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Prototype color e-paper skips on filter, cranks up vividness
Fuji Xerox has showcased its latest e-paper model at SID in Boston. The 5-inch 600 x 800 display adjusts the electric field for each color, swinging them between the two layers of the screen. Instead of a typical color filter, an extra layer of white-colored particles between the visible and invisible layer, offering a blank surface when needed, while magenta and cyan particles are in charge of colors on the prototype. The company's already working on CMY arrangement to provide the full range of colors on the finished e-paper model and promise a color gamut wider than a newspaper. Hopefully, it will also involve a much thinner bezel.
Bridgestone reveals plan to withdraw from e-paper business, AeroBee loses its buzz
If you were intrigued by those 21-inch e-paper tablets Bridgestone showcased last year, you're sure to be bummed by this news. The company has announced that plans to withdraw from the electronic paper business and expects to bring production to a screeching halt by the end of October. Citing increased competition and rapid declines in material prices for the move, the outfit looks "to put an increased focus on its core businesses." As you may recall, Bridgestone had partnered with Delta Electronics to develop the business-focused AeroBee tablets and it remains to be seen if the latter part of the duo will continue its e-paper exploits with a new mate.
Ricoh's new electronic paper promises greater brightness, enhanced color
Color E Ink technology still has some kinks to work out, but Ricoh thinks it may have just taken a big step forward with its latest display. The company's electronic paper, introduced at SID this week, promises to reproduce images that are 2.5 times brighter than competitors' offerings, while covering a color range that's four times wider. To achieve this, Ricoh used a simple lamination method, layering three strips of electrochromic material between two substrates. Unfortunately, however, there's no indication that the technology will be commercially available anytime soon, as Ricoh still needs to incorporate its e-paper onto more practical screen sizes, as well as enhance the display's durability -- both of which sound like pretty major hurdles to us. Full press release after the break.
Bridgestone builds world's largest e-paper tablets, shuns consumers (video)
If you thought the Kno was unwieldy, check out these A4 and A3 paper-sized AeroBee terminals from Bridgestone. The company, best known for its tire commercials featuring adorable animals about to get run over, unveiled two new tablets with 21-inch and 13-inch (underwhelming) color e-paper screens -- the largest available on the market. You can check them out in the video after the break, but don't get too excited, these beasts aren't destined for consumers. Instead, they're being marketed to businesses which will likely use them as in-store displays or kiosks. Next step: coffee table-book e-readers. Though, we suspect In the Shadow of No Towers would lose something in the translation.
LG demonstrates two color e-paper displays, one with a split personality
Competition is good, let's officially welcome LG to the burgeoning color electronic paper market. The company is diving right in with not one but two color prototype displays that it showed off at FPD International in Japan. Both are 9.7-inches diagonal, the first being fully color with an 800 x 600 resolution -- which just happens to exactly match the specs of E Ink's latest. The second, however, is only partly color, the top three quarters being monochrome with a 1200 x 1200 resolution, augmented by a 200 x 600 color strip at the bottom. It's an interesting offering, a layout not unlike the Nook but all on a single display. No word on price or availability, but you can see them doing their thing, along with E Ink's latest, in the video below.
LG putting 9.7-inch color, 19-inch flexible e-paper displays into production
LG's shown off plenty of display prototypes that may or may not ever wind up in actual products, but it looks like two of them are about to get real -- a recent SEC filing has revealed that LG is expecting to put both a 9.7-inch color e-paper display and a 19-inch flexible e-paper display into mass production by the end of the year. Details beyond that are expectedly light -- including any word on what type of products they'll be used in -- but the 19-inch display is apparently the same one we first saw back in January (pictured above). That could conceivably be used for a newspaper-sized device, or possibly things like digital signage, which might be a tad more likely given the constraints in tacking a touchscreen layer and other components on top of the display.
Liquavista displays go out in the sun, look better than all right (video)
We've seen Liquavista displays plenty of times at various trade shows, but so far they've always been locked up indoors. Now they've gone outside to enjoy the weather, and ARMdevices.net was there to capture the results. The low-power color and monochrome screens are shown looking at least as good in the wild as they do in captivity, and when placed next to a traditional LCD (in the laptop on the right) the difference is clear. Granted, the colors are a bit washed out, but the refresh rate is certainly far higher than anything we've seen from E Ink. While there's still no firm word on how much this technology will cost manufacturers, converting from standard LCD production to Liquavista production is said to be relatively painless. How painless? We'll rather disappointingly have to wait for at least another year before we find out, as these aren't slated to go into production until the second half of 2011.
LG Display busts out 84-inch 3DTV with 3,840 x 2,160 res, we want the 2D version
Yesterday we brought you Samsung's 19 inches of transparent AMOLED goodness, today LG counters with an 84-inch 3DTV boasting UHD resolution and a claim to being the world's biggest of its kind. To be honest, at that size you really can't get away with old reliable 1080p, so it's comforting to see LG's keeping pixel pitch in mind when designing its headline grabbers. In other news coming out of the SID 2010 show, LG is demonstrating a "liquid lens" TV that'll give you glasses-free 3D, though the details of how that works are a bit scarce, while the company's also pushing its IPS wares in a big way, with a 47-inch HDTV, a 32-inch pro monitor, and a 9.7-inch (sounds familiar) smartbook on show. Also at 9.7 inches, we have color e-paper that's slated for mass production before the end of the year, while that flexible e-paper from January is also making an appearance. A pretty comprehensive bunch of goodies from LG, we'd say. Update: We just noticed a small but freaky 3.98-inch UHD LCD with a world's best 394ppi density. Amazing.
Liquavista demos its color e-paper display with a new QWERTY-equipped dev kit (video)
You'll be forgiven for just glazing over during CES and ignoring all those ebook readers that were raining down, but Liquavista's attempt at marrying the endurance of e-paper with the desirability of color is well worth another look. The company has now furnished its LiquavistaColor dev kit with a QWERTY keyboard and also recruited Texas Instruments into the fold, whose OMAP system-on-a-chip is doing the grunt work under the hood. The video after the break indicates that touchscreen interaction is also planned, but the most impressive thing has to be the total lack of any redrawing pauses, which may be the considered the biggest drawback to the many E Ink devices out there. For the more conventional monochromatic crowd, we've also grabbed video of the LiquavistaBright, which replicates the rapid refresh skills, but omits the keyboard and OMAP in favor of a more compact form factor and Freescale iMX5x hardware. Slide past the break to see it all.
Philips develops color e-paper, wants to skin your gadgets with it
Our first reaction to this was to think just how wildly unnecessary "e-skins" are, but then we saw that slide up there and started to see the (electronic) light. Philips appears to have struck upon its own version of Kent Displays' electronic skins, which requires no backlighting, operating by reflecting ambient light instead. Based on similar tech to e-books, this invention is initially targeted at generating colorful covers for things like mobile phones and mp3 players, but it's said to be "highly scalable" and e-wallpapers and light-dimming windows could be on the cards if things continue developing. And of course, no "water cooker" would be left behind. %Gallery-79970%
Samsung shows off color e-paper prototype, PVI might beat it to market in 2010
Now here's some yummy news to wrap our minds around. Samsung, a company with a manufacturing portfolio so wide that you wouldn't be surprised to see it selling toothbrushes and perfume, clearly also wants a slice of that growing ebook market and has now unveiled a 10.1-inch color display with that purpose in mind. It's still very early days, with a measly 10:1 contrast ratio and the ability to display only 7% of the NTSC color gamut, but baby steps are better than no steps, right? While Sammy is shooting at delivering this within two years, PVI -- the maker of displays for Kindles and Sony Readers -- is expected to ramp up production of its own color screens in the second half of 2010. Add these two heavyweights to the color e-readers already expected from Plastic Logic (spring 2010) and Bridgestone, and what you get is one hell of a thriving marketplace -- as long as Pixel Qi doesn't render them all useless when it launches later this year. Read - Samsung Exhibits 10.1-inch Color E-paper Read - PVI to ramp up flexible and color EPD in 2010
SiPix to debut color e-paper next year?
SiPix (a division of our old friend AU Optronics) has announced that it will bring "a small number" of color e-ink displays to market by the end of 2010. Apparently, a breakthrough in thin-film-transistor panels has put the company on the fast-track to making this technology commercially viable. If so, it could beat rivals like PrimeView (the manufacturer of both the Kindle and Sony's Reader) to the punch by a year or two. "Making colored electronic paper displays is our top priority," said SiPix president Andrew Tseng. "We are in talks with customers to supply colored displays ... as [color] would encourage advertisers to place ads on [electronic] publications, which then would be able to provide more content [to readers] for free." While PrimeView is currently scrambling to buy up US-based E Ink, AU Optronics is scheduled to ship its first e-paper display modules to customers this quarter. The ball's in your court, Fujitsu. [Via TG Daily]
Bridgestone's 13-inch color e-paper display handles pen input, has the future written all over it
While it'll always be difficult to accept innovative technology from a company that makes our tires, there's just no faulting Bridgestone's work in the e-paper space, or their latest color entry, above. The 13-inch display, based on "QR-LPD" tech, has what looks to be great color depth, along with snappy 0.8 second screen refreshes (great for this screen size) and actual Wacom-based pen input. There's video of it in action after the break, and if we didn't know better we'd think they were putting a Sharpie to a perfectly good display. Unfortunately, the image does look a little dim at the moment, so hopefully that's something Bridgestone can improve upon as they approach commercialization -- whenever that might be.
LG Philips announces A4 color e-paper
While this doesn't mark the first time that we've caught wind of colorized electronic paper, South Korea's LG Philips has announced that an A4-sized rendition of the vivid bendable display has successfully been developed in its labs. The panel reportedly measures just 35.9-centimeters diagonally, is 0.3-millimeter thick, and can display up to 4,096 colors while maintaining the energy efficient qualities that inevitably come with using energy only when the image changes. Unsurprisingly, the company plans on marketing the device as one of convenience and doesn't hesitate to tout its greenness in the process, but unfortunately, it failed to mention when this would find its way out into the general public.[Via Physorg]
