has challenges with required voltage and temperature range.
@@Tattlebot There was, I think Technology Connections showed it, a very expensive professional colour monitor mean for film and TV production, that used an odd field-sequential CRT / LCD hybrid! Beautiful picture apparently. As you probably know, colour CRTs split the screen into RGB sub-pixels, where B&W CRTs don't have any "pixels" at all, it's just a smooth line, at least horizontally. Nice smooth uninterrupted picture.
So they took a decent B&W CRT monitor, and stuck an LCD "colour wheel" in front. This LCD simply changed from transmitting red, to green, to blue, rapidly, while the monitor changed along with it, at a high speed. Field-sequential colour except a flat LCD panel replace the spinning wheel. Apparently very good, but too niche so not many were made. Interesting though, a CRT display without RGB subpixels, or indeed any colour display at all without subpixels. Same as the screen on the organiser in the video, just intrinsic colour. The monitor I'm talking about probably used LCD in the same mode.
Wait... I found it!
ua-cam.com/video/z-q8ehzHeQQ/v-deo.html
@@greenaum If IPS displays have 1 ms average response time these days, they should be capable of FSC operation. I wonder why they're still all WLED?
It must be because, while FSC blocks much less light, RGB backlights are less efficient, and have temperature and unequal lifetime issues.
you sure, have a VERY underrated channel. I wish you all the success in the world. Thank-you for no click-bait thumbnails and high quality production.
this channel is wildly underrated. these videos are incredible and made with so much love! killer content!!
amazing comment! Posy should totally reach out to you to do visuals for one of your jam sessions to make the ultimate experience that will transport peeps to the ethereal plane or something. coolio
Your narration is beautiful and captivating. Just like the imagery. Amazing!
This looks and sounds like a documentary and I love it, absolutely fascinating
Nintendo made a "Pocket Pikachu 2 GS" virtual pet that had similar technology to the Casio 3 color diary. Instead I think the Pocket Pikachu showed black (super dark blue), yellow, and red as its three colors. It behaved the same way as that digital diary and it had a "Color" toggle that you'd need to adjust to get the colors to display correctly.
I came here to say the same thing, I was 15 at the time of having a Pocket Pikachu 2 GS and knew that typical LCD's used Red/Green/Blue subpixels, but was fascinated how a single pixel could change to different colors like that.
It's refreshing to see a well-shot, well-narrated video that doesn't fully explain its subject. Thanks for sharing these neat displays!
This guy is not just gold, hes a mixture of Thorium, Osmium and Rubidium! I love this man.
Huh, this is pretty neat. :D
I also like how wonderfully Dutch you sound, without having too thick of an accent.
Damn.. I can never get rid of that accent :-/
My old man used one of those Casios in the 90s.
What a device. Always seemed like it was from the future.
Your narration and footage are very captivating. Thanks for the great video!
I had one of those 3-color organizers back in the late 90's. Because the different colors were slightly offset vertically, I suspected they had a 3-layer sandwich for each pixel color, if that makes sense.
You're cool Posy, keep it up. I'm still using your selfmade cursors every single day and am so pleased with the looks of them. Thanks again for that. :)
P.s.: Nice jacket!
Could you send a link to those cursors
@@EliStettner literally go look up his most watched video, how are people this lazy
I always forget I have them lol
Oh my god a modern OLED color depth and intensity without sub pixels would be unreal. It must be basically impossible, or id think it’d be done already
Hey. Great video. Tip: take 3 polarizers and put one in from of each other(with a white light behind) now rotate two of them independently, and then you will see the colors from polarizing interference :) so that is generating the colors in displays!!!
Where do you get the polarisers? You mean ordinary ones for ordinary LCDs?
@@greenaum Yes, ordinary ones!
The jacket suits you!
In the gaming historian’s video on the development of the gameboy he mentioned Nintendo were offered to use one of those colored lcd screens and it’s crazy seeing what the gameboy might have looked like if mono screens weren’t so much cheaper
Appreciate the comment on reflective displays, I miss them too. I used to use PDAs with reflective displays to read ebooks on the bus before epaper matured. They may not have been the best color but they were far more practical in daylight for readability. It always seemed weird that this wasn't leveraged and that people forgot about the technology in the move to purely backlit displays - especially on smartphones.
I love that people are out there digging this deep into how things work. Some engineers spent years perfecting these things then moving on...
Part 3! Suffering for your art, you removed the polariser and we are all wiser from your experience, thank you.
This guy has the most unique content, the only other creator I can think of that is close which is Ahoy, but you have an even more diverse subjects, and sometimes involve yourself. I love your content I hope you see further success.
I just discovered Posy and now Ahoy in the same day. Thank you stranger. My rabbitholes will be deep and fulfilling
A rather marvellous series. Very well done, and great to see the retro-tech.
Thank you for a good laugh this morning. The segmented blade knife tip 6:55 was quite hilarious.
If you've ever taken apart 3D glasses, depending orientation of the lenses when placed on top of each other, they will go from orange to purple, but flipping one lens will "switch" it into a more usual greyscale mode. I'm not sure what makes one side of the polarizer different from the other, but it's cool seeing a screen that took advantage of that effect.
Edit: Apperently it is caused by iridescence, the reflection of color based on interference at the size of the wavelength. As the polarizers are basically plastic with really tiny lines it makes sense that it would cause this effect and it only working on one side could be caused by the fact that the lines are only impressed on one side.
Your videos are so binge-worthy😭 so much info and do many interesting topics! I cant wait to learn even more from you!
Much love from germany :)
5:33 There's something really rare and aesthetic about a color LCD display!
"REmove the polariZAH"
I loved this series so much. Can't wait for more.
Just watched the three parts of this series, and wanted to thank you for making them. So much interesting stuff in here! Great stuff!
My Garmin watch has a reflective panel, it's an always on LCD that can easily be seen during the day under ambient light. Or at night with the back light. The newer models even have a solar panel under the LCD.
I remember my Gameboy sp (the ones that folded) having an LCD screen not needing a backlight - you could see everything perfectly well in sunlight n the backlight button was for dark rooms. Wish current mobile screens could be visible in sunlight
I have discovered this channel this evening by clicking on the new youtube button "show me something i don't usually watch" and I am super happy. I find your videos extremely soothing and calming, the way you capture the beauty of these technologies, the way you show how much work and imagination has been put into these designs that we call "pretty" "vintage", is really nice. Thank's for the sensitive, precise and beautiful work.
"last and least, red green and blue subpixels"
im dead
Captures of that Color Digital Diary could make awesome nostalgic wallpapers!
0:26 the way you said watches :), i love it
Was very surprised when the 3 color subpixel-less LCDs turned up that there was no mention of a relatively widespread usage/implementation of these, and a pretty decent one too: Siemens phones. Specifically S10D (Active), S11E and the later, much smaller S25
This channel is quickly becoming one of my favorites. Quality content right here
this is cool and all but deep down we all know that they just use magic
I remember seeing the 3 color organisers in catalogs as a kid being curious about them.
This channel is seriously amazing.
i'm in awe. I don't know what to say. Having grown in the 90's i remember when watches were all the rage and how colored liquid displays were all but a dream to me.
This is the first LCD video I've seen from you. I have taken these wonderful little things for granted, and you immediately began blowing my mind because of it.
Looks like the UA-cam algorithms are sharing your videos to a new audience -- I see I'm not the only one to have just found your channel. I've watched 5 videos already! Great video and I love the colour LCD - it would be a perfect low-power display option like e-ink, too bad it's not still kicking around because the retro appeal is awesome.
Same here, it's fascinating how this is not the first time I go down and find other people commenting exactly what I just thought. Was it you that stumbled upon Posy's channel and brought me here or was it the other way round? :D
This is one of the greatest UA-cam videos that I have ever seen. So much so, that I saw it twice. The music, the narration, the videography... absolutely beautiful. Bravo
I've seen one of those Casio screens in a educational toy when i was little.. since i already knew how the "TV made color" the screen didnt make any sense to me... and the memory of it has stuck with me for all these years, now i see your video and i finally found what exactly that was, and that it did indeed exist. This was kind of surreal to see a faint memory demonstrated and dissected in a video...
A friend of mine actually had the Casio Digital Diary when we were in middle school. I had a similar one that worked the same way but had three "scenes": The guy at the desk, an airport in a cityscape. They were called minidatabanker (mini databanks) in Sweden where we grew up and we (and nobody else) were crazy about them.
Gotta love your highly detailed and well thought-out videos about decomissioned electronics no one else in the world seems to care about. Thank you, sir!
This LCD series has been so interesting and well produced! Can't wait to see your channel grow (:
I would have loved that color digital diary back then. Seems like a fun piece of tech to use and I love the pixel art they used to demo the screen.
I had a phone(Siemens S25) with the 5:11 type of screen when I was a kid. It looked so weird(in a good way), even my classmates who had proper(for the time) colour screens were like "wtf kind of display is that".
Oh yeah, I had that PDA back in its day, and the destop animations have burned themselves into the back of my mind. But there's another, maybe the most important use of this display technology: The Siemens S10 and S25 mobile phones, the latter even being the first cell phone to support WAP. I also had that, so it seems I really liked color LCDs.
Nice video! And it suits you very well. I hope you will become popular!
Pokemon Pikachu 2's color display works like that Casio diary but has different (and more?) colors to work in it's application. Really neat stuff.
Aboslutely love your content. visually mesmerising while also framing it in such a perfectly technical / layman balanced context. Look forward to many more uploads from you in 2021. Also the jacket looks great.
This is the first time I'm thankful to the UA-cam algorithm that it suggests your video to me. You have such a relaxing voice that made me feel relaxing watching your video while still learning about these things. Also, tiny jokes here and there are so spot on.
Looking forward to your next video!
What a pity.
Again the last part.
But you are creative enough to find another fun subject to focus on.
They are very nice videos and educational too.
Keep it up!
Danku :)
I have a Casio graphic calculator with the same LCD. Having 3 colors when doing graphs was helpful.
That "background", 5:08 probably the most vaporwave looking device I have seen.
I love love love how fascinated you are with all these magical things. I love the music you add. I love your jokes. I love your enthusiasm and competence and artistry. You are an incredible creator, I want you in museums.
I think the one that actually changes colours is based on the concept that the liquid crystal rotates (twists) the polarization different amounts, depending on the voltage across it, but it also rotates the polarization different amounts depending on the wavelength of the light. Like a prism. So you vary the voltage to change which colour is rotated the right amount to pass through the polarizing filter.
the technology right between the old school and the current gen technology was always so beautiful to me growing up. I got to see the limits of 90s display technologies pushed to breaking before we finally moved onto the standards we use today, like mostly LED
the animations for the casio agenda got me going like CRAZY. so.. CREATIVE
I have a watch where the backlight is polarized, so in the day it looks like a black positive lcd but when you hit the light button it looks like the pink screen but green instead. Its so cool how it switches polarization.
Man, the transflective lcd on the pebble was freaking great. I miss those.
You have a very soothing and satisfying speaking voice and the videos are very interesting! Here's to another 184K subscribers!
There's one type of LCD for which I still need an explanation for how it works. Specifically how the electroluminescent backlight of the LCDs used in the Palm Pilot III worked exactly. With that backlight the display would become "inverted", but only for the backlight. With the backlight on, but under bright illumination conditions the contents would appear normal. So in some way the backlight did illuminate only those parts of the LCD that were active darkened. My hunch is, that there's another polarizer sandwiched between the backlight and the reflective mode LCD arranged so that the backlight would enter the LCD at 90° to the normally reflected light and hence pass through the "darkened" parts of the picture shown.
Wow that digital diary is beautiful! The blue and green pixels reminds me of an old Learning "Laptop" for kids, but I think those where just one color and my mind plays tricks on my.
Just found your channel yesterday and have to say it's very quickly become one of my favorites. Thanks for the great content.
I've just discovered this channel now. How have I not heard of you? Instantly one of my favorite creators on the website.
Definitely some pretty interesting detours in tech development.
These are the technologies we may have took for granted. Spectacular work!
dude wow i can’t believe i only discovered this channel now!! insanely underrated thank you for sharing
I'm not sure but I think the display on V-Tech's first Genius Leader Color was also a display like that on this Casio diary
just discovered your channel, i now have a newfound obsession with LCD screens
You really remind me of this channel called ahoy, that's one of the highest compliments I can give, seriously you have one hell of a talent for this!
Beautiful displays on the watches, I don't care about the explanations, they look so cool and non-LCD! Thank you!
I remember my school throwing away storage bins of Casio graphing calculators with this display type. My librarian knew I liked to collect tech so she gave them all to me. Little me thought I was going to figure out how to play my SEGA Genesis on the displays somehow xD I was amazed how something so cool was considered “outdated” compared to the greyscale TI-83’s they replaced them with. I’ve noticed the color was dependent on the voltage sent to the display.
Such a great series! I was completely hooked all the way through!
the vibe is just so needlessly great
The Track at the beginning is "Almost Right" on his The Great Four Tracks Release :) Had that stuck in my head since watching this, great videos! Can't wait to see more from you!
Thank you! I've seen the basics of LCDs many times, but this went way beyond and was fascinating! Another interesting entry is the early Pixel Qi display on the OLPC XO-1 laptops! As I understand it's a sharp, crisp greyscale reflective background LCD, but it has a diffraction grating on it and when backlit, the effective resolution is reduced, but it splits the light into RGB and looks a little fuzzy. It's a brilliant way to have a good colour screen on the cheap, AND it's fantastically clear in sunlight - it's just not both at once haha
It's only fuzzy because it uses 4-groups of square pixels as "subpixels" on the OLPC. Other Pixel Qi panels that were produced had the usual RGB subpixel pillars in a single square pixel.
The watches appear to be a different technique, wherein the typical reflector is replaced by a material that reflects light of one polarization while passing through light of the other. Thus the pixels that are "off" look like a mirror, and the pixels that are "on" look like a window. What you put on the other side of that window is what makes it really interesting. If it's black, it'll look like a regular display, but it could be fluorescent orange, an EL panel, or even an RGB diffuser panel.
I've done a lot of hypothesizing on this, much like you have... I had only seen *one* display using this technique, prior, and frankly it wasn't particularly well-implemented (Palm V PDA) due to the technologies at the time... the el backlight was too dim. The three-dimensionality of it looks amazing up-close, and its potential for clear displays seems really promising. I really wanted to see where this technology could've gone, but having no idea what to search for, hadn't come across Any other examples until this video. Thank You!
I'd love to see a vid like these about that, specifically!
Yet another channel with low sub count that has earned my subscription,
Never before did I think I’d be sitting watching a three part series on the LCD!
You make wonderful videos. I'll be patient. I'm sure that whatever you create next will be awesome too!!
High-res closeups of LCD displays look so otherworldly 🤩
Your presentation is so immaculate.
Immensely happy to have stumbled upon your channel!