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Imagine if personalizing the wallpaper on your computer or cell phone was as simple as holding your favorite photo against the screen, pressing a button, and waiting a few seconds for the image to appear on screen. That day may soon be here.

Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology unveiled a prototype LCD panel Wednesday that does just that. The display with a built-in scanner was on show in Tokyo at the Electronic Display Expo.

Adding Images

To make the display, engineers at Toshiba began with a 3.5-inch polysilicon thin film transistor LCD, similar to that found in devices such as consumer camcorders, and added image sensors among the display pixels.

The display has a resolution of 320 pixels by 240 pixels (QVGA) and the scanner has a resolution of 960 pixels by 240 pixels, which means it can reproduce images of anything laid flat on its surface, in actual size.

Demonstrations at EDEX involved business cards and photographs, and it took around 7 seconds for a scan to be completed.

Double Duty

"We call it an input display," said Motoshi Maruno, a specialist in silicon-on-glass technology at Toshiba Matsushita Display and a developer behind the technology. The company is a joint venture between Toshiba and Matsushita Electric Industrial that was formed last year and took over the display operations of the two companies.

"You can use it as an ordinary display, and you can use it just like a scanner," he said.

The prototype on display at the Tokyo exhibition was completed recently and work remains to be done before the technology reaches the commercial stage, said Maruno.

Although the screen of the prototype can display 260,000 colors, the scanner function can only manage monochrome images. Maruno said a color scanner function is among the targets of future development work.

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