Seiko Epson shows off e-paper
By Peter Rojas 
posted May 31st 2005 9:41AM
posted May 31st 2005 9:41AM
Still gonna be a couple of more years before they commercialize this, but Seiko Epson announced at this year's SID
International Symposium that they had a working prototype for a 2-inch e-paper display that's just 0.375mm thick and
has a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels.
[Thanks, James B.]
can you get papercuts from this?
i know you're all thinking it . . . moving porno mags . . . :-o
Does not seem to be anything ground breaking here but it is cool stuff. Here is a video of a rollable displays from Polymer Vision that is worth a watch:
http://www.polymervision.com/assets/downloadablefile/polymer-vision-12983.wmv
It'll probably cost a fortune.
wait, lemme make sure im getting this right, does this mean we're gonna start seeing harry-potter-like displays as newspapers and magazines and the like? thats in-freaking-credible. Can you imagine, SONY might finally be able to come out with a users manual thats actually worth something!
Can wait for the new E-Paper money. LOL
Are we witnessing the birth of the REAL Video WALL? I sincerely hope so! It has been my dream for the last 50 of my 57 years!
What is the application of this if you can't fold it? I guess one could buy an "e-mag" and download magazines into it, but the default unit would need 400 pages so that no magazine could ever be larger than it. I don't see this making it to PDAs because it's black and white, and despite being so thin, the screen is not a major element of bulk in handhelds, so it would never replace conventional LCDs.
Who says it has to be just magazines? You could have this one sheet, not too much thicker than a few pages of paper, able to roll it up into a carrying tube, store any number of things on it. Put your books, newspapers, etc. on it (assuming the storage is that good by the time it comes out) and then you have a few magazines, your favorite paper, and maybe a book or two all on one, thin sheet.
writing books as we know it began with the scroll and will likely end with it as well
Baron:
Tell me how that is different from present-day ebooks. Because the display is low resolution, or can roll? I must scoff! The potential is there, but except for very few, very exclusive applications, this e-paper is being prematurely unveiled.
Brian, the main advantage of e-paper is in the power consumption. I.e. once you draw your page on the paper, there is no more power needed to maintain the display. Compare that to conventional displays where you need to spend energy all the time it is on. So yes, it will be a huge advance for ebooks, they'll need a lot less power and so will be lighter (maybe even run for months on a watch battery).
Even without ebooks, there are tons of applications for this: in marketing (price tags, billboards), in transportation (maps, traffic signs), and who knows what else... Brian, be careful what you scoff at, you may end up proving your own short-sightedness more than anything.
The other advantage is: no backlight. These technologies aim for very high contrast ratios (like regular ink on paper) without the need to produce more light than there is surrounding the display. Think about how washed-out all displays (CRT, LED, plasma, LCD, and so on) look in strong sunlight, and you know what I mean: out on the patio, your monitor has to be brighter than the sun! So e-ink takes digital media where it couldn't go before: out into the light.
Anyway, we've been hearing about this stuff for years now. I'm impatient: all I want to know is when I can finally get one in the real world!
Brian - I agree that this is still in a premature state for some of the applications that I envision it being used for in the future, but everything has a starting point. Baby steps if you will... Maybe I should rephrase what I said and state that one day, in the not so distant future, it would be nice to have something about as thick as a penny, fairly flexiable, built in memory (enough for several thousand pages, plus pictures, should be doable in the next few years), and built in power supply... Maybe a watch battery, maybe it pulls in some of it's power from a few solar cells, or another source (radio waves?). I don't know, I just see something like this (even if it has been out for a while) as being a stepping stone for something much greater.
Bryan - I've heard about the no need for backlight, but there's a stack load of LCD's that look absolutely fantastic in the daylight without backlights - just look at your LCD digital watch (if you still have one). Even color LCD screens can look excellent in the daylight - check out the highly transflective screen on the Danger Sidekick II, in full sunlight it looks like it has been painted on!
Electronic ink looks like it has a lot of potential but if you're holding out for daylight readable displays, they're already here.