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Flex Lighting's LED film will brighten your e-reader, mood (video)
The slogan pretty much says it all: Flex Lighting has developed a new front light LED film that could drastically change the way you interact with your e-reader. According to the Chicago-based company, this film is part of a new lighting system that promises to bring smooth, nighttime reading to E Ink displays everywhere. Flex Lighting's setup is rather simple, consisting of nothing more than a single LED and a thin layer of film, laminated onto a device's reflective screen. At a thickness of just 50 micron, the film essentially acts as a light guide, spreading the LED's beams across a reader's display and creating a "soft glow" that many predecessors have thus far failed to replicate. The folks over at the eBook Reader managed to get their hands on a brief demo video, in which the system performs rather impressively. See it in action for yourself, after the break.
3M Uniformity Tape improves lighting quality on LED edge-lit LCDs, lowers production costs
Ever seen a display like the one on the left? That's long been a pesky phenomenon -- known as "head-lighting" -- with many LED edge-lit LCD panels, and 3M's new Uniformity Tape wants to make sure it won't be around for much longer. Basically, the tape sticks onto an LCD's internal light guide, and its printed-on optical pattern disperses each LED's light path at wider angles. This allows for up to three times the distance between each LED, while still maintaining an even all-around brightness level across the panel. There are other benefits to this as well considering future LCD panels could use fewer LEDs -- cutting manufacturing costs, and raising eco-friendliness. Hopefully the tape actually ends up working as well as the photo illustrates, but for now, you can view the full press release by clicking past the break.
