Bright color reflective displays with interlayer reflectors

A good solution to the reflective display of color has been a major challenge for the display industry, with very limited color gamuts demonstrated to date. Conventional side-by-side red, green and blue color filters waste two-thirds of incident light. The alternative of stacking cyan, magenta and yellow layers is also challenging - a 10% loss per layer compounds to nearly 50% overall. Here we demonstrate an architecture that interleaves absorbing-to-clear shutters with matched wavelength selective reflectors. This increases color gamut by reducing losses and more cleanly separating the color channels, and gives much wider choice of electro-optic colorants. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America