Electronic Paper Advances

ke4roh writes "Electronic paper comes a step closer," says a Reuters article today. The paper, made by E-ink bends and makes for a higher contrast display, perhaps for e-books and cell phones. It reminds me of Jim Willard's Paper Computer, but their web site is history. Slashdot previously discussed color electronic paper."

Comments

Re:sci-fi wins again

[Saige]

I do wonder about the power supply though. Seeing that I can barely get a day's worth of stand-by on my cell phone with a tiny text screen it seems keep these things powered up might require an equally revolutionary energy store.

The thing to remember when talking about e-ink is that power will not be needed to keep information displayed. Power will be required for the wireless data reception, and for changing what is displayed, but various e-ink technologies that have been mentioned all have means of showing information that are not energy intensive.

I'm not sure offhand exactly how it works, but usually involves some sort of small particle or such with, say, black on one side, and white on the other, and they are rotated to show a particular pattern of 'pixels', and then take no energy to remain in that pattern.

This is one of the big wins of e-ink - along with the fact that done properly, it should look little different from plain old paper. (though it is definitely not there yet)

If you equipped an 'e-ink newspaper' with the ability for the user to query for updates, instead of the paper constantly checking a wireless frequency, then power consumption could be quite minimal.

I do look forward to fully interactive e-ink, so that, say, you could have a notebook with e-ink paper, you jot down notes with a stylus, the paper shows the proper marks so it feels just like regular writing, but with the options to save notes, recall them later, and memory that allows one notebook to keep the information that a whole stack of real notebooks couldn't hold. Can you imagine having an e-ink journal, for example, that could hold a lifetime's worth of data in it, so you could recall anything you've ever written/drawn on the e-ink pages?

Re:Some good info...

[Corporate Gadfly]

> Here are some good links for those of you who want to know more...

With a little bit more effort, here's the same links as hyperlinks (no nasty spaces, no cut-and-paste).

E ink homepage
E-Ink boost for mobile electronic reading
E-paper moves a step nearer
E-Paper Here Sooner Than You Think