Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Philips Improves Electronic Paper

Posted by timothy on from the wait-till-it's-on-snowboard-graphics dept.

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.

2 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Interactive paper by Shadowcaster · · Score: 1, Troll

    So, how far off are rollout displays (Earth: Final Conflict, Red Planet, etc.) for my PDAs? Or for that matter, a cellular addon for pocket videoconferencing? *drool* I can imagine a rollout 72 inch wall-mounted TV, akin to the rollout white screen projectors use.. that plus a decent stereo and who needs to go *out* to the theater anymore? ;)

    At the risk of being labelled troll, "providing 256 grey shades of gray" is a stupid statement.. it wouldn't be 256 grey shades of color if it's grey, would it? :)

  2. These are coming sooner than you think by dfeldman · · Score: 4, Troll
    One of my buddies works at a competing manufacturer and has some very promising news about these displays. Although I'm not sure what the case is for the Philips units, production and deployment of his company's product is scheduled to be ramped up in February, with consumer products hitting the market around March 15th. Some of the tidbits that he leaked to me were:
    • The baseline, mass market model will have a resolution of 64dpi and cost roughly $0.50 per square inch for displays between 6 and 24 square inches. This includes the circuitry required to interface to an 8051 or other mpu.
    • A serial interface (ideal for connecting to a PC or BASIC stamp) will be offered around September 2002.
    • Resolutions of 128dpi and 256dpi will be available, albeit at a substantially increased cost.
    • These units take about 0.003 uA/pixel, which is substantially less than current LCD and OLCD offerings.
    • Work is being done to make the drivers' jobs easier. For instance, advances have been made that allow the driver to get away with only refreshing static data once every 3.5 seconds.


    df