Digital Ink On Billboards

cdneng2 writes "The New York Times has this article on a revolutionary new billboard. It uses digital ink, versus the typical CRT, LCD, Neon, or Plasma displays that are so prominent on the newer billboards that wastes electricity. From the article: 'By creating a paste made of tiny helix-shaped particles that can be minutely manipulated with electric charges to reflect light in highly specific ways, Magink can produce surfaces that look like paper but behave like electronic screens, rendering high-resolution, full-color images without ink - or, as Magink executives like to refer to the process, with digital ink.' The billboard can display images at 70 frames per second." You can find more articles on the billboard technology on the Magink website.

Comments

Re:Why oh why...

[Anonymous Coward]

The day advertising and the military merge, we'll be in a world of hurt.

Wake up dude. That last 3 US wars (Iraq, Afganistan, Iraq) have been full-on media circuses.

Re:A question

[AlecC]

Same reason you don't have back lighting on a book: it is an absorbtive, not emissive, technology. The coloured elements seem to be opaque, so backlighting wouldn't work.

There seems to be no reason why they couldn't scale the technology down to PC size. But I think they have targeted the big-ticket applications for their first market - not a stupid idea. If they can replace "million dollar" displays with "80,000 dollar" ones, there are some *big* shot term profits to make the money to fund the mass production line to manufacture cellphone displays at the millions/month level you need to get the costs down.

Expect this to appear in living rooms soon

[heironymouscoward]

Let's try scaling this technology up the curve a little:

- 10-bit color (4096 colors) will become 16-bit and then 24-bit.
- 5mm pixels will become 1mm and then 1/10thmm
- the borders between the pages appear 1 pixel wide, and will thus vanish
- cost of $8,000 will drop to $2,500, then $500.

Yes, looks good!