Today’s incumbent flat-panel display technologies enjoy dominance by achieving efficiencies of scale for traditional designs. LCDs and plasma displays (PDs) have steadily dislodged cathode ray tubes (CRTs), while newer technologies, such as organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) and liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) jockey for dominance in a changingmarketplace. Each technology has a preferential size range beyond which economies of scale or compromised yields increase costs disproportionately. Most incumbent technologies are energy inefficient (a liability for portable deployment), require expensive retrofits to meet nichemarkets (such as avionics), and are limited by their core operational principles (see Figure 1). Conventional color displays may have more than a million pixels, typically comprised of a red, blue, and green subpixel, each with its own control mechanism. (PDs can have more than three.) This tripling and miniaturizing of components reduces manufacturing yields. Historically, yield improvements arose from brute force rather than by reassessing the three-subpixel paradigm.Having reached the limits in this approach, interest in ‘exotic’ display technologies has been rekindled. These alternative approaches not only address existing limitations, but deliver new, previously unimagined functionality. Our research has focused on time multiplexed optical shutter (TMOS) technology. TMOS combines field-sequential color (FSC) techniques with the principle of frustrated total internal reflection (FTIR).1, 2 Red, green, and blue light is sequentially edge-injected (at high frequency) into a slabwaveguide (glass or polymer). The evanescent field projecting from the waveguide provides the photon pool that is accessed with a simple micro-electro-mechanicalsystems(MEMS-) like structure for image generation. When a pixel is charged, a high-refractive-index membrane is propelled across a 250nm gap to the waveguide surface. Upon contact, light couples from the waveguide into the membrane and Figure 1. The number of precision-registered layers in an LCD reduce its energy efficiency.