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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.
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?
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?
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
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.
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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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?
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.
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.