Slashdot Mirror
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.
Nice teaser article, but how cheap is cheap?
When they can put a 25-page book together what accepts some sort of floppy disk or memory chip so you can read different books with it for under $50, then that's cheap. Until then, they may be using a different definition than you and I.
E-Ink had *colored* *posters* of their electronic paper product shown in stores.
Actually this has already been implemented. This article at Scentific American Magazine from the November 2001 issue describes in detail where the technology is and how it is currently being used. P.S. I know that it is an IP address, but that is what Scientific american sends you to. If you want goto Scientific American's homepage and search for electronic paper. The first result is the article linked to above.
What good is a used up world, and how could it be worth having? --Sting
as a papermaker, I have seen all of the approaches to epaper. Most recently these were presented at NIP 18 (Intnl Conf Nonimpact Printing) in Ft Lauderdale. The main problem would seem to be the approaches ALL require backplane electronics to make the stuff work. Therefore you induce a charge to get proper sphere alignment, once acheived until a new charge is induced they aintain their orientation.
So, don't charge out and invest in e paper; as right now the berst application is point of purchase displays. An interesting concept, but the economics are not there yet, except for perhaps specialty applications. Once they can make dirt cheap backplanes by printing them, then perhaps it can make inroads on paper. However, don't hold your breath. Wonder if an informed reply will bet a better score?
this could be good for the Flat panel monitor. if it is cheap to make and can scale well to lage sizes this could become an ultrathin TFT monitor that costs no more than 20 bucks.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3