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Philips Improves Electronic Paper
Remco writes: "BBC News ) has a story about Philips apparently improving the quality of electronic paper. What they've done is instead of using sillicon, they've discovered a polymer for use in electronic paper. This makes it cheaper to produce and has the added bonus of providing 256 grey shades of gray." Philips has been working on flexible displays for a while as well as research on using plastic instead of silicon. here's an article we posted before about OLEDs, another one of the promising leads toward thin, low-power, cheap-to-make displays.
No no no! If you have good-quality electronic paper, why would you need more than 1 sheet? Making an actual book out of it would be a waste, why not just have a way of changing a page at a time as displayed on the sheet, or scrolling?
Like most scientific endeavors, this story is about an advance in the field, not its readiness for prime time.
Let's look at some quotes that might help you next time:
This five-centimetre-square ... brings affordable electronic paper a step closer, say its developers, Philips Research.
... should be cheap to make in bulk
...
But this display
In principle, this could be a low-cost solution
It's a shame that nobody looks at this from its scientific merit -- after all, any "holy grail" technology is the culmination of a lot of baby steps.
It all goes downhill from first post
IMHO, e-paper needs to be white. From the photo in this article, it's the same color as your old LCD screen. This presents a problem when going for 256 gray-scale in games/apps because your white is already 25% gray. The real hoop to jump through is finding a way to bleach the proteins and platics while maintaining their functionallity.
History shows that digital rights management only applies to the right to profit-it has nothing to do with consumers rights. Losing the ability to do whatever you want, short of commercial republication, with your purchases will nullify many of the benefits oof digital paper. When I buy a book or newspaper, I like to know that I've actually bought it rather than licensed it for some term, and that I will always have the ability to read it whenever I desire. Anyone who believes that when electronic paper is available publishers will play by the same rules they have no choice but to follow now is naive.
Keep in mind that copy protection won't be too hard to enforce for books and magazines that choose to keep up physical distribution lines. How many people did you see pirating N64 games? Hardly anyone has the ability to write to a cartridge, so if these papers took their input from a cartridge piracy would not be easy. Companies wouldn't need to reduce our rights-but rest assured, they will anyway, I'm just pointing out why any moves on their part will necessarily be due to impure motives.
On the other hand, there are tradeoffs for the rest of the world. Even with all the recycling of paper (and most of it still gets thrown out), trees still need to get cut, and paper has a limit to how many times it can be recycled (eventually the fibres break down). Not to mention the fact that rather nasty chemicals are used in its production, have you ever smelled the air around a paper plant?. Digital paper will last far longer and one sheet can display a variety of content; this will dramatically reduce the usage of wood based paper. Expect to see environmentalists and civil rights advocates at each others' throats over this issue.
Think of e-paper as of PDA's. PDA's are not sufficiently generic to replace the PC anytime soon or probably ever. But still they can be very useful. And just the fact that you can take them with you has spurned companies to market them as fashion accessories. Similary, e-paper is not a general purpose display solution. But as a fashion accessory it's unbeatable.
PS: I'm starting to buy into the theory that the /. editors recycle news on weekends on purpose (and I think Timothy has agreed to take the blame? Or maybe they run a pool): the story link was still visited from the last time..
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
Can't we require that people with access to post front page articles actually have to semi-regularly read Slashdot themselves so we can avoid continually duplicating stories?