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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.
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.)
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.
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.
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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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?
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.
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?
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
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it's a sig, wtf?
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
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]
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.
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?
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.
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.
It's not in the article, but a photo of it wrapped around a pencil is on the site.
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.
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!
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--// Hartsock
Live to Code, Code to Live!
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.)
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.
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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?
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....
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SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
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).
...imagine reading Beowulf on a cluster of these.