Siemens jumps on the e-paper bandwagon
Don't know about you, crew, but over here at Engadget HQ we're growing impatient waiting for the promise of
e-ink,
e-paper, portable
flexible displays, etc. to pay off. Much
as we want it, seems like all we keep hearing are "coming soon" promises from bizzes who've supposedly got the tech in
the can, but are waiting to commercialize the product. Latest to pimp their own ultrathin display solution is Siemens,
who claims their new color screens are quite actually paper thin, and that they actually cost relatively little to
manufacture—£30 ($52 US) per square meter. That's still a bit much for newspaper use, of course, so it looks like they
want us to hold out until 2007 on this one, when they suppose it'll be a little more affordable in mass market pricing.
Just so long as our Pizza boxes can call us "stupid cannolis," by 2010, we'll be fine.
[Thanks, Stephen]
Filed under: Displays
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
DarkFader @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
[quote]Thats still a bit much for newspaper use[/quote]
That's because the rainforests are a free resource? ePaper could help saving it.
Dan @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
This got my hopes up for entire newspapers and magazines to simply be distrubuted on a single page of this stuff. Then I read over at the Guardian:
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1591602,00.html
"The images are in colour, and can broadcast anything that can be shown on a regular flat screen monitor or TV, although with a slightly lower quality. These could be short film clips or flash animations like those found on the internet."
So for now, it looks like the resolution won't be high enough (think Sony Libre) for comfortable in-depth reading. But advertisers will love this. Also my spell check is broken.
Austin @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
Hmm, funny, but I think that if I had the option of buying a newspaper for a couple hundred that automatically displayed today's news every morning, I think I'd buy it. Of course, that requires some massive wireless update service and some subscription plan. Easily doable I'd think.
james @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
where can I start buying stock? who are the major companies starting this? I've got 200k I need to get rid of!
the english guy @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
"Of course, that requires some massive wireless update service and some subscription plan. Easily doable I'd think."
You mean like Google's wifi/wimax rumoured service, a worldwide 'net? Yeah easily doable.
Shin @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
So far the only use I can think for ePaper is a pen-sized roll-out newspaper which you can update every morning by stabbing the pen somewhere in the PC.
Why the pen-size? Because I wanna keep the ePaper after I have read it.
Why the pen roll out? Because I want want to read multiple pages but not update a bag whole of ePaper before leaving the house.
Why newspaper? Because that's the only useful thing I can think of that doesn't need a fast refresh time. Maybe manga too.
zadzagy @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
While this is a really cool technology, how can this be recycled? While there are good channels for recycling plain paper in place, I'm concerned that this would lead to more landfill waste.
Joe @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
This would be just like the magazines in and newspapers in the movie Minority Report where the headlines are showing up as the news happens and things are moving and scrolling accrossed the page.
Just think, the entire magazine could be sold with only 2 double sided pages. You would have a cover, and back...then all the insides would be displayed electronicly through a simple "touch to flip page" here.
The downside...? Right now, magazines last years for your kids, your kids kids to go back and look at. If everything is electronic then it obviously requires power which means that 50 years from now it wouldn't work and the type of batteries it used probably wouldn't be around...so you'd have no way to go back and look at something that happened.
Gil @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
You people are missing the point. You don't need to sell magazines with the paper all you need is a file to upload into one of these devices and you'll be able to upload the same file 50 years from now in the device you have then
Mark Stevenson @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
Nice reference to Futurama with the pizza box there.
Big G @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
It would lead to less landfill waste because you wouldn't be throwing out the paper every day. Te paper would change to the new one. The same with your TV Guide, Men's Health, Playboy...
Scott @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
#1. Do you really think newspapers are made from rainforest wood? The New York Times, Honduras Mahogany edition.
And don't forget the energy, lithium, oil, etc. used to produce e-paper and other throwaway electronic junk. At least trees grow back, and are easily recyclable.
You know full well how this technology will be used: to catch our goldfish-like attention and sell us more crap. It will never replace a single newspaper or magazine. Who wants to recharge their newspaper?
Gil @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
Scott: I will refrain from calling you names and I will explain
1. Indeed it does take oil to create this but it takes oil to create almost anything and we're already seeing advances that allow us to create plastics
2. E-paper has more uses than magazines. Think dynamic maps with GPS, one page books, badges, callendars etc. If you have goldfish attention... hey don't blame technology.
3. E-paper doesn't need recharging. It only needs power to switch the image and even if you want more pages you can charge the small amount of power it needs when you upload files to the paper
chuck @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
Okay, but none of you have hit on the real benefit here. portable porn with pages that wont stick together!
Scott @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
Gil-
I'm not saying it's worthless, in fact it's cool stuff and I wish I could buy it. But this idea that it's the death of paper or that it will save the rainforest is silly. Paper isn't going anywhere, and nor should it.
Fair point on the power issue, but people are talking about videos on cereal boxes and scrolling headlines and stuff like that, which will require a constant power source. Turning the page of a paper or book will require a power source to be attached.
And I maintain that the people really salivating over this stuff are looking at it as an advertising medium. Publishers don't particularly want to throw away their current business models.
Jon @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
Its more than a newspaper. Any flat area is your workspace, you can roll up into your pocket.
Read the sports reports with video highlights, then watch live (using wireless or digital-tv) on the way home.
Add decent voice recognition and its your new light laptop.
Gil @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
But in the end they will. Not now and certainly not in our lifetime but 200 years from now if we don't have a major setback (dark ages etc) I seriously doubt they'll be any paper around. Think of that show "Andromeda" where they all had e-paper around.
chuck: that's using the old noodle ;)
ipodman715 @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
This is neat. No more school books with pages ripped and and crap written on them.
ipodman715 @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
^ ops repeated and
lol
ablufia @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
is this a can of dog food for an Aibo ?
tarek @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
i saw that futurama episode yesterday
Joe @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
If you're going to be environmentally minded, you have to have your facts straight. First off paper doesn't come from the fricken rain forrests, it comes from trees we grow here in the US specifically for paper production (there are 3 times more trees than 75 years ago because of this fact.) Secondly landfills get covered by grasslands and help produce Methane as a renewable, green energy source. It's been calculated that, at our current rate of waste production, all the garbage that will be generated in the next thousand years can be accomodated in a landfill 35 miles square and a hundred yards deep, the equivalent in area to approximately 0.1% of the range land available for grazing in the contiguous 48 states. Thirdly the vast production of air pollution and high costs that come with paper recycling... well makes the idea of recycling paper ridiculous ... but we do it because people have the wrong ideas about "what's good for the environment."
Just google "paper trees misconceptions" and then pass the facts to the other alarmists.
John Bennet Ramsee @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
The best function these can have would be to use them for Blue Prints and/or autocad (or any mech prog) print-outs/files. If you were on site and had to go through blueprint after blue print, it would be sick to unroll one of these screens and then just u/l the different screens/sections.
John Molina @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
I keep thinking Back to the Future in the year 2015 ... I want hover conversion, damnit!
Anthony @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
30/sqm doesn't seem that much. To put it another way, doubling the price of a (non-Sunday) paper would let you put a 15x15cm animated colour image on the front page.Or how about a news ticker across the top of the front page? The Guardian here (in the UK) recently changed its size and went colour-printed throughout; papers are happy to make major alterations (and increase production costs) if they get a slightly larger market share. For big events like Royal Weddings, I'm sure tabloids like the Mail and the Sun would be happy to run price-hiked "Special Commemmorative Editions" at 2 or so with a full-page "pull out and keep" animation of the ceremony.
Or how about animating a postcard for an extra 60p? And I reckon travel companies would pay 30p per insert if you opened your copy of (insert rich-person magazine here) and an animated Caribbean-beach scene fell out onto the table. In fact, how about a video-booth on the beach that lets you record your own few seconds of your sunburnt face grinning like an idiot and mouthing "wish you were here" while clutching a margarita?
The bottom line is that even if the price doesn't drop that fast, there are areas where it would be used today, in mass-media, at the quoted price. I liked the suggestion in the Guardian article of cut-out-and-play computer-games printed on the sides of cereal boxes!
Search Engines Web @ Dec 19th 2005 12:54AM
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,69839,00.html?tw=rss.TOP
Wired has just done a story 12/15 on Siemens ePaper