Paper Capable Of Playing Videos Developed

Makarand writes "Nature has posted an article describing paper capable of displaying video using rearrangeable electronic ink, being produced by Philips Research Labs (in the Netherlands). The paper-display draws power from a lightweight battery, and displays data stored in a portable chip. The display consists of pixels containing a drop of colored ink that can spread over a reflective white background under electrical control to create colors. With fast switching times and lower switching voltages, these paper-displays are capable of displaying video images."

Comments

It's a porno AND a tissue.

[Anonymous Coward]

How convenient...

Re:It's a porno AND a tissue.

[SharpFang]

More and more, it seems like a large percentage is sex-starved, I-want-to-be-funny goofballs

This part is +1 insightful, rest looks like a typical flamebait. Note most nerds ARE sex-starved, funny goofballs - and this is their site with their news and their style comments! If you don't like that, move elsewhere, there are many science news sites on the web. The fact that slashdot is not as classy as YOU would like it, doesn't mean it needs to be changed. It means that YOU need to look for a more classy place.

And hell, somebody mod me offtopic or flamebait and I'll get really pissed off!

Marketing madness!

[Empiric]

Okay, it might be way too late at night for me to be posting, but...

I wonder if the advent of multimedia paper, as it were, will create a sea-change in the nature of all types of advertising.

As it stands now, most every box/can/available-surface of products is in some way branded advertising for the product, like, your coke can says, naturally, "Coca-Cola". This advertising must translate into some approximately-calculable value for the Coca-Cola company, in terms of more coke sales.

But... is there an inflection point at which an ad for something else (say, Porsche cars) would be more valuable than the advertisement for coke? If so, might companies sell space on all manner of products wrapped in this multimedia-paper like banner ads?

It might be interesting to open my refrigerator and see a few-dozen multimedia presentations on various consumer goods, changing every morning, but... well, maybe a final trip in that Porsche to some Amish community might be more sanity-preserving.

Re:Marketing madness!

[jestill]

I am afraid that as costs come down you may be right. Combine this with low cost sound systems and you have a recipe for complete madness. This sort of thing has been explored in the Minority Report Movie, and to some extend in Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age'.

Re:Marketing madness!

[Simon]

It's not all bad news. These things will contain computers. Imagine hacking your wheaties box to show something more interesting. You could directly recycle and reuse all of the 'paper' you receive.

If annoying animation gets out of hand, a few seconds in a microwave oven will probably fix the problem. ;-)

--
Simon

Impressive. Now, when does it ship?

[silentbozo]

Color e-paper, great for display devices, able to replace LCDs, etc. Now when do these things go into mass production? I'd love to have flexible solar cells at pennies per yard, but I can't get those yet either.

BBC News story...

[WIAKywbfatw]

Here's the BBC's slant on the news: Electronic paper prepares for video.

They're already up to 80 Hz refresh (12-13 ms respnose times). That's pretty damn impressive for a technology that's still in the basic R&D stage, and it augurs well for the future.

The Daily Prophet

[Zog The Undeniable]

Boring...they had all that in Harry Potter two years ago, and oil paintings that talk ;-)

But how do you get color?

[panurge]

The picture in the article has to be misleading. Although a camera has adjacent color receptor sites, print color doesn't work like that at all. If the cells are adjacent, they can only produce an approximate gray. In the CMYK standard printing process, the ink markings superimpose, so grays are achieved with different sizes of black dots, and red is obtained by superimposing yellow (-blue) and magenta (-green). This means that instead of being adjacent as in the picture, the cells would have to be stacked. There would also need to be some way of ensuring that when the cells were partially colored, the upper colored areas were not directly over the ones below (or they would be obscured and only the top color would show.)

There may be some magical solution to this, but it looks to me as if color is very, very much more difficult than mono.

Re:But how do you get color?

[MalachiConstant]

In the CMYK standard printing process, the ink markings superimpose, so grays are achieved with different sizes of black dots, and red is obtained by superimposing yellow (-blue) and magenta (-green). This means that instead of being adjacent as in the picture, the cells would have to be stacked.

I worked in a pre-press shop for a couple of years, so I've worked with printing on a very low level. The color dots don't need to be directly stacked on one another to achieve a certain color. In fact each color is printed at a seperate angle so the dots are rarely directly on top of one another

Take a magnifying glass to your sunday comics and you can see that the black dots are at one angle (usually straight up and down) and each other color is rotated slightly. Even at relatively large dot sizes (72 dpi) the dots seem to merge together to form whatever color they're looking for.

Since the dots are arranged in groups of four in this paper you could achieve the same result, except it may look a bit more like a computer image (made up of distinct pixels in a grid) as opposed to a magazine picture (pixels for each color are rotated). It also sounds like they can make the dots whatever size they want, which is how it is done in printing:

The larger the applied voltage, the more the ink retracts. The ink is therefore capable of a continuous grey scale, not just of a two-tone contrast.

And even if the dots were stacked directly on top of each other it would still work. The ink is spread so thin that it's transparent, that's why yellow on top of magenta shows as red. So if they could stack it somehow it would show correctly (assuming the ink they use is like regular ink in that way).

Re:But how do you get color?

[AlecC]

It is not a question of working differently at a molecular level. In the thin film that actually ends up on the page, the inks are translucent - think Jello, not paint. Each ink absorbs the light at some frequencise and passes others, which then bounce of the white paper behind - unsess abosrbewd by another ink at the same point. It is not perfect, and in bulk the inks look opaque. But the inks are actually printed over each other.

You are right that, if the dots are really small, the eye will average them out. This is, actually, how screen printing works: there are actually rows of dots in shaded areas. However, they are of the order of 30 times smaller than pixels on even the best screen, so it takes quite a powerfule glass to see them.

What the article doesn't say, but the picture does, is that Cyan+Magenta+Yellow, which should theoretically produce black, actually produces a durty purplish brown. So you need some real black to get a good rendition. Each pixel will have to have four cells.

Grandparent is correct. Because the cells are spatially separate, 100% red will actually only have 25% of the the background red, the rest remaining white. So I would expect a colour display, while having good readability, to be rather flat an uninteresting. The B/W display should be very good. Because it is reflective not emissive technology, it should have excellent readabilty and low poer consumption (but not the zero power consumption of the e-Ink in /. a coupel of weeks ago).

"Great" frequency?

[WegianWarrior]

The frequency would be great, would hurt your eyes after a couple minutes I would guess...

I guess that depends on what you mean by a "great" frequency. In Europe, television has a frequency of 50Hz (it's 60Hz in the US) - even if I've heard that two and two frames are alike, in other words that the frequency is 25 or 30Hz. Movies in theaters are usually run at 24 frames per second, in other words a frequency of 24Hz.

There is no real need to have frequencies running much higher than that to watch a movie - since a frequency of 72Hz would just mean that the same picture would be drawn three times over, and thats a waste on a device like this.

In addition, there might not make much sence in talking about frequeny at all on a device like this; if they want to save on power, they only alter the state of the pixels that actually changes between each frame.

Re:"Great" frequency?

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Movies in theaters are usually run at 24 frames per second, in other words a frequency of 24Hz.

Actually, movies are run at twice that, i.e. in order to reduce the flickering each frame is projected twice. And 48Hz is just barely acceptable for straight on viewing. You'll see the flicker clearly out of the corner of your eye.

So, they actually need more than that, 72Hz is actually about right for something that you're sitting close to (such as a computer screen).

There's a lot of info on the net if you want to dig deeper.

Re:"Great" frequency?

[AlecC]

I guess that depends on what you mean by a "great" frequency. In Europe, television has a frequency of 50Hz (it's 60Hz in the US) - even if I've heard that two and two frames are alike, in other words that the frequency is 25 or 30Hz. Movies in theaters are usually run at 24 frames per second, in other words a frequency of 24Hz.

TV has a field rate of 50/50 hz. Fields are alternately the odd and even lines of the picture, so the frame rate is 25/30 hz. The two fields are spatially slightly separated, so even on a still picture they are not the same; the second field gives you more information than the first. But if the original capture mechanism was a video camera, the two fields are captured at different times as well as different places, so it gives better motion display.

There is no real need to have frequencies running much higher than that to watch a movie - since a frequency of 72Hz would just mean that the same picture would be drawn three times over, and thats a waste on a device like this.

You are correct that film is at 24 hz. However, cinema projectors deliberatly flicker the light at 48 hz to give an impression of better movement. Once you get the trick of it, it is quite easy to spot 24-frame film material on TV, and it can become annoying.

50/60 hz field rate, and making a frame out of two fields, are both in fact economy measures. When TV was first invented, high rates were difficult and expensive, and there was a tradeoff between picture quality and cost. In fact, percieved movement quality increases up to frame rates in the low 70s of Hz - hence 80Hz being "as good as you will ever need".

A frame will be displayed 3 times at 72 hz only if it is sourced from a traditional film camers - a breed which is slowly dying out. All news cameras are now electronic, and Lucas is filming the Star Wars series electronically - othere will follow, slowly. Some of the new HDTV standards have 60 true frames, not 60 fields, per second.

As I say, existing TV standards are a compromise for the tradeoffs of an earlier day. We will eventially get newer standards, and hence better pictures. But once a set of standards are embedded in the comsumer marketplace, there is a massive lag in the adoption of new standards.

Excellent

[SpiffyMarc]

We're that much closer to those creepy animated singing cereal boxes from Minority Report...

Not e-books, perhaps, but...

[achurch]

I'll still take real dead trees over electronic paper for my leisure reading, I think, but how about the opposite application: writing? "Print" a document to the paper, mark it up in a meeting, and have the changes all saved without having to go back and mark it up again on your PC. Alternatively, take the paper to your favorite country getaway, write up a story, and (assuming your handwriting is decently legible) have it automatically OCR'd into text for later editing, without needing to lug a laptop around and all the associated annoyances.

I dunno, sounds good to me . . .

Re:Not e-books, perhaps, but...

[lipi]

...but how about the opposite application: writing?

Xerox has been there, done that:

"Through a chemical process that Xerox is holding as a trade secret, "each ball is given an electric charge, with more on one side than on the other," Sheridon explains. So when an electric field is applied to the surface of the sheet, the balls are lifted in their oil-filled cells, rotated like the needles of tiny compasses to point either their black or their white hemispheres eyeward, and then slammed against the far wall of the cell. There they stick, holding the image, until they are dislodged by another field. At high voltages, the balls stick before completing their rotation, thus producing various shades of gray. Sheridon's group has also produced red-and-white displays and is working on combining balls of various hues to produce full-color ones.
(...)
But the real goal, Sheridon says, is also the most distant: an electronic surrogate for paper. Engineer Matt Howard hands me a wooden pencil that is plugged into a weak power supply. As I write on the sheet, the tiny electric field conducted through the pencil's graphite core darkens the screen wherever the tip touches. Howard is working on a handheld wand that will receive text and images from a computer and scan them onto a Gyricon page, which would then be annotated, photocopied, erased--but not discarded."

Copy of the Scientific American article is here , but you may find other references.

does anyone else here feel old?

[circletimessquare]

remember those old, cabinet-sized gothic beautiful wooden radios with huge glowing tubes visible from the back? some of you might have only seen them in museums

did you think to yourself "good gosh, what archaic times" when you saw them? we probably all did

and then i see news like this, and know how people like us, who grew up with crt screens and space heater-looking computer cases with noisy fans in the back, will be seen as archaic some day ;-P

Magazines will never be the same.

[CherniyVolk]

Tired of the bored centerfolds that just sit there?

Re:high tech?

[Jeremi]

If you can operate your Etch-a-Sketch quickly enough to display 80Hz video on it, then you really need to cut down on the caffeine...

Overclocking...

[DaneelGiskard]

So if I overclock one of these, "burned out" will finally become a whole new meaning...? :)

Re:I welcome our new e-paper overloads...

[Jace of Fuse!]

Your point almost makes sense, until you consider the fact that all people are in fact suffering from more stress and enduring more psychological problems than previous generations.

You can blame better diagnosis (or misdiagnosis) if you want, but really I'm not sure the typical human is really meant to be as smart as society now days expects it to be. A natural human living off of the land really needs to know nothing more than how to make a spear, run from big beasts, and keep out of the rain.

Technology (be it tending crops or inventing holodecks for wild endless regret-free sexual encounters), builds on technology. Each generation has tools and knowledge that previous generations didn't have. At what point will it reach a level where few people can cope? Even now days most poeple haven't got a clue what's going on inside a computer. Most people haven't got any idea how a telephone, automobile, or television works.

How many times have you heard someone say "I don't need that many features on my TV/VCR/Microwave/etc"?

Some people evolve with the times, others just learn to cope, but more and more I think we're going to see people who simply can't hack it all. As more and more people become unable to deal with it, I can honestly see us finding a name for whatever disorder they supposedly have, fiding some medication for it, and then sending them on along their way.

We'll think they're slow, or stupid, or have no common sense, but in reality, these people could probably make a spear and hide in a cave as well (maybe even better) than the other overly cereberal upright hairless apes.

Voila!

[rwaldin]

Print one of these and you'll have all the magic animated paper you need without electronics or drugs!

Re:Impressive. Now, when does it ship?

[JohnPM]

This type of post is starting to get about as interesting as "First Post!!" and "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!"...

Every single new technology article covered gets someone saying "that's all well and good but they've been saying this for years. speak to me when i can buy one.".

Take the article for what it's worth. It's not a sales brochure or an investment prospectus, it's a science/tech piece.

Re:guess what:

[ColaMan]

Just wait until someone develops a proxy filter for your downloadable newspaper content.

Ads? What Ads? :-)