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Full Color Electronic Paper a Reality
alumniac.com writes "Good riddance to backlighting, full color electronic paper is set to take the market by storm. On another note, this will add a lot more zing to my paper airplanes." This is a little light on the technical details but it's an interesting read, especially because this isn't as far away from hitting the market as a lot of the stuff we see around here.
Dude, that is soo 1897.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
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I noticed
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I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
Does the EU then consider silicon dioxide to be a hazard on beaches worldwide?
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
The publishing industry is probably drooling over the opportunity to publish EBooks using digital paper. And why not? With the data in digital format, it looks and quacks more like "software" than like a book. Enter the DMCA, "Intellectual Property" lawyers, and all the bad things that come with commercial software.
No more secondhand book shops, no more giving that book to a friend when you're done with it, no more libraries. You won't buy books anymore -- you'll buy licenses to read them.
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Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
It should've been labelled "Funny".
.sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
Cuz it is. =-)
".sig,
".sig,
No it's not either on or off. Its intensity is continuously varied by some electrostatic process (attracting charged white particles to the top or to the bottom of a black fluid). Plus, the output from each such object is filtered red, green or blue. This gives you a continuously varying intensity of each of the primary colours, from total black up to some maximum value (which could produce a light shade of grey, but I don't see how it can produce white).
That's not what it looks like. Where do you get these ideas from? Not the article, surely. There is only one sort of charged particle, and it is white, and it floats in a black fluid. Colours are generated by filters which are completely static and separate from this machinery.
And another thing, oppositely charged particles most certainly will want to mix, thoroughly, since they attract. To separate them, you need an electric field, but a weak field can only weakly separate them (you need to balance the lower energy due to the field with the higher energy internally due to your separating them).
The reason you have yellow paint is because it is impractical to make a fine mesh of red and green paint spots every time you want yellow. But it is possible and it is additive. There's no way light from a red spot will subtract light from a separate green spot. But when you mix the two, then of course the subtraction happens.
A very small electric field will do very little to separate them (they attract each other too strongly). A very large field will separate them totally (their mutual attraction isn't good enough to overcome it). An intermediately strong field will partially separate them. Clear?
Think of it this way: if you mix green and red paint, you'll get an ugly mess. But if you make a fine array of alternating green paint spots and red spots, you'll actually end up with something like yellow. Similarly, mixing cyan and yellow paint make green, but an alternating array of those colours will make something greyish (maybe tinged with blue or yellow, but not green).
It seems to me that the surface would need to be highly reflecting, indeed, to reproduce white; but RGB the system is, not CMYK.
When you shine light through a red filter, it absorbs everything except red.
When you shine light through a green filter, it absorbs everything except green.
If you put the filters on top of each other, it absorbs everything (or would if the filters were perfect). This is subtractive.
Similarly, if you mix red paint and green paint, the result will absorb both red and green. But if you have separated dots of both, it will emit both red and green. It's additive. There's no way a red dot can subtract light from a spatially separated green dot.
Try thinking about the physics, rather than the terminology. Whether the source of light is in front or behind is irrelevant, what matters is only what's reaching your eyes. (Incidentally, this whole RGB stuff is an approximation made possible by biology, and not perfect: eg, the blue green line of mercury light can't be reproduced by RGB.)
Or content "tailored" to the prevailing community standards. So we don't have to expose our kids to any pesky thought-provoking ideas we don't approve of.
Just junk food for thought...
If/when we ever develop truly useful nanotech this will easily come to pass... along with just about every other dream of that sort.. Nanotech on a level that can rearrange matter on an subatomic scale could potentially solve MANY of our current problems, from pollution (nanites that change pollutants into O2 for example), food could be created almost effortlessly, nanites in the body could keep us VERY healthy... There are downsides too.. they could be used VERY effectively to create a doomsday weapon.. or make our problems even worse.. like a nanotechnological disease... (ala Deus-Ex)
I was thinking of maybe using chemically-powered nanotech... there's a lot of energy in just about any matter, you just need to find a way to get it out Maybe some sort of quantum-power would work too... at those sizes it could be possible to take advantage of some of the sub-atomic forces to generate power...
I bet you hit it on the head....FSCK'n publishers are jealous because the recording industry has such a stranglehold on music that they want to own EVERY PRINTED WORD.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
u r dum
Dude, when you square the area you have to square all operations you do to it. So one third of 90,000 /sq.in. is actually 10,000. It's crazy but do the math(1/3^2). So you get roughly 100 dpi.
You don't exist. Go away. --SysVinit Halt
I doubt shaking it would erase the image: as long as the correct electrode is still charged, it should attract the bead back to its proper location.
I wonder how long it holds the charge for, though?
Crumpling the paper would probably ruin it along the creases. And, it would be a whole lot more expensive than a sheet of paper, too.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Which is thick for paper, but pretty thin compared to anything else.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
As long as you're not right on top of it, 80 dpi is certainly good enough to use.
You could probably put solar cells on the top of the frame and a pager network download mechanism inside and run it without any outside connection, especially if it only has to update every 10 minutes or so.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I thought from your first post that you might have been in a print shop, where you were merely proofing other people's jobs that were sent to you electronically.
The types of jobs I see being threatened by working high-res e-paper are things like "we're the marketing staff of XYZ Corp, and we need light box transparancies made up for a convention at the very last minute, 'cause we're just not very organized." A printer nowadays makes thousands off of chumps like that, albiet at the cost of increased job pressure. With e-paper, the companies will be able to DIY at the last minute and actually save money.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
But will the client still need you?
If your dream comes true, it will wreak havoc on the printing industry, because users will be able to DIY a lot more. There will still be a need for print, but there will certainly be less need, and some types of jobs will completely go away.
Of course, you could get into the digital paper support industry...
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Because a pixel on your monitor can represent millions of gradations of color, whereas a dot on your LJIII can only be one of four colors. Gradations of color provide perceived resolution too.
no, we should teach them to ignore it, by dismissing it as something not even worth spending a second of brain-CPU on, as naturally as possible. if you don't expose children to advertising at all, they won't know how to cope with it, and they'll fall for it much more when they eventually grow up and see it.
Well, I've heard this since 2 years ago.
It's great idea. I don't no longer to worry about
bad vision. Paper is much better than CRT/LCD monitors for your eyes.
But I wonder if it works great for fast-changing
images like QuickTime movies.
How much will it cost, anyway?
I would rather pay for it even though it is twice
as expensive as current CRT monitors than buy
inexpensive CRT monitors. ( 17" )
Will it be manufactured by Samsung, Sony, etc?
Because Samsung is the company which has #1 market share ( including OEM ), if the product is to be successful, it would be great if Samsung makes it.
I doubt it would react to a magnetic field, but it would react strongly to an electric field. Statics would be a problem.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
The B&W has been around five years from Xerox
and MIT. Spin-off companies have demoed at
conventions. The display is not really paper,
but plastic about as thin as those "for sale"
signs you can buy at a hardware store. They
basically can go anywhere you'd put a thin
plastic sheet, so dynamic store window and real
bulletin board displays are an obvious use.
Any you could have notebbook/tablet/ebook portable
computers less than a millimeter thick too.
The article referred to DPI (Dots per Inch), which isn't the same as PPI (Pixels Per Inch), where dot = there or not there, pixel = shades of grey/colour. The article didn't say one way or the other, but in the absence of other evidence, I'd have to assume that we're talking about 1-bit dots here (anybody know otherwise?). You'd have combine a couple dozen dots to form intermediate tones (halftoning). So it's almost comperable to a CRT *if* all you want to do is 8-colour (3 bit) non-antialiased text.
-spc
Not nearly as well, by the sound of it.
So at present, the real value to this stuff is that it doesn't have to be backlit (and, I suspect, uses less power as a result), not that you can make paper airplanes out of it, as alumnniac writes.
What they need to do is to place a color gradient on the ball...RGB around the equator, and black and white at the poles. Then orient the ball instead of just flipping it. That gets around the filter problem (of course now you need to orient it in two dimensions, but there are permanent electrets as well as permanent magnets, so that might be possible. (Or maybe there's a better way.)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
P.S.: I claim all patent rights (HAH!) on the foregoing idea. So nobody can use it without my say-so.
Sorry to reply to myself, but I just had to say that.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Please do remember to consider energetics. Many of the more far-out nano-tech ideas will remain forever impossible because they just don't consider that. And there are a lot of possible answers, so I'm not shooting it down.
... well, everything has it's drawbacks.)
My favorite answer is the develop something analogous to cholrophyl that works on a certain (selected) wavelength of radio. Then everything is tuned so that the radio-noise that it emits is on that frequency (possibly in that set of frequencies). This would give a limited amount of free energy for nano-tech, but when you wanted them to get busy, you would need to fire up a transmitter and beam it onto the selected area. (Shouldn't need to be a very energetic beam, but it would be needed.)
Actually, this would minimize some of the potential dangers of nanotech, also. Many of the nightmares are based on chemically powered mites. Some of them on cholorophyll. Radio wave eaters have an obvious (if dismal) method of control. (And then because you nanos were designed for use in the FCC controlled air-space, you won't be able to use them in the EUC
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Except they are not using a single ball. They are using a lot of little balls. The half-black half-white thing is what the xerox spinoff gyrecon? is doing.
My guess is they haven't figured out how to place different colored dye capsules precise enough on the paper. Getting the alignment between the wires, and capsules could be tricky, but doable. They may also be trying to come up with a truely multi color capsel. That is one with all three colors in it. That would be a control problem. I can't see a way to control it. The filter method is hokey in my mind, but it works.
Looks like my bosses old assistant was ahead of her time when she was tip-exing the mistakes on screen.
The next thing you'll have is screen friendly erasers.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
IMHO (and I'm sure there's a really good technical reason for this), they missed the boat using a RGB color filter over a b/w pixel. Wouldn't it be much better to have three different-colored pixels -- cyan, magenta and yellow, perhaps?
They would still have the 1/3 of the resolution problem, though that seems pretty unavoidable with this kind of approach. But at least they'd have a truly CMYK reflective electronic display.
I suppose the really good techincal reason not to use CMY pixels has to do with the problem of assembly. Would keeping track of which pixels were which color be much harder than producing the filter they use in the current setup?
-Esme
Ok, this is all very nice, and I'm sure it'll get some limited use, but I don't expect to see it in widespread use in offices and whatnot. Why? Because the whole point of paper isn't so much as a display device, but a modifiable display device. I.E. people will want to write on it, and guess what will happen when someone draws their Bic across this.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
You actually could. I recall reading in Popular Mechanincs a while back that one of the prototype applications was changing signage in department stores. Apparently they produced some poster size prototypes (monochrome at this time) that could be hung from the ceilings.
So one would seem to believe that you can produce massive displays with this. What it would cost... That's probably another story.
From how it sounds in the article, it seems like they just used this filter technology, because it already existed and would allow them to get to market quicker.
I too think that using different colored dyes in the capsules would be an ideal solution. Probally make for brighter colors, and would definatly present the ability to use the CYMK color model.
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This is the first I've heard of this.
Does anyone have any more information? Like refresh rate. How long does it take to turn one "page" into another?
I was impressed with the 300 dpi. But for true printed work, that is a little low, I have a 1200 color laser at my house now. But for a display that would be nice. Until I saw at the end, that in color because of the filters you are limited to 80 dpi.
Oh well.
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If the surface was truely changing color, then it would have to use the subtractive primary colors.
But from how it sounds, the light passes through a filter, and is either reflected by capsule behind it, if it is white, or the light is absorbed if the capsule is black.
If the capsule is white, the light is reflected back up through the filter. By grouping the additive primaries together (RGB) you then pick what combined wave lenghts are coming back to the eyes.
So it is still pretty much color LCD, with a reflective background, but now instead of making the pixels opaque to be black, you just turn off the reflection behind a the pixel.
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http://www.eink.com/company/releases/toppan_cfa.jp g
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
The display may match the room lighting better, but it's still RGB, not CMYK.
Once an image has been produced it will remain visible even with the power switched off.
Whoa, not good. That means I can't just hit the power switch and pretend I was done for the evening when the girlfriend walks in. Might have to actually run another application and switch over to it. Not good.
On the other hand, this could mean a self-updating Hustler magazine. Hmmm. You could pull out that ten-year-old magazine and see what the chick looks like these days - see what all those years of tanning beds got her. Heh.
What's your damage, Heather?
they mention that for now they are rigid and they hope to be able to replace paper IN TEH FUTARE..
yes that means that the article and such are mis-named, but whatever.
SIR YOU MUST LEARN TO READS!!!! THIS TEKNOWLADJEE IS USELESS TO YUO ANYWAYS MISTAR DOESn"T READ!!
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
withering my intuition,...
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/
say hello when you visit.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
... the power socked on the side of your ultra-thin laptop was fiddly.
Bob.
Geez, I'm not sure that warranted "Troll"... It is a valid question about the type of products this thing will be good for... They specifically mention targeting cell phones, PDAs, etc. It doesn't sound like the technology would admit a backlight, which those things need. However, a built in "side light" might work... Something that just scatters light through the plastic covering might generate acceptable luminosity.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Wow. I was moderated a troll... And here I thought people would find it funny. Or maybe insightful. In any event I would consider it something to think about if it truly won't work with backlighting. My Palm is bad enough in semi dark lighting. Not being able to turn on the light would make is next to useless.
;)
Ah well... The jury have spoken.
Well... Donno about you guys. But I am off to buy stocks in companies making flashlights RIGHT NOW! I can't WAIT to have the same trouble using my portable in dark places as I would have reading a book...
Anyone tried to read with a flashlight in the mouth or balancing it on the ear to read in a car? Or maybe holding it with one hand while struggling to turn the pages without dropping the book or the flashlight?
I wonder if how long it will take before it becomes a feature of portables that they have a build in telescope arm with a halogen light on the end. And for the first half year of selling these babies the good deals will include a MagLight and an extra set of AA's.
Oh well. Not all steps forward can truly be all forward.
With this e-Ink, is a pixel either on or off (monochrome), or can it have range of values between on and off, (greyscale)?
If it is the latter, then 300dpi is great, and I can't wait for greyscale PDAs to arrive using this technology. If not, then the technology still has a long way to go, as greyscale will have to be simulated using stipples.
I suspect it is the latter, otherwise colour would be pretty crap and ZX Spectrum style (8 colours!). All they have to do to increase the colour resolution is make the pixels thinner (1/3rd the width), not smaller overall. Even if they could only halve the width, you would have 150dpi colour displays, which would still be neat.
Okay, it will be CMYK, not RGB, silly me. Reflective!
Still, if the device is currently 300dpi, and you arranged the CMYK as so:
[1pixel]
CCCCMMMM
CCCCMMMM
CCCCMMMM
YYYYKKKK
YYYYKKKK
YYYYKKKK
Then you will have 150dpi out of the bag anyway. You could get some pretty nifty sub-pixel antialiasing with such an arrangement, as you could double the resolution in both the X and Y axis - LCD subpixel antialiasing does triple the resolution in the X axis only.
Actually, it is RGB, as the colour filters are filtering, not reflecting. However, when real colour e-Ink comes out, then the above CMYK pattern would work fine.
Pixel shading should be possible. An e-Ink capsule (pixel) is a sphere with lots of black particles in it, that are either attracted to the electrode, or repelled. It stands to reason that there must be a way to get intermediate levels (half of the particles on one side for grey, etc)... Just how many levels is possible depends on the amount of particles in each e-Ink.
No you won't - you will end up with an ugly brownish colour whatever way you mix it. Hence the existence of yellow paint, which you mention in the next sentence!
CMYK is for reflective media (magazines, etc), RGB is for emittive media (TVs, monitors, lights). If you are reflecting white, and then want to filter that into colours, you use an RGB filter, because the light is coming from behind, not reflecting off it (hence the word filter). This is known as a reflective backlight (or something, I forget).
Shine a red light and a green light at the same spot on a (white) wall - you will get yellow reflected back at you. RGB is additive, CMYK is subtractive.
Play around in the Gimp or Photoshop to see what happens in additive vs. subtractive modes.
mumbles something about very dark yellows being emitted when red and green dots are placed close together, but not mixed. Still, yellow ain't dark dull yellow is it? That final sentence was playing on me. What is the difference between a red emitted light, and a red reflected light? :)
So how can a mixture of red and blue dots reflect yellow light, whatever the resolution? The blue dot is actually absorbing yellow light! The red dot is reflecting yellow, because red is a mixture of magenta and yellow.
I will tell you, it doesn't, and two computer graphics courses at university and normal art qualifications tell me this. Yet you got +3 Insightful. Gah.
Have you heard of primary colours? Yellow, Cyan and Magenta? These colours are subtractive.
What you are saying is correct with additive colours - lights in other words. Put a red light and a green light close enough together, and it will appear yellow.
Banner ads aside - that's an interesting idea: the electronic school book. Never goes out of date. Plug it into the desk socket and zonk - history as of ten minutes ago.
Or a set of electronic encyclopedias. Er, for when you can't get to the net.
One thing that wasn't noted in the article - how sturdy is it? You fold/bend/crinkle paper and it still can be read. How well will this hold up when it ends up in the hands of the lowest common denominators?
The article did mention the trick that makes this work: suspend a tiny white bead in what amounts to black "ink", electrodes all through the paper will create a charge that will either make the bead come to the surface (white pixel) or push it down into the soup (black pixel). Lots of beads means lots of resolution.
I imagine that crumpling the paper would not only destroy the electrodes but give your hands an annoying ink stain.
My question - how well does the bead stick in it's programmed posistion? If I shake this like an Etch-a-Sketch, does the image fade?
Before you get all wet about the prospects of electronic paper you might want to take a glance at all the patents E Ink holds.
"This revolution will be patented."
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Scott Brady
I like vegetarians, they taste great!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Pepsi Fish sounds great, but where would the pull tab go?
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microsoft, it's what's for dinner
bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com
it's a sig, wtf?
This is great, now MacDonalds will be able to market to children right on their textbooks. We can have scrolling banner ads with history, about how WalMart founded the west! Then in algebra we can learn how Coke is better than Pepsi!
This will rock!!
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microsoft, it's what's for dinner
bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com
it's a sig, wtf?
...considering today's CRTs only have around 100 dpi (25.4 mm/i divided by the average CRT dot-pitch of .26 mm equals 97.69 dpi).
- Milo Hyson
You know who's going to jump on this, don't you?
Charmin
Combine it with Playboy and you have a whole new protocol: PTP (Porn via TP)
HONEY?! What the *hell* were you looking at???
Blog,Twitter
True.... Just think of the copy protection techinques.... combine it in a book with some of those paper batteries that were mentioned awhile ago, some photo sensors, etc. Imagine how easy it would be to implement photo-copier/scanner protection.
I could also see companies using this for protected and trade secret documents. If you could add a small gps, you could even make it erase itself if it was ever removed from the building.
Definately some interesting and scary potentionals.
So how does tripling the dot-count to achieve colour reduce the dpi by about a factor of 3? Shouldn't that be a factor of sqrt(3)?
The article probably just glossed over it. The pixels are 300x300/sqin, but the colored filter overlay can be 300x80/sqin. You'd think 300x100, but the filter reduces the resolution further to keep the colors separate, I would guess. Maybe they just enforce 80x80sqin for square pixel mapping.
I'm also not sure which way you'd cut the resolution, horizontal or vertical. Most LCDs pack the filter horizontally (columns of RGB), but they stick to squarish pixels. This would be an application for that Microsoft color-edge mapping algorithm that takes the hue-vs-luminance (or here, hue-vs-value since it's subtractive) tradeoff into account.
[
I would think they could compartmentalize the areas with ink inside the sheets. They could make pre-folding sections that would have creases already there. as long as there are contacts running along the edge of the sheet to connect everything it "should" work. At the resolutions they are talking about I wouldn't expect the creases to be anymore annoying than the support wires in most flat screen CRTs.
Is this the end yet?...How 'bout now...how 'bout now...how 'bout now?
I thought it was funny. Thanks.
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
thousands of dollars of equipement?... um, most stores i go to have zon machines and are online already... and like that matters to the government anyway.
"clerks can run the ...DL through a card reader and confirm that the birthday associated with that DL number matches the one on the card"
sure... but my point is the cashier can't confirm that the picture on the card --which can be altered-- is the correct photo for that DL number with a simple card swipe. An electronic paper DL would be able pull the correct photo from a database [just like a web page] to match the swiped card.
supremely illogical? well, i do read slashdot...
<---[singularity sig]
Imagine showing your id to buy beer, it being run thru like a credit card, and the card automatically updating its 'display' face to the cashier showing that indeed you who you say you are, and that you are old enough to buy beer. Hmm.
<---[singularity sig]
n0b0dy c4n h4x0r 4 gib50n!!
--Clay
Here's a closeup
Personally, I'd like a bit more resolution.
"Source... The Final Frontier" -- keepersoflists.org
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.
"Source... The Final Frontier" -- keepersoflists.org
If it's animated, you know you've gotta have sound too. In stereo. It's gonna be hell browsing mags at the store ;*)
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
This would be my take and I would only assume they are making this screen with the fewest changes possible to their current design. The most optimal color Display they could make would be like
r g b r g b r g b
r g b r g b r g b
r g b r g b r g b
r g b r g b r g b
r g b r g b r g b
r g b r g b r g b
Which given their current monochrome model is 300DPI should yield ~100 DPI. Which I'm pretty sure would create a screen that based off the distance from the r to b would create some distortion in the image. Like streaching it 3 times it's normal width
So you want to tighten up the range of elements like so
r g b r g b r g
b r g b r g b
r g b r g b r g
b r g b r g b
r g b r g b r g
b r g b r g b
This yields ~94DPI. Which leaves us with the following possible solution.
r g r g r g r g
b b b b
r g r g r g r g
b b b b
r g r g r g r g
b b b b
Which based off their 300DPI product should yield ~75DPI. Which should be optimal for viewing as everything lines up nicely.
I'm not an expert but this seems to be logical And it explains the less than 100 DPI resolution they have given.
Now that we've got electronic PAPER, are we going to have electronic SILLY PUDDY?!
Education is the silver bullet.
With electronic paper we will deprive a whole generation of Americans the experience of stretching Beetle Bailey's face to gross and distorted proportions.
Many of these troubled children will go on to live lives in a state of confusion and will take careers as politicians.
It seems to me that every point on the page doesn't reflect some fraction of the light falling on it (whatever colours that pixel won't reflect.) Even if you turn every pixel on, something like 2/3 of the light won't be reflected, and you will get a mid-gray at best.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
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.
wot no sig
In this case it's not about printing something onto the paper to absorb the incident light, it's about filtering the colour of the reflected light. CYMK stands for Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and blacK. If they printed black filters of the page it would always be black. With the RGB filter a spot will either reflect Red, Green or Blue light, or it will not reflect at all, and the colour will be formed by additive lighting, rather than subtractive absorbtion.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Or can I staple it to my wall? I could have changing wallpaper... And not any of this desktop wall paper nonsense... Actual changing wallpaper...
...Uh-oh, parents stopping by, better change the wallpaper from Jenna Jameson to, um... star trek...
How will this stuff be used in the porn industry... You know it will be, but how, and when?
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
I think this will be good when they pump the resolution up to having color at 300dpi or better. It will be nice to lower the cost of Laptop and PDA screens though. These guys look like they will beat organic lcd's to market so lets see what happens.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
With a paper "lcd" monitor I will have to illuminate my screen just as I would a book. How strange. . . and how devasting to cave dwellers such as myself. . .
Why on earth would I want a 300 page novel where one page could contain the whole book. I supposed that I can imagine a magazine where pages contain video, not just words and photos but I already have a couple of versions of that - my computer and my television. The TV picture is still a bit better but the laptop with wireless modem is closer to truly asynchronous.
I didn't see anything about size restrictions. I could see using this to wallpaper my room -- a 10 square meter screen might come close to what I want, once they get the resolution up there.
What are the real applications? Live video display on id- and credit-cards? Blueprints that can display and calculate? Smart x-rays (once resolution jumps 3 orders of magnitude or more)?
Almost anything makes sense except books!
Money could be printed with electronic paper. Even when the worst inflation hits (It's all good - and you know it!) Your hundred dollar bills would all of a sudden become 10s. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA :) HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
You can't handle the truth.
When everybody's clothing is online, the greatest hacker's challenge of the time would be hacking into central clothing processors and switching the colour off completely, trying to make the clothing transparrent.
Imagine the metaphysical and psychological ramiffications on the above metioned idea...
You can't handle the truth.
in a short while we should be able to import clothing from Taiwan made completely from flexible e-paper. That way we could follow fashion and latest news much more precisely. The news could be downloaded into your e-paper jacket and printed on the sleeves. Advertisements could be printed on our backs... Scrolling messages in Taiwaneese would be the latest fashion outcry... Why Taiwan? Just like the Armaggedon character said: American parts, Russian parts - all made in Taiwan.
You can't handle the truth.
(Now if only they could make a CPU, hard drive, and mouse in the size and shape of a pencil...)
--
There was a Slashdot article some time ago (which I couldn't find) that referred to a Magic 8-Ball disection.
The Magic 8-Ball technology is similar to "electronic paper" - the ball is filled with an oily blue/black fluid, and contains a plastic icosahedron (polyhedron with 20 triangular sides.) The message appears when the plastic icosahedron floats to the top and a side (usually) presses against the "window" to reveal the message.
In "electronic paper", an electric charge controls the display instead of gravity; I suspect gravity may cause the image to fade over time as it pulls the microcapsules back to the inky depths.
Yeah, well, one word: VHS.
There is, technically, emmitted light. The light passed in unobstructed and then is reflected through a filter to get the color, versus print where ... eww ... I see the problem here. Both are *forms* of subtraction.
;)
However, that's not how you made the decision, it's much more simple: is the base color black or white? In this instance, it's black, and then bits of white are activated and then filtered, much like a CRT, which is RGB, and thus, additive. Paper defaults to white, where bits of color are added to bring it closer to black, hence subtractive. So this is additive technology and thus, appropriately RGB. Hence them using it.
It's not in the article, but a photo of it wrapped around a pencil is on the site.
About a year ago, the refresh rate for an E-Ink branded display and similar systems was "0 Hz". This due to the fact that the charging speed of the electrostatic grid called for a page to be built in memory and then drawn on the display all at once, instead of dynamically, pixel by pixel. I remember reading that this was a major obstacle as far as E-Ink engineers were concerned, but I figure they must have overcome it if they plan on making laptop screens etc... Maybe it wasn't "charging speed", but it had something to do with the physical properties of the ink and the display matrix.
This sig intentionally left blank.
"All they have to do to increase the colour resolution is make the pixels thinner (1/3rd the width), not smaller overall"
That probably wouldn't be the best solution though. A perfect sphere would have much greater strength and also allow greater flexibility (smaller, more uniform units) than an elongated shape.
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Now that's what I'd call a big-screen TV.
CMYK would actually be the Right Thing for some applications anyway -- say Apple started using EInk displays in a PowerBook with CMYK capability. The publishing industry would go nuts -- this is as close to pure WYSIWIG as you're going to get, I should think.
/Brian
This reminds me of the Galactic Police PDA thing that Mihoshi had in Tenchi Muyo. It was like a pencil but pressing a button caused a screen to unravel itself out of it like a paper scroll. That would be uber-cool. Instead of looking like a dork with a Palm bulging in my pants pocket, I can look cool with a PenPDA stored snugly in my pocket protector!
"Ask me about Loom"
Xerox's idea is similar (although as far as I know they don't have color yet); but they (not unnaturally ;-) think that a laser-printer type scheme is better.
That way it separates the paper from the drive circuitry. And the drive circuitry is expensive in fact because it needs relatively high voltages, and you need a lot of hardware around the edges of the paper to get all those pixels to do the right things.
Putting the drive circuitry inside a laser printer box means that the paper moves past it and hence the paper is much cheaper. However color is probably harder that way. Still, how often do you NEED color?
Where I work, we have a lot of B&W printouts of things that aren't needed to be kept for long; and the reusable paper would be ideal in that case.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"It doesn't look like this is a paper-based technology at all. The technical marketing info on their website lists it as a display technology.
Ah... the death of print? The loss of jobs due to new tech? Heh.
:)
My clients will still need me, yes. The web was supposed to make them stop using paper, they were supposed to start self-designing/self-publishing everything electronically with fabulously easy desktop tools -- and if they didn't want to self-design, they could always hire one of those $10/page "designers" that proliferated in the 90's.
Current trends are not in the hacks' favor. Rather it would seem that people (business-people) recognize the need for well-trained (and well-paid) communications professionals (like me). The curve seems to peak early ("Hey, if I can use a mouse, I must know what I'm doing!"), but it doesn't last at that level for long. Those that don't recognize the difference between professional work and $10 work deserve what they get.
Not to mention the fact that half my job entails explaining options... I know those options, because I'm an expert -- the client doesn't know what they can do, or how to accomplish it. I consult to their ignorance, and there will always be ignorance.
So I'm not worried about my own job security, and since we're in my dreamland, people will come to treasure real ink and paper, they'll clamor for it, and compensate the specialists accordingly.
As for the printing industry...
When I said "printer" I really meant the office machine, not the printshop, which might be your reading here. The death of the printshop is a long way off... an evolutionary time scale, rather than a revolutionary one.
I can make very good proofs in my home studio right now for very little money -- and so can my clients, if they choose to not be clients -- but the quality is nothing compared to what my printshop can output, and of course in terms of mass quantity there's no way client or I can take care of production ourselves. So... In the mystical and hazy future (where my cheap and ubiquitous reflective displays live) issues of quality and quantity may be solved for the DIYers, but at that point I doubt it will be wreaking any havoc on an industry that won't exist in today's form anymore, and will have plenty of time to adapt, to adjust the target of their manufacture (at which the designer can always aim), or to phase themselves out of our ability to mourn their loss, like a blacksmith or something.
I once had a dream that I owned a truly reflective display on which I ran Photoshop and QuarkXPress. I could lay out a color-critical job on that display that, due to its reflective nature, was capable of reproducing color almost exactly as it would be reproduced with ink-on-paper, rather than via the crude approximation of an emitive display.
:(
I could then unplug that display, slip it into an envelope, overnight it to a client and plug in a new display, because they were so cheap and ubiquitous (I'd buy 500 "sheets" at a time at the local office supply superstore).
No need for a printer. No need for an inaccurate CRT to calibrate. No need to worry that the color on-screen and on-proof wouldn't match, because they'd use the same model, and our eyes would see them the same.
It sounds like this "electronic paper" is nothing even remotely like my dream (low resolution, an RGB color model, prolly expensive...). And it doesn't address the fact that ink is tactile and three-dimensional, or that it reacts differently to different surfaces.
What I need is a surface that could rearrange itself molecule-by-molecule to create something indistinguishable from printed output, but that's probably not going to happen anytime soon.
Eink can be found at Eink.com There is also an image of there product with text from hamlet here. Hope that gives everyone some insight.
Mimetic Polycarbon ring a bell?
From what I understood of the article, each of these dots is either on or off so you would get essentially 3bit colour resolution.
You'd have to use dithering to reproduce photos or video, so the image quality will suck close up (Yes I know that's how printers work too, and I've seen the results from the first inkjets with resolution comparable to what this is promised to do. Not pretty up close).
One of the PDAs' biggest problems is the fact that the screen is too small to do anything useful. Perhaps such paper could solve this problem.
It's generally more difficult to watch TV from an uncomfortable position (e.g. too close) than to read from a sheet of paper. For the same reason, the addition of a convenient, big and readable display to PDAs might improve their usability greatly.
A disadvantage of digital paper is the lower refresh rates such a display may provide. Even 10 fps don't usually do the trick, and such paper probably has less than 1. However it could potentially become the display solution of choice for the PDA market.
I want this product adapted to function as wallpaper so I can turn one wall in my house into an enormous Monitor/TV! At 80dpi that's better than the average TV... and If the drawing rate is too slow for TV it would still make a killer wallpaper since you could then load custom art onto your walls! Imagine your whole apartment/house in "Propaganda" print wallpapers! Ooh the swirls! Or you could have a random wallpaper every day, and display custom senery for lunch!
//
--// Hartsock
Live to Code, Code to Live!
It sounds like a dot is either on or off. That means you can only have eight colors, unless they can somehow do shading of the pixels. It doesn't seem to imply that, based on how the article was written.
That would suck. They shouldn't even bother with color, unless they can either increase the dot density to simulate decent color, or fix this problem.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I'm guessing they use several pixels for each color for altering the brightness.
--t
I believe that's merely a subquestion of the larger issue -- "What is the net environmental impact?"
For example, things to consider include the lifespan of paper vs. the lifespan of electronic paper, the environmental impacts of the ink used on both, the recyclability of both (including the inks), the fact that paper comes from a renewable resource (no clue on how renewable the electronic paper components are), and the environmental issues involved in the printing process itself (I believe normal printing involves harsh solvents, while electronic paper "printing" would just involve moving the little things inside the paper around). Overall, I doubt it's something Slashdot could do more than offer wild ass guesses on (although if anyone has any insight on some of the issues, the data's always welcome -- it's just that it'd never be enough to draw a final conclusion), but I think a formal investigation, with access to lots and lots of information covering both paper and electronic paper technologies, would probably be able to cook up some results.
Also relevant is the end-user application. Newspaper and books, I think, would be your big winners, best exploiting the reusability of the electronic paper. Also interesting would be using it, in conjunction with a digital camera, as a poor man's version of a digital picture frame. On the other hand, printing out webpages (which I do when I want to carry information with me to the store, which means the paper will get folded up) and class notes (and similar applications where you want to scribble in the margin) just ain't gonna cut it, short of a few more nifty advances (namely, the ability for the paper to be folded without being permanently affected and the ability for a pen-like device to non-permanently "write" on the paper, with the writing capable of being read back by the printing device, for storage with the original page).
As for the book issue, I can see having a single "book" as a major potential win. I generally only actively carry one book around with me to read, unless I'm near the end of the current book. However, with this technology, as I'm nearing the end of the current book, I could just reprint it as page 200+ of the current book and then as much of the next book as will fit. That way, if I finish the current book when there's no printer accessible, I can just keep going. On the plus side (tying back in to the environmental issues above), if we compare an electronic paper book to the current digital book machines (which have all kinds of nasty chemicals in the battery and such), I suspect it'd be a clear win.
However, I am worried on how well electronic book technologies will do. Unlike music and movies, books can much more easily protect themselves from Napster-esque piracy by simply refusing to embrace electronic distribution. It takes almost no effort to rip a CD. It takes only a little more work to DivX encode a movie. It's a major pain-in-the-ass to scan an entire book and then OCR it (although I suppose you could skip the OCR bit, especially since you'd be printing it back out in this case). That's not to say it isn't done, but if the results in the movie and music industry are any indication, I doubt electronic distribution would be in the best interest of book publishers.
(Wow -- I think I managed to hit 3 different and only marginally related topics in this comment. I need to cut back on my coffee intake.)
I can't see this being used for individual sheets for a while, since you probably cannot bend them. The most practical use would be Electronic Books filled with electonic paper. That would be great for book readers like me who like to download books,pictures,maps,etc but hate to read them on a LCD screen. This is very promising.
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
If it were dots per square inch, yes. But it is dots per inch, a 1-D measurement. Unfortunately, going from 300 dpi to 80 dpi is about 1/14th the resolution on a 2-D screen (90K dots vs 6.4K). About the same difference as would be seen when going from a 1600x1200 display to a 425x320. Not good.
This sentence no verb.
A Magna Doodle has a similar principle of operation whereas you trasnsfer iron filings (or the like) from the top side (drawing) to the bottom side (erasing) using magnetic styli and a magnetic erasing slide bar.
Does anyone know of any screenshots of this product functioning? How long does it take to create one page?
Can it stand up to the one handed reading test? You know, the test where, in the long run, the pages end up stuck together.
--
"Linux is a cancer" -- Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I had this dream, oh, probably about a year ago now.
Technologies like this e-ink become commonplace. Eventualy, they can "tatoo" a PDA onto your skin. It really just "floats" on the surface of your skin, and washes off after about a month. So you have to keep getting it re-applied. But this also allows you to get the latest model.
Next in the dream, this becomes commonplace. Everyone now has a PDA tatooed right on their hand, just like a wristwatch used to be. But some people can't afford this.
So good ol' corporate greed steps in to save the day. They'll tatoo a PDA on your hand in exchange for you also allowing them to tatoo a color animated advertising banner on your forehead.
Now as you walk down the street, and glance across a sea of foreheads, you see zillions of ads. Among teens, it becomes a status symbol of who's ad is on your forehead.
I posted this on slashdot some months back when a similar type article ran. All things repeat on slashdot.
--
"Linux is a cancer" -- Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
IMHO (and I'm sure there's a really good technical reason for this), they missed the boat using a RGB color filter over a b/w pixel. Wouldn't it be much better to have three different-colored pixels -- cyan, magenta and yellow, perhaps?
They would still have the 1/3 of the resolution problem, though that seems pretty unavoidable with this kind of approach. But at least they'd have a truly CMYK reflective electronic display.
I suppose the really good techincal reason not to use CMY pixels has to do with the problem of assembly. Would keeping track of which pixels were which color be much harder than producing the filter they use in the current setup?
This was my first thought too, but in reading the article it sounds like a time to market thing. They decided the filtered approach would put them in the market very soon (the technology is already there) and other approaches were off in the distance. Even the company was complaining about the filtered approach in the article, so I would imagine we will see a better implimentation later, after they make a bit of money off the filtered idea.
I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!
This is probably the technology I anticipate the most because I think most people have reached a limit where they just cant spend more time of their lives in front of a back-lit screen. Back lit screens are very tiring to look at from up-close.
I am a bit skeptical of these hypeflashes though, because of all the articles I've read about electronic paper, not a single one has discussed printing speed, cost, quality (not just dpi, but does it look 'good') or anything else in detail.
If they really believe these will be in market in two years, why have we yet to see an extensive demonstration of a prototype and how it works? My guess is there are hidden problems about these screens, that will make them less of a super invention than they sound like today.
I hope I am wrong. Reading an e-book without getting dizzy would be nice.
Will code a sig generator for food
There's a great push in the EU to make PC's recyclable, reducing hazardous waste and sparing landfill space for truly non-recyclable garbage. IMHO, one of the worst materials for recycling is composites, i.e. Drink Boxes, which can be aluminum, plastic and paper.
Defined as an unusually high concentration of any substance, which may threaten the environment. e.g. Honey is not, in small quantities hazardous, but 50,000 gallons in your backyard would be.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
One thing that wasn't noted in the article - how sturdy is it? You fold/bend/crinkle paper and it still can be read. How well will this hold up when it ends up in the hands of the lowest common denominators?
I am very excited about this electronic/digital paper. When I was little I thought it would be cool if we all had little "base" books and we could just slip in a floppy or something and load up a book. Now it seems like this little fantasy that I had when I was younger, could actually become a reality.
Also, I wonder actually how expensive it actually will be. Will it be feasible to publish books/manuals/essays for this digital paper? Will it have USB port on it, so you can convert over text to the format used in the books. Will it be a format that is similar to PDF? Can hackers reverse engineer the format and make a free convertor? I sure hope so!
--If only there was a license required to use a computer.
Some of the eink.com literature talks about improved power comsumption relative to existing PDA LCD technologies, with the caveat that actual performance depends on how much of the display gets updated and how often. I would imagine the worst case scenario is playing Quake where the entire image is refreshed 85 times/second. The numbers seem to work out that a monochrome e-ink screen would use about half as much power as an equivalent size color active matrix. Color e-ink would probably be quite a bit worse. Doesn't bode especially well for the first generation.
Oh well... looks like it'll be a few more years before I can rip up my screen in disgust at having been fragged yet again :-)
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
I always thought DPI was a 1D measurement, ie. 300dpi means 300*300 dots per square inch.
So how does tripling the dot-count to achieve colour reduce the dpi by about a factor of 3? Shouldn't that be a factor of sqrt(3)?
If we can patch together segments of "digital paper", it could be a crucial step in making affordable the wall display panels from Arnold's apartment in Total Recall....
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
If you get /.ed, the image on your monitor turns into random jumbles, kind of like looking at an etch-a-sketch.
And what happens when you spill coffee on it?
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
liB
I'd heard rumors of "monitors you can roll up and take with you," but this is the first I've read about the existing tech. It's really inspiring what you might be able to do with paper that can generate it's own text...I'm sure you remember Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. Now all we need to do is embed processors and a wafer-thin solar battery and we've got a palm replacement that I can fold and put in my back pocket!
Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
Don'tcha just wish that squeaky old laser printer print as fast as a high speed copier, you know, the ones that use a flash bulb and will plow through an entire ream of paper in two minutes? Put one of these babies on the deck and rig it to update its display between flashes, and it'll print a telephone book in two minutes. Not that you would need a telephone book anymore if you have a sheet of this stuff and the phone directory on a flash RAM card, but the point is it would revolutionize high speed printing. Especially when used with a color copier.
EVERY TIME I HEAR THE WORD "PROGRESS" MY FUR BRISTLES
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
If not, please make sure you get a Nerf keyboard before you hurt yourself.
The Diamond Age, anyone? Anyone? Now we can have shirts made out of this stuff and pay licensing fees for new designs, streamed in via our cell phones.
If the surface was truely changing color, then it would have to use the subtractive primary colors.
No, that's not why. The reason is to do with the mixing properties of the medium. RGB is appropriate when the emitted colors are added together (additive mixing), which happens in this case because the different colors of pixels do not overlap.
CMYK is appropriate when the colors are compounded (subtractive mixing) which happens in print because the inks are applied over top of each other, i.e. they do overlap.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
This is really old news. I have a buddy that works QA at e-ink. He's been there almost two years and he says the thing is ok. If you've been to a few real trade shows you've probably seen the product. I saw it at a show about a year ago.
I was thinking... this kind of gives a while new meaning to a subscription... I mean heck, give it some good waterproof page(s) (for a centrefold) and an IR port... (pins short out) and BAM! can you say business plan? A little slideshow programming... or maybe not... you could even have *animated* pron mags now (eat your heart out, hugh) Nummy...
-- "It's tough to run with both feet stuck in your mouth" - Zoe's evil side
Might keep people from browsing and not buying... tho it might make it hard for younginz to keep the parents from finding out...
"Whats that sound, son?"
*moan moan*
"Oh, nothing mom... sore stomach!"
-- "It's tough to run with both feet stuck in your mouth" - Zoe's evil side
I'm sure some day some solution will be durable, fast, wide-angle, cheap and scalable. But I'm not holding my breath. Hey! Have any of you thought about a cannon of electrons, controlled by a magnetic field, hitting on a phosphor surface? If it could be made to work...
--
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
This is neat, but if it's not backlit like an LCD, wouldn't a CMYK colorspace work better? After all, you don't print in RGB.
Yea, it's expensive and hard to read! WATCH IT FLY OFF THE SHELVES!
TODO: Something witty here...
Daddy? Why do you and every one of your 'puter friends wear glasses? Well, once upon a time, using a computer was like sticking your head in a microwave while it was cooking, and staring at the lightbulb. Good riddance to backlighting when it comes...hopefully, I children will never sit in front of a UV lamp strong enough to light the living room...they're blessed to be spared the 12 in. green mono.
Debian - It's an open source community, why are you still in your closet hacking on that slack-box, kid? Come out and
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/98/9/4835
It describes the methods used to create the paper (authored by people from Bell Labs and by E Ink corp).
What? I don't have to turn it upside down and shake it to clear the screen??
That's no fun...
______
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Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
The math involved is a little weird. 300 dpi for black and white printing, while "about 1/3", or 80 dpi, for color printing. I'm wondering how they got the "about" from. If you have 3 color pixels for every 1 black and white pixel, you should have closer to 100 dpi. Then I was wondering if the placement of the pixels would dramatically affect the numbers, etc.
>>>>>[ Anybody here ever read Snow Crash? Note to self; write a best-seller sci-fi novel. I can't wait for a R.E.A.S.O.N. to hit the public market, it should make tech-help calls much more bearable... ]
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
You can read a somewhat longer, though not much more technical, article written by Charles Mann in Technology Review's March 2001 issue.
I'm hoping they make display units you can put your vehicle, so that one has more choices for imparting information than honking, flashing your lights, or flipping the bird. I want a to be able to display the following message on a big sign, in reversed characters, on the front of my car:
Inventor of the LOLbalrog meme.
First, the Japanese Pokemon TV show had enough flashing colors to cause seizures in children. Now the poor Japanese children will be seeing pre-packaged origami that will look worse than a rainbow-colored strobe light on a bad acid trip. Should be fun.
-s
...imagine reading Beowulf on a cluster of these.
I understand this to mean that each pixel in the RGB triplet is in a switched state of either on (white) or off (black). So there is no adjustment for the brightness of each individual pixel. Doesn't this mean that the color space will be fairly limited? RGB has 256 levels of brightness for each of the primary colors to create the full spectrum. =\ JP