Slashdot Mirror

goes well with electronic paper (http://www.eink.com/news/releases/pr86.html) .

Gyricon is also shipping an electronic paper product, in the form of signage. (Full disclosure: I'm one of the firmware guys at Gyricon.) We have a 15"x17" segmented display and a 7"x5.5" 100dpi all-points-addressable display. And you can buy them right now.

Unfortunately the technology isn't quite there yet to produce the re-writable newspaper that everyone thinks of when you say "electronic paper". The biggest problem is getting a flexible backplane. You need a flexible TFT or something like it. We have the flexible re-writable media; we just need something flexible to put it on. I imagine you'll see flexible LCD displays before you see flexible e-paper displays, just because the backplane technology is similar but LCDs are in much higher production.

Thickness is another issue. Every form of e-paper I know of is mechanical in nature. You have to move colored particles from the back of the display to the front of the display and vice-versa. The particles in front need to be opaque enough to hide the particles at the back. Gyricon's displays use beads that are half-black and half-white. The beads rotate one way or the other. E-Ink uses individual black and white particles in capsules of clear liquid. SiPix uses a single-color particle in an opaque fluid. By the time you get the particles, the fluid, and something in which to contain it all (say, sandwiched between sheets of plastic) you have a relatively thick package.

The big differentiator between today's electronic paper and other display technologies is that e-paper is bistable. Once you write the image you can remove power and the image stays put. This makes it good for very low-power applications where the display isn't constantly changing. If you want video you probably don't want electronic paper.

I'm not trying to be an apologist, just explaining the current state of the technology. Yes, we all know that everyone wants "electronic paper" that acts like real paper. And yes, we want it too! We're working on it. These are the first baby steps in that direction. Right now electronic paper is at the point where it can mimic real paper's ability to maintain an image without power, and that image can be viewed in ambient light. We need to continue to refine that and to start branching out into other aspects of real paper: Flexible, cuttable, thin. We're working on it.

As usual, all the standard disclaimers apply. I speak for myself, not my company, yada, yada, yada...

The libre ebook reader uses this and is shipping in Japan.

E Ink's PR on it
Review of unit

The libre ebook reader uses this and is shipping in Japan.

E Ink's PR on it
Review of unit

If you really want to see one first-hand, you can always order the developer kit.

Worse, all E-ink really offers is an "e-Ink front layer" for someone else's LCD. That's not "digital paper", it's just a reflective display technology that's as bulky as other reflective display technologies. And the other guys have been shipping product for years.

E-Ink's latest press release indicates desperation. They're pre-announcing something they hope to display as a prototype at a trade show next year. You can't keep doing that sort of thing year after year.

You will see that, in fact, the display does NOT require constant power.

There are several unique things about electronic ink technology which make it desirable:

1. Low power requirements. Once an image is set, it stays set until energy is used to change it. Any ambient light can be used to view it.

2. Visual appeal. Electronic ink literally looks just like a piece of paper with printing on it. Would you ask what the "dot pitch" is of a page of newspaper, or of a paperback book? It looks this way under all viewing angles and lighting conditions, including bright sunlight.

3. Flexibility. This kind of display can be rolled up and carried with you, or spooled into a carrier much as a window shade rolls up.

There are still several weaknesses in the technology; for example, the refresh rate is rather low. But the technology is new and still in commercial development.

An example: My favorite "dream application" for this technology would be a "book" with electronic ink pages, with the "binding" containing a small computer system. Then you could upload many different texts into your book and it could shift from one to another at the touch of a button. It would take virtually no power since the images are fixed once set; turn on the computer, "open" your newest title, turn off the computer, and read as long as you like, no power necessary.

I have been a fan of this technology ever since I first heard of the idea in Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age". A web search several years ago turned up E-Ink and other companies developing this technology, several of which have been mentioned on Slashdot in previous months. However, this is the first "full-sized" display I've heard about.

IMHO, the long development time doesn't represent vaporware, it signifies good business sense. It was foolish to deploy this technology when there was little industrial infrastructure to support it, and when its capabilities were still far below those of LCDs and well-established display technologies.

Instead, they have waited to release it until its advantages outweigh the remaining unsolved problems. Once those few problems are solved it will easily out-compete existing display technologies, except perhaps in a few specialized applications.

http://www.eink.com/news/releases/pr86.html wow. Yeah, I expect eventually you could paper your wall with this stuff and have a room that you can change as easily as your desktop background.. or a room that was your own home cinema :D

The only new thing about today's press release is that it's bigger than before and higher resolution. But yesterday they announced a colour version, which is a bit more newsworthy.

The only new thing about today's press release is that it's bigger than before and higher resolution. But yesterday they announced a colour version, which is a bit more newsworthy.

I can't see how 4 shades of grey is useful unless it didn't require power to keep the display

According to the company's website, power is required to produce the image but not to sustain it. Presumably it degrades with time I couldn't find any info on this. One of the figures in this PDF suggest the image can persist for at least 100s, but who knows what this will be by the time the product is ready for the market - whenever that is.

Dev kits for the 6" display can be pre ordered for $3000. I guess they will come down once production starts.

Having actually seen an e-ink display some years ago, I was very impressed. Can't wait to actually be able to buy one for a sensible price.

You can order a prototype kit, including Linux on a Gumstix, through the E-Ink website. Provided, you've got a spare $3,000 lying around.

If you have a spare $6,000, let me know. I'd love to try it out, too.

According to this page, the paper retains the image when the power is removed. Even more info here (PDF).

According to this page, the paper retains the image when the power is removed. Even more info here (PDF).

They still haven't gotten that far. :-(

Check this and that.

Let us hope someone gets working screens so I can get a smaller place to live with fewer books, sometime! (If those fails, I think there are more projects working.)

E-Ink has been developing (and offering) similar technology for quite a long time now.

http://eink.com/company/index.html

I think E-Ink started as an offshoot of someone's research grant at MIT.

Yet another ePaper product promised more than a year away. Ho hum. If history has a lesson, any ePaper announcement this far away should just be ignored.

First there was Philips eInk, whose technology was integrated into the underwhelming Sony LIBRIe. Then Seiko revealed a wristwatch that appears big and heavy enough to block bullets.

With their no-lighter-than-other-technology design, most of these products seem to have missed the compelling point of ePaper: it is supposed to be as big and as light as paper!

Even the eInk development kits being sold Novemeber 1st are for small 6 inch displays.

Until they announce ePaper that I can use to cover an entire wall, and it is available *next week*, I am not going to hold my breath...

Isn't this just eInk technology repackaged by Siemens?

See eink's benefits page for an overview.

The biggest advantage for the designer of battery-powered portable devices is that an eink display need only be driven when the display contents change, while an LCD must be constantly driven (by rail-to-rail signals driving the display capacitance) even if the display contents do not change. This means that, for applications requiring infrequent updates (e.g., status displays on cell phones, pagers, Apple Nanos, etc.), the eink display driver can be turned off, saving power. Further, eink has the legibility of conventional paper, so under conditions in which ordinary paper is readable the LCD backlight is not needed, saving considerably more power.

Wow it's $3,000 and you have to fax in the order form. I feel like we're back to 1995 when simple electronics costed a ton and everyone used the fax machine. Well I guess this isn't exactly "simple," it's probably one of the coolest displays ever. See here for details.

I've been saying since high school (17 years) that we need this technology. I don't think it matter what the resolution is... If you can put a dynamic image on something as flexible and portable as paper, it's worth it.

Consider the possibilities. What does the average person do when they create a document on computer / receive an important e-mail they want to read later / download a manual for a product that they need to view at a different location? They print it. Paper is ultimately versatile because of its portability. A tablet PC just doesn't cut it when you need to slide your chair a few cubicles down to share an idea or present some documentation. Forget a pocket PC - average paper is 8.5x11" for a reason.

With electronic paper, you simply "print" to the medium and take it with you to wherever - the boss's office, home, a meeting room, the bathroom... Doesn't matter. And because it is electronic, the possibilities are almost endless for how you can renew the data it displays. No more having to collect your hard copy from a printer. The "paper" is just like a PDA, with bluetooth or WiFi, and with touch-screen technology you can even update the image from the device itself. It's also cheaper than a PDA (after mass production), so you can give it away without worrying about where your life-in-a-box went for five minutes.

IMHO, the sooner this becomes an actual product, the better, even if it looks like a bit worse than newsprint.

And, as other have said here, this tech will only get better. The medium that is being used is by E Ink, which already provides superior resolution (most likely, the given res was a limitation of the controlling tech, not the medium). Next comes colour. Come on! Persistent, highly visible dynamic image generation on flexible material? This is the arguably the main reason why laptops/tablets/PDAs exist at all.

Furtherdown in the article it mentions very blithely that the technology powering it comes from none other than E-Ink which explains the quicker than expected turn around. It's Phillips branded and integrated but the tech that makes it work is E-Ink Corp's.

Check out their site to see the roadmap... we should be seeing much improved versions of this gadget very soon.

"Nessecary?" Make that "neccescary." :-j

Eh. Sometimes. Kinda. Sorta.

In the developed world, school systems are often (usually?) elaborate day care centers. Schools keep kids off the street, out of trouble (for the most part), and -- perhaps most importantly -- out of the workforce.

I've read a number of times that the US school system was modeled, in part, on Prussian schools which emphasized an instillment of discipline and obedience. It was adopted deliberately to handle the large influx of uneducated immigrants in order to mold them into compliant citizens with sufficient skills to become productive members of the work force. Whether true or not, it effectively describes the results of the US primary school system.

Unfortunately, the model remains largely intact even though the environment graduates face are quite different. Stated goals of "modern" education are largely rhetorical. Many methods are adopted and discarded so rapidly that virtually none have a chance to succeed or fail in any enlightening way.

True, but it missing the point. Schools -- or more precisely, teachers -- are neither equiped to teach about technology any more than effectively use it. This is a failure on the part of our system, not our teachers.

Eh. Superficially true. "Technology" won't realistically be in a a position of "becoming" a school until we can produce beings like R. Daneel Olivaw or Commander Data.

We have a long way to go to properly exploit even current computer technology. One example: text books. Dead wood textbooks are a multi billion dollar black pit that do nothing to advance the state of the art of effective teaching tools. Imagine if that money were invested in creating hyper-text pads, perhaps using something like electronic ink and perhaps handwriting and speech recognition as well.

In brief, "technology" cannot be simply bolted on to our existing model of education and its current structure and teaching practices. In fact, it is quite apparent that our existing model is ineffective even if technology wasn't an issue. The suggestion in TFA that technology in schools is in any way a "fad" is yet another example of our educational system's myopia.

But that's another post entirely ... make that an entire thesis.

At the recent Society for Information Display show almost every major player had a flavor of electronic ink prototype at their booth.

You guys need to look around at what else is out there before you get too excited about a flashy news announcement.

The screen problem is a killer.

E-ink is one way around the screen problem. Basically, it is electronically controlled paper.

As not to divulge anything I shouldn't be, check here http://www.eink.com/technology/index.html for a simple diagram of how it works.

Actually, that is only one of many electronic paper technologies. The one you're referring to is the one developed at Xerox PARC, and is being commercialized by Gyricon. Eink's tech, one the other hand, uses single-colored spheres (black & white in this case) floating in a oil medium. The spheres are charged, and depending on how you manipulate them, you can get black, white , and shades of grey for each pixel. Here's the overview of it

I was either thinking of e-paper only, and/or still living in 2001.

We see a 2-bit grayscale display (May 2004: http://eink.com/pdf/Philips_E_Ink_Electronic_Paper _Datasheet_May04.pdf); and a 12-bit color display (July 2002: http://www.eink.com/news/releases/pr62.html). However, the press release states the 12-bit displays were "...targeted for commercialization in 2004." Anyone know what became of it?

I was either thinking of e-paper only, and/or still living in 2001.

We see a 2-bit grayscale display (May 2004: http://eink.com/pdf/Philips_E_Ink_Electronic_Paper _Datasheet_May04.pdf); and a 12-bit color display (July 2002: http://www.eink.com/news/releases/pr62.html). However, the press release states the 12-bit displays were "...targeted for commercialization in 2004." Anyone know what became of it?

The e-ink technology has also been used in colour displays: http://www.eink.com/news/images/eink_color_tft_dem o.jpg To do the colour displays, they use several micro capsules with three orthogonal colours like cyan, magenta and yellow. On one half of the wall of the capsule are tiny white particles that are charged negative. Since the capsules themselves are only about 100 microns wide, you can create different colours by adjusting the orientation of each capsule to face a given direction. This is done by applying an electric field. You have to use cyan, magenta and yellow because the display generally reflects light and doens't produce light on its own.

Yes, this company (at eink.com) has a fairly amazing new product. I would love to invest in them, but they are a privately held company.

It works like a sort of like a high-tech 'etch-a-sketch,' magnetic charged particles stick to the screen in either black or white (negative or positive charge) and STAY there until the image changes. So power is needed only for the image changes. This clock is the first example I have seen here on Slashdot, but Boing Boing recently showed an e-Book reader using this same tech. Sony branded, I believe.

In my opinion, the e-Book use is the IDEAL use for this. I have never seen it in action, but from all reports, it looks and 'acts' like paper, easily readable, just black text on a white page. The sony device looked very interesting.

Here, I found a bunch of pictures. Japan only so far, but what new tech isn't...

GALLERY OF E-BOOK PICTURES

Although both the story and this post are blatant plugs for a proprietary technology, the stuff they use for this clock (E Ink) really is quite cool, and can be used in many other gadgets.

For example they are building bendable 200dpi grayscale screens and some Xbox game boxes are using it to create an animated picture on the side of the box.

I wonder how long it will be before these take over the world, and the sci-fi idea of every billboard and poster being animated becomes real? Maybe when the Pentium VI 10GHz Powerbook comes out, it'll have a screen that can be rolled up and put into your pocket?

It's already used in an e-book product from sony. It looks absolutely terrible--sort of a high resolution etch-a-sketch. My guess is that maybe in five years this technology will look about as good as a cheap newspaper, for only 1000* the price. Still, it's probably a good technology for large print uses like this or advertising billboards.

Making 100 million of anything isn't that hard. Just call up Flextronics. It's making the first 100,000 profitably that's hard.

The near future for the Third World is probably systems based on cell phones. They're already at at the right price point and are headed down from there.

I wish you provide more info (even submit story) about that freaking Librie thing from Sony. Are we finally speaking about actual ebook here?

http://www.eink.com/news/releases/pr70.html

Its in my list and not giving up my 7650 just like you of course :)

Also there is a chance that whoever (Reuters,AP?) got that story to whole World is speaking about that device.

I find the problem is that PDA screens are a bit crap. Not only that, but the feature wars between manufacturers tend to make them into constantly evolving geek toys (Sorry!). Useful, I'll admit, but not really a nice device to read a book on. I've been following the devopment of high contrast, high res EInk products such as this and it's only a matter of time before products appear which will give us crisp, 300 dpi high contrast displays (albeit at slow refresh rates) that consume miniscule amounts of power. That's when the eBook becomes a much more attractive proposition. Sony have a device up and running, but I don't think it's consumer ready yet. Soon....

Something similar you might want to check out is Electronic Ink. I was reading your description and it fit it almost to a T. It doesn't have the backlight, but it does have the single charge change-state ability. You can find the link here.

An interesting take on making "digital paper" work. I'm familiar with eInk's process, which is both similar (in that it uses a current to bring the ink to the surface) and completely different. I've been waiting for years for someone to make a commercially viable digital paper, and while the demos continue to get better, it seems we're still not quite there yet.

E-Ink Website

It seems to me these guys are already doing this. Perhaps this is competition?

This kind of technology seems promising for the future of ebooks...
Let us all hope they do not screw up with this technology like Sony/Philips did with E Ink and their Librie ebook reader.

Even better, because there's no need to use the intermediate PDF step, instead the user would just print from their browser and they'd get the nicely formatted output pages.

With ads, or without? I just can't wait for e-ink "paper" to become popular. Blinky, flashy - on a printout!

Here's the link - E Ink used the gumstix in their prototype, and joined with Philips and Sony to make the LIBRIé.

Maybe electronic ink will help, at least with contrast problems.

Big surprise - ATRAC3 has DRM!

All I can think of when I see this kind of thing is that the media companies are building a case for a future lobbying effort to outlaw non-DRM-locked hardware.

Sony just developed an eBook reader - the first to use an e-ink display, and then castrated it with DRM, and a total library of 400 expire-in-2-months books.

Obviously products like these are going to fail, and I just can't see their existance as mistakes. Sony may be smarter than they appear.

it is apparently available now

it uses something called e-ink, which is an interesting technology.

it uses hardly any battery power

It's readable in the sun

it takes no battery power to actually run, just change state

Etc.

Pay attention! The only thing that I don't know that it has is the ability to be backed up properly, lack of DRM, etc. as I've not yet seen one myself.

Sony released their LIBRIÉ earlier this year utilizing e-ink with a scren resolution of 170 dpi.

It's not 600dpi, but according to users does it look as crisp as paper.
The new screen-tech does apparently also save on batteries since it only needs power to refresh.

To bad it only supports Sony's DRMed books so far. Can't wait until one of these baibies (or the DRM-format) gets hacked.

There is no eBook that anyone would want to use in lieu of a real, dead-tree version. Nothing is large enough, has the right resolution, battery-life, and most things out there that are large enough are not just specifically for eBooks.

You might want to keep and eye on that new electronic ink technology like this one mentioned on slashdot a little while back, though. I can guarantee you it won't be cheap for a little while after they release the technology, plus, it probably won't work with Linux unless you do some hacking, but keep an eye on it none the less..

How about that new e-book reader from sony?
Sony Libre

http://www.eink.com/news/releases/pr70.html ... Whenever it's available!