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On the other hand, once digital paper comes into being and advertising on the wall of the subway starts moving around in the same annoying fashion as most banner ads, then this device could be used to detect a certain frequency of movement or brightness of color and block or blur it! Voila! Pop-up ad blockers for reality!
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http://www.eink.com/news/images/

This article mentioned This Press Release which said that the E-Reader would be available in April. The press release has pictures of the device.

Picture

Japanese qwerty

someone above posted this link it explains it pretty well.

If you added a LCD strip below the screen you could stick more dynamic things there, i.e. (the LCD displays the echo of text you are inputing, then when you are done, that line is dumped to the e-ink, kinda like old word-processor/typwriters).

I really don't see a problem with getting any app running with minimal screen updates.

What I'm kinda worried about is wear and tear.

• How bad does IR/UV light bleach/ruin the screen?
• How many times can a microcapsule change colors before it wears out?
• I've never seen a 170dpi screen, but how bad will a couple of stuck pixels look?

Along with other posters, I think this looks immensely better than current portable book displays... That said, what in the world are they reading?!?

E-Ink was founded in 1997 by a few MIT geeks. I think they had the name before they had a marketing department. This was pre e- and i- nuttiness.

I remember interviewing with E-Ink in 2000, I think with Barrett Comiskey, one of the founders, in the Toscanini's (ice cream store) at MIT. Wicked smart. Too bad I shanked on the interview!

How about E Ink, Inc. ?

E ink involves tiny spheres with magnetically charged particles inside that are either black or white. See here.

Reflection based displays, like eInk, are great for displaying text. But when it comes to representing graphical concepts they fall far short, since they're limited to greyscale.

It's fairly simple to adjust the amount of light reflected to make greyscale images. What is very hard to do is adjust the wavelengths reflected to make different colors. Until there is an easy way to do that discovered, light emitting displays is pretty much the only option for computing chores that rely on color.

Oops. I actually meant eInk not ePaper. (flexible digital paper where you only need an electrical current to change the pages, but not to keep it turned on.)

>> Would it work as a large TV monitor? The frame rate is up to 70/sec, so the question, again, is resolution.

This link mentions resolutions in the range 120-150 dpi, but AFAIR one of the first EInk demo screens had about 300 dpi resolution (as a laser printer)

I thought this was going to be something that was cool, like eink. Maybe there's more to this they don't talk about, but I've seen displays that look like this at the local theater.

The ones I've seen look like real-life versions of vertical banner ads (coincidentally enough). Just a big LCD-ish display, whatever the actual technology. They're somewhat eyecatching in that they move, but... when it comes down to it, it's just an ad. Big deal.

Of course, I can think of more interesting uses for the system, if you put them absolutely everywhere and integrated touchscreen capabilities. But animated advertisements in real life are just about as interesting as the sort you find on the web. And you can't filter them either.

2048x1152 DLP (front projection)
1280x720 DLP (rear projection)
Flat CRT (still under development)
Inorganic Electroluminescent (still under development)
Electrostatics & Suspension (ambient light, still working on color)
Electrostatics & Revolution (ambient light, still working on color)
Electrostatics & Interference (ambient light, no plans for larger modules!?!?)

I don't think any format will get Ebooks to catch on until we have reader hardware that makes reading those books at least as pleasant as reading a paper book.

Here's hoping that all those e-paper efforts will produce something usable soon.

Here is what the display is made of... And here is the last ./ story. Come on guys! Don't get my hopes up like that!

As a side note, I was at Epcot and got to see Xerox's Gyricon (now marketed as 'SmartPaper') up close and personal. The only issue was that the person at the booth barely knew how the stuff worked and did not have so much as a magnet to show it change. Someday...

> Here are some good links for those of you who want to know more...

and they've got funding....

While the Distributed Proofreading Document Guidelines do call for sacrificing many aspects of text formatting, DPed works retain italics (using html-style tags), and boldface (sortof -- all caps for some reason). Double carriage returns indicate paragraph breaks, and line-lengths are preserved. Upper ASCII characters are required, too, so most of the accents and non-English standard characters are preserved. Some book projects have their own special guidelines that differ from the Doc Standards, and several of them include plans to distribute the finished work with high-res scans of illustrations, music staves, whathaveyou included.

How Gutenberg distributes them once DP hands off the text is up to Gutenberg. There are other repositories of texts online (see archive.org ) that do things differently. What's perhaps most important, in terms of preservation, is that a fragile old book has been scanned for posterity. Distribution and portability benefits from its conversion to semi-plain and very plain text. As long as the original scanned images are preserved, they can be revisited if a richer document is required.

Now, if only E Ink would get a product to market!

Storing books online is one thing. Gutenberg also needs readers to be successful. How many readers are willing to read .txt or .pdf files instead of printed material ? Several times I downloaded Gutenberg books, with the intention to read them from laptop or screen lateron. Turns out this is too inconvenient, when compared to paper print.
If only electronic paper would be at 1c a page ...

I thought this interesting technology would also have such first-generation products too...

For some reasons the companies are just dumbass anal about it. They're have been flexible "e-paper" displays since 2000 as trials in federated department stores macys.

2 main companies currently lead the pack, BOTH have production facilities:

http://www.gyriconmedia.com/ Uses beads. berkeley->Xerox-parc->private. production fac. in michigan.

http://www.eink.com/ Uses organics but no where near as small as quantum dot-anything. MIT -> private. Manufacturing facility in Japan.

Actually some eink and any ordinary sheet of paper will work too.

E-paper created by MIT a couple years ago is basically what you describe, but uses negatively charged black particles suspended in laminated plastic. Apparently they can transfer it to pretty much any surface including real paper.

They spun off a company called E-ink which sells their products to a couple retail chains for changable signs. There is a description of the technology here.

I'm pretty sure this was covered by slashdot (or maybe wired) a couple years back.

Here's a tip.

Go to eInk and check out a few of their products. They'll prototype up some stuff for you at a pretty reasonable cost, in the $20k range.

It's thin, it's light, it's power-saving, it's going to be pretty cheap once large-scale manufacturing kicks in. You could seal this stuff under a clear keycap. The major engineering problem, that I can see, is getting all the graphics data to the keys. Based on how the tech works, you'd probably be making a segmented character display, rather than dot-matrix. If you want a dot-matrix graphics display, they have to put an active-matrix array behind the eInk layer to control the dots.

The stuff is also easy to see in bright light...something difficult to achieve with LEDs. Plus, it stays in the state you left it...no blank keyboard when your KeyCapWriter drivers crash on powerup.

If you really insist on them glowing, put a single LED in the key and front-light the eInk with a plastic light guide.

You'll align your product with another emerging technology, probably strengthing both companies' chances (or pinning your chances on their success, whatever way you look at it).

I don't work for eInk; wish I did. They once had an opening for a hardware engineer.

Imagine a sheet of e-paper with touch sensitive layer on top of it on an engineer's desk. The engineer uses a stilus to enter schematic diagrams and navigate the UI. A virtual keyboard program can be started for text entries.

This paradigm would work for a lot of things an average user would use a computer for: web surfing, e-mail, text processing. It would probably be a tough fit for multimedia and gaming, though.

These color electronic ink displays are targeted for commercialization in 2004. Using E Ink's electronic ink technology in components made by TOPPAN, Philips plans to first introduce monochrome displays (ranging from black & white to 4-bit gray scale initially) for handheld devices and portable consumer electronics next year.

Digital Paper/Ink Digital Paper

This new paper, with electronic ink would mean one book could hold all your books. One piece of paper could be your news paper, magazine, even your favorite website. One peice of paper could have all your schoolwork on it.

SympodiumInteractive Lecture technology, This allows students to view the board, as well as move along at their own pace doing their own thing. This would allow a student to learn more due to the class not slowing them down. Its interactive so if a person wants
more detail about something they can get it.

Reason, Logic, Cause and effect.

This is something schools never teach and this is one of the most important things we must teach kids, as well as adults.
Example

Is the power consumption of this technology low enough that eInk and the other related efforts will be obsolete even before they are commercially released?

This thing combined with e-ink would rock!

* Books are readable in bright light with very little eye-strain. LCDs aren't.
eInk is readable in bright light. + backlighting is probably possible for under-the-covers-reading

* You don't have to worry about the batteries dying when you are at a particularly engrossing section.
According to the eInk site a display can run upto two years on two AA batteries

* Books are cheap: dropping a book into the bathtub is annoying, but its not going to put you out a few hundred dollars.
These books could be made so that if you close them they are water and shock resistant.

There are ideas, yeah. They just seem to be, well, hidden in vapor. Or something. They're in the often-publicized, seldom-seen category of fun stuff. I wish that'd change, and soon.

They do have this

E-Ink had *colored* *posters* of their electronic paper product shown in stores.

E-Ink had *colored* *posters* of their electronic paper product shown in stores.

Electronic books and paper have been "just around the corner" for ages. How many times have we heard about this new break through which will make paper useless?

Ahh, but we *will* get there eventually, and probably soon (soon == 5 to 10 years)

First off, paper is easily portable and fairly robust. Moreover, most people prefer to read from paper rather than from screen. This is due to the fact that conventional screens are just tiring for the eyes.

Go look at the tech from E-Ink. Their tech have the same contrast as normal paper (since they use pigments (ie, ink) embedded in sheets.

Also, paper is easy to use, and you can just write on printed paper and make marks in all the colours you have available to you. Easy stuff!

I'm sure it's easy to create an overlay -- one that you plug in to your e-paper and put on top of it. A touch screen that you can use to "write" on the e-paper. Later on they might make special pens that can change the state of the e-paper -- creating marks or erasing them.

Cost is also an issue, e-paper is still way too expensive. Normal paper is cheap and cheerful.

True, but if you can reuse it, to total cost of ownership might be less. Think about why people own cars instead of calling a cab every time -- the cost of each cab ride is MUCH MUCH less than a car + storage of the car + gas + insurance + repairs, yet people buy a lot of cars anyways. If I pay a fixed amount for the special equipment to write/erase these things (a fixed cost, amortized over time), and suppose I pay $10 per sheet (I'm sure it'll get less than this with mass production), then I'd much rather use one of these than a $0.01 sheet of paper. Even if the final cost per sheet is more, the less impact on the environment (creating the paper, stores having to ship truckloads of it around, disposing of trash) is more than worth it.

While the reusability of e-paper is great, it's unclear for publishers how to create a good business model from it. People will be much more prone to copy e-books than normal books (ever seen anybody read a book on photocopied sheets of paper?) Thus, a good business model needs to deal with people copying things.

True. This problem is already happening w/ CDs and soon movies. It will probably be "solved" one way or the other (new business model or draconian laws) by the time the book publishers have to really worry about it.

And people just like to hold some physical publication in their hands. Books, magazines, newspapers, printed paper just feels more real.

E-Ink's paper supposedly feels just like paper (or very close), so people will get used to it. You can fold it, bend it, roll it into a loop, make paper airplanes (although another poster does not think it makes a very good airplane :) ).

And finally, some documents need to be physical to have legal status.

There is already a federal standard for electronic signatures. I'm sure that in the future, we'll be able to "sign" documents using biometric technology (a unique signature given our voice or fingerprint or blood sample, etc).

These are all reasons why, even when technology wise e-paper is mature, society will not be leaping to accept it.

I'm sure one day people of the Earth will be saying, "You know the ancients use to write on sheets of flattened, strained, chemically processed wood pulp? How did their civilization ever survive under all that waste is beyond me.".

Also, in reply to those who says that their e-paper has to be low power....E-Ink's tech does not require power to display the content (it is just pigments suspended in solution)! It only needs power when changing the contents of the paper (which is supplied by the interface).

Low Power-- Electronic ink is a real power miser. It displays an image even when the power is turned off and it's even legible in low light reducing the need for a backlight. This can significantly extend battery life for portable devices.

But I am also looking forward to OLED technology, because of the fast switching times and full color. Now if only they can get the lifetimes of the displays up...

I was just thinking about this today, check out eink, they say they have a product for release in 1st Quater '02.

For twenty years I used to read only usual books since I had no choice, now I only read electronic versions of books, especially if I can get them from electronic library (www.lib.ru) this library is in Russian but it has tens of thousands of titles (half of them are foreign titles) and I do not print the books, I read them from the screen. It would be perfect, but I still am waiting for the really good electronic book to come out, something like what these guys are building: www.eink.com

After he wrote Snow Crash, the ultimate cyberpunk novel, Neil Stephenson wrote The Diamond Age. Its key plot device was a book with leaves of paper that were computer controlled and displayed whatever the person wanted to read at the moment. Thus a single volume was the equivalent of the entire internet or library of congress or whatever. This differed from using a laptop computer because his society was "neo-Victorian" and everybody wanted to be seen with books, not computers, as a kind of status thing. The funny thing is that Electric Ink is on the verge of making this a reality and has already got posters up in department stores...

I first saw this on a Sunday afternoon techie program, think about text flying around, blinking or being added dynamically via a wireless lan connection to a page and you've got the idea of it's coolness (even though its only monochrome).

The thing I like about eInk the most is that its fairly high-res (well, it looks sharp to me) and that it does not require back-lighting, it reads like paper under natural light.

http://www.eink.com/

It would be really cool to see Sony or some other company come up with a thin, flexible PDA. The technology is already there, save for the touch screen part of it.

Two companies, Flexible Circuits and E-Ink have the circuits and display parts down. All we need now is a flexible processor and flexible memory, and we'll have a Palm FleX which you'd be able to fold up or roll up and put in your briefcase.

If anyone knows of a vendor of flexible memory or processors, I'd love to hear of it.

If you've got the cash I assume it could be done.

Check out this site. You could wrap your case in digital paper and do pretty much whatever you wanted. It's only black-n-white now, but color is in the works.

from E Ink FAQ :

Q. Could this be used for animations or video?

A. At today's level of development, electronic ink can change color from 1 to 10 times per second-already good enough for animation. To allow video rates, electronic ink would have to shift at 60 or more times per second. Scientists at E Ink are exploring advances in this area as part of ongoing research and development efforts.

with such a refresh rate a CRT wouldn't be usable for anything (because of a flashing picture), but the paper LCD would be suitable for low-framerate applications (not for video) and the picture should be rock-solid..

http://www.eink.com/company/releases/toppan_cfa.jp g

It's not in the article, but a photo of it wrapped around a pencil is on the site.

Here's a closeup

Personally, I'd like a bit more resolution, at least for reading. But maybe they'll make b/w versions for that?
It would sure be nicer than reading on my ipaq.

Here's a closeup

Personally, I'd like a bit more resolution.

According to their technology page, there are both white and black particles, oppositely charged. Given that just an electric field is applied, how do you only move some of the particles?

Given that they have white particles, I wonder why they can't have particles of different colors, rather than using filters.

As to your other post, it's a good point that the particles will attract each other, so that's not an issue.

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