Slashdot Mirror
Domain: eink.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to eink.com.
Comments · 171
-
Re:Questions I Have
E-Ink has a picture of a functioning prototype demonstrated at a recent conference
-
Re:Questions I HaveI've not seen the colour display but I have been able to take a close look at their banner blue and white display. It had letters about 100mm high and must have been about a 1m long. It ran from a PP3 battery and was controlled via a serial port. The update rate was about once every 2 secs but I believe this was more to enable people to read the messages more than anything else. The clarity was fantastic and it really did look like it had been printed. I was impressed anyway
It did suffer from some image ghosting which meant that every 4 images are so it had to go to all blue and then all white to get rid of this problem. This took about 1 sec which made me believe that the max update was about 2Hz. Not really suitable for connecting to your laptop but then this was over a year ago and they may have been able to improve on this since then.
The E-ink site is at www.eink.com but I guess you guessed that.
-
Is there a negative on the back?
Looking at the image on the web site, it appears they put charges on both the top and bottom layers. Does that mean their "layer of circuitry" is transparent? If so, there'd be a negative of the image on the back side, which would be uh, something.
Or maybe the charge is only on one side. It seems like a charge on both sides would be redundant. After all, the same charges would repel (pushing them to the top) and the opposite charges would attract (pulling them to the bottom.
-Erik -
Links
-
Links
-
Re:The real ultimate display
I've heard of two types of "electronic paper", one uses black & white charged balls (developed at parc) the other uses capsules filled with ink and little white charged particles. ("electronic ink"
-
Re:Why Color?
MIT has some research on some kind of electric ink - it looks like an ordinary paper but you can light [the equivalent of] pixels. Last I heard, they only had greyscale.
A few links:
Salon article
E-Ink
More info should be available at www.media.mit.edu, but it seems to be down for the moment. -
OEL or OLED?They just changed the acronymn. Do a search for OLED and you will find lots of other places doing the same thing -- examples:
- EInk
- Ritek
- RollTronics
- Universal Display
- Cambridge Display
- Kodak
- and check out this page at Stanford Research
-
Reducing power consumption and other things
What will be really interesting is when electronic ink technology matures enough to be used in a notebook. That will do as much or more than Transmeta for reducing power.
As far as reducing consumption in drives, I bet it's only a matter of time before those brains at IBM quit messing with glass platters and find some way to significantly help power.
If I'm remembering correctly from the big coming out party, Transmeta said "up to 8 hours". Who knows exactly what condition they intended would reach 8 hours? A reasonable effort to lower consumption elsewhere? For one thing, Transmeta did reply that Toshiba's notebook was too heavy. Also, the comparisons Transmeta gave at the time obviously was to the then-current market chips. At the time, things like SpeedStep were just entering the lines for Intel and AMD.
Transmeta's power claims must be somewhat reasonable. With the discussions between AMD and Transmeta, it appears that AMD would be conceding at least a niche (iApps or more?) in the market to Transmeta, and help reaching 1 Ghz would be a step towards compensating for the per-clock slowness of the Crusoe which should have been (and mostly was) expected at the first mention of code-morphing.
On the code-morphing side, Transmeta loses some speed initially but anticipates a likely move away from x86 so long term it looks good. For example, what happens if (huge if) Itanium catches on and trickles down to the consumer level in the long run? The VLIWs of Itanium may actually be closer to native for the Crusoe than x86 is, and if not it's not losing speed that it had on x86. I seriously doubt the success of Itanium, but sooner or later someone's going to find a way to move us off x86. Actually, my personal thoughts are that no one will make the jump until they do it either with Transmeta-style code-morphing plus native code availability or something like AMD's approach to SledgeHammer (virtually dual procs I hear).
-
Re:Stephen KingThe company to talk to is Eink. Right now, they do signage, but according to talks I've heard by the people there, they are also looking at the PDA & digital book market. Current issues to do that are with production & color, from what I understand.
I got a demo of their product at a talk - you could read it even when tilted almost 90 degrees! Clear, bright text. The guy had a simple 4 letter sign that changed every few seconds, all powered by a AA battery. Turns out it only takes power for switching the colors.
As for looking at it hours on end, we're talking millions (or at least lots of thousands) of little spheres per square inch - the resolution is limited by the circuits, and the spheres on the edge of a line turn partially white / blue (current colors), sort of like anti-aliasing. Readable like paper.
And, since it's painted on, it's flexible (you could bend the demo sign, although it was about 1/8" thick as signs aren't designed to be flexible). Imagine a computer screen you roll up!
jeff -
Go E-INK...
Anyone know why E-ink is still selling only Point-of-sale type displays? www.eink.com They were claiming paper replacements in 95 but I still haven't seen em yet.
Must admit, this is the best looking webpad yet. The cylinder on top gives it balance and orientation and still makes a roomy place to stuff more electronics/antenna/battery without affecting a particular handedness.
--- -
It's a fab processThis isn't a printing process. It's another way to do IC fabrication. Flat-panel displays are usually made by processes that are too much like semiconductor photolithography. That's an expensive process per unit area, and for displays, you want area, not density. For a display, you want large area and low density, so printing looks attractive.
It looks like Epson is on the right track, but is still having trouble with the blue LEDs. If they're concentrating on cell phone displays, they probably have a high cost per unit area. (If they'd cracked that problem, they'd be showing wall-sized TVs.)
Another company making displays by printing is E-ink. Their process is different, and involves tiny balls in fluid moved by electrostatic drivers in the substrate. Writing rates are slow; this is for signs, not TV. The site is heavy on hype; skip the irrelevant Flash animations and go for the data sheet.
-
It's a fab processThis isn't a printing process. It's another way to do IC fabrication. Flat-panel displays are usually made by processes that are too much like semiconductor photolithography. That's an expensive process per unit area, and for displays, you want area, not density. For a display, you want large area and low density, so printing looks attractive.
It looks like Epson is on the right track, but is still having trouble with the blue LEDs. If they're concentrating on cell phone displays, they probably have a high cost per unit area. (If they'd cracked that problem, they'd be showing wall-sized TVs.)
Another company making displays by printing is E-ink. Their process is different, and involves tiny balls in fluid moved by electrostatic drivers in the substrate. Writing rates are slow; this is for signs, not TV. The site is heavy on hype; skip the irrelevant Flash animations and go for the data sheet.
-
Nothing new...This idea has been bouncing around for a decade (or more) now...
Doesn't everyone remember the dozens of articles written years ago about that guy in the MIT Media Lab who had the exact same idea (called electronic ink, then)...All the pop. mags picked it up.
Even check out the corporate spinoff: www.eink.com and also check out the neat-o simple flash anim off of the "Technology" section...Old idea, new company trying it...
-
Score 5 (Insightful)... How about "Flamebait"?Wow, here we go around the "rms is a communist" maypole again. Karzan tells rms to "shut up" instead of actually debating his points, and finally ends with some demogogary about us all working in coal mines. Riiiigggghhhhht. Next time you want to call rms a communist, why don't you read what he has to say on the issue and debate those specific points instead of flat out accusing him of being a communist. Oh, and calling people who disagree with your views on intellectual property law "anti-intellectual-property cronies" pretty much rules out informed and reasoned debate. IMO this post doesn't deserve a single moderation up... but today I'm no moderator.
So, let's deal with your assertions:
Ok, first of all, eBooks are NOT going to replace real books; people like paper books. Books are static information, and people like to have an object associated with that information, something with a smell and a feel that reminds them of the last time they read it, etc. I'm sure this has all been said before anyway.
What a ridiculous assumption. Paper is expensive to manufacture and dangerous to the environment, especially considering how much of it we throw into landfills after a single use (never mind the toxic waste released during manufacture). The limit to electronic print distribution is the initial cost of a reader plus the limited display technology of current readers on the market. Don't expect a Palm III to become the standard for electronic newspapers. But new display technology coming down the road makes your point moot:- Xerox PARC's Electronic Paper This technology takes two plastic sheets and immerses tiny beads, one side coated black the other white, inside a wax-like substrait sandwiched between the two sheets. With a small electric current any arbitrary ball twists in the substrait and thus changes it's color. This technology should allow for a flexible 8 1/2 x 11" sheet which can represent at least 300dpi... easily good enough for an electronic newspaper or book.
- Then there's AT&T's eink, another technology which promises similar display capabilities.
Regarding rms's opinions on Copyright law... did you read the article he wrote? Did he say that all copyright law should be abolished? Did he say that all capitalism should be abolished? Did he suggest we would be better off working in Coal mines because that's real work? I sure didn't see anything like that in what he wrote.
Personally, given the DMCA and subsection 1201(a)(1) I'm seriously concerned that we're heading toward a society where even basic "fair use" rights for libraries, citizens conducting scholarly research, and the right to read an item multiple times are in serious jeopardy. Given the technical restrictions imposed by 1201(a)(1), a publisher could limit a reader to a specific city (just stick a GPS chip in that ebook reader), a specific user (just stick a fingerprint or retina scanner on the reader), and even have the publication wipe itself out upon first reading. As others (and myself in a previous post in this thread) point out, this could herald a real Orwellian world in which newspapers and publications could rewrite history after the fact; destroying the public historical record. And what happens if libraries, and their users, aren't exempt from paying a license fee for each access of an electronic publication?
And finally, where did Adam Smith ever claim that Capitalism depended on intellectual property law? That's a pretty ridiculous claim on the surface. - Xerox PARC's Electronic Paper This technology takes two plastic sheets and immerses tiny beads, one side coated black the other white, inside a wax-like substrait sandwiched between the two sheets. With a small electric current any arbitrary ball twists in the substrait and thus changes it's color. This technology should allow for a flexible 8 1/2 x 11" sheet which can represent at least 300dpi... easily good enough for an electronic newspaper or book.
-
So it's still vapor-hardware
I saw this in PM last year. Possibilities??? e-ink
-
Re:digital ink
-
What about E ink?
Could be old news to most, but EInk is developing a high resolution display that promises to be closer to the look of paper, use less power, and be cheaper to manufacture than LCDs. It seems a bit pie-in-the-sky compared to evolutionary improvements to LCD technology, but I hope they can get it to work. It would be interesting to see the two (actually three) technologies side by side some day. I want both: LCD for movies and games, EInk for reading, writing, browsing, etc. Then again I can't imagine what it would look like to watch a movie on a display that looks like printed paper. It might look really cool.
-
Re:I like books too.Anybody have any news on the 'ePaper' that PARC developed and MIT is working on?
e-ink (Inc.) is working on it
-
Re:About time
You're probably thinking of this article:
http://www.popsci.com/news/12131998.e ink.html
It's about "E-Ink", a startup out of MIT that is making technology which sounds very similar to the XEROX stuff. For more articles and info about them, check out their website:
http://www.eink.com
Shawn
stsamuel@post.harvard.edu -
Digital Paper....
the MIT crew can be found on e ink. Seems they're a bit vaporware'ish, though...
