Japan’s Sharp electronics a leading manufacturer of LCD’s, has revealed a new TouchScreen LCD fitted with ultra-sensitive/MultiTouch Capabilities.,

In this TouchScreen Model, each pixel carries an optical sensor eliminating the need to place a film to the panel for touch screen functions, there by providing beautiful images without losing display image quality.

In Today’s World the TouchScreen abilities are becoming an integral part for many mobile devices such as SmartPhones, Digital Cameras, PDA’s (Personal Digital Assistant) and UMPC’s (ultra mobile pc), but traditional methods to provide such touch input capability requires bonding or laminating a film on the top of the LCD Panel, which leads to problems such as reduced display image quality and increased thickness for the display section of the device.

The major achievement attained here is by embedding an optical sensor in each pixel, this device has the ability to recognise multi touch input i.e, you can use two or more fingers at once to handle the data

For example, users can easily tap the screen with two fingers to enlarge or reduce a displayed map.

Also this device can be used as a scanner

scanner function can be used to scan in a business card placed on top of the screen, and further improvements to this function are expected to enable fingerprint authentication in the future.

According to Sharp the Sample shipments will begin in September of this year, with volume production slated to start next spring.
Some facts about the samples that will arrive in september this year…

Newly Developed System LCD
Screen size 8.9 cm (3.5-inch) on the diagonal
Pixel count 320 V x RGB x 480 H (half-VGA)
Note: Optical sensor built into each pixel
Applications Smartphones, digital cameras, etc.
Functions Touch screen (with simultaneous recognition of multiple touch points), scanner
Start of sample shipments September 2007