Crazy Croatians

Monday, April 25, 2011

Magnetic Screen Monitor Idea

  A thought rattled around in my noggin today; has anyone ever created a magnetic screen for the output of something like a monitor? I guess it would appear much like an "Etch A Sketch" with tiny bits of a powder inside used for drawing whatever images are desired. However, the mechanics would be much different. Somehow the powder of the magnetic screen monitor would create the image instantly and as quickly as a crt screen can (which uses magnetic deflectors to direct the electron beam to create the images). But in the magnetic screen Monitor the image would not be scanned repeatedly like in a crt, rather the image information would be sent to the display and changed there directly. I think it would be similar in some ways to the design of a liquid crystal display. The screen would be made up of thousands or possibly millions of very tiny pixel-like magnets, and each would have 2 states that they could be in: either at rest and unpowered, or active and powered. When unpowered the screen would be either grey or white, but when powered the powder would be pulled to it creating a black pixel. The combination of all the pixels together in a pattern would create the images. There could be many pockets inside the screen holding the powder so that it wouldn't need to travel far to reach a magnet. Also, when unpowered, the magnets would actually have a negative-like charge in them to repel the powder (to avoid extra powder falling onto unwanted areas). I'm not sure what applications a monitor using this technology would be good for, although I thought it was an interesting idea. Someone may have, and probably has, thought of it before. I have no idea.

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