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Sony Launches First Commercial Electronic Paper Display Reader
prostoalex writes "The e-paper is coming to reality in the form of a 6" screen with higher than usual 170 dpi and $381 price tag. It runs a customized version of Linux, and being Sony-branded, supports MemoryStick. The British journalists claim that three AAA batteries keep it up for 10,000 pages, but it's not too clear whether they've actually verified it, or just read the press-release. The manufacturers are hoping to sell 5,000 of these a month as their best-case scenario."
Nothing new here:Link
Japanese keyboards are like qwerty, but each letter/number has a kana (like a syllable) associated. There's a key next to space bar that change keyboard mode (hiragana/katakana/roman).
Japanese has an alphabet. I dont see why people think asian languadges are so difficult. They are often structured much better and are far easier to learn. Personally i found japanese to be far easier to learn than spanish. Oh and for anyone who thinks that its hard to memorize a word that uses symbols nto letters think of it this way. Every work in english has a certain way to spell it. When you see a word on paper you take the letters and turn it into a meaningful word in your head. Its the same with asain languadges. Instead of letters they use slashes and in some languages circles. You to remember how to spell each word you read in order to read it just like asains must remember what each symbol means to read.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
I dont see why people think asian languadges are so difficult.
Try find a kanji in a dictionary...
Try read a japanese text with a dictionary...
Try speak a word you read frist time (kanji usually has 2 way of reading)...
Korean has a easier way of writing, but sometimes they use kanjis too.
PS: IANAT (I am not a troll), but i do have a lot of work studying japanese...
Yep, the jp106 keyboard layout is QWERTY, but has a few extra buttons to handle jumping between character sets. The space bar is much smaller as a result.... and the backslash is replaced with the yen symbol. And yes, in Japanese Windows as there is no backslash, you can imagine what the filename paths look like. I just wish the keyboard would work properly with DOSbox and Bochs... for some reason the DOS emulators get confused when dealing with Japanese keyboards. I can't get the colon to come out.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I went to Sonys site for the answer, and as per usual for Sony, they arn't very clear on the details. But, what it says is that in order to get the books on your dily-bop whatever it's called, you have to download them from certain sites wich have a membership fee per month that will alow you to download 3-5 books a month for 6-10USD a month. It doesn't say what the format is, so i guess you'll have to find someone that has one and ask them :)
:) so i probaly wont get it. I ussually just sleep on the train.. But japaense people will love it. everyone reads on the train.. and you can read a lot when you have 2 to 4 hours round trip every day. Right now a pretty comon thing is book club stuff.. kinda like a blockbuster, but for books.. and it's usually inside the train station :)
I think it's pretty cool and i might wanna get one, but i just don't read that much.. hehe
if this could replace that, that'd be kinda cool.. but i think it will take a long while before it's completely accepted.
it doesn't even consume power when it's idling on a page It consumes power all the time, whether refreshing the page or not.
i do agree with your point, but...
Some won't expire.
Some you don't care if it expire.
But some people just don't care at all.
What's the point of 170dpi? My Palm has perhaps 40dpi at the most and it has perfectly readable text.
As already mentioned, higher resolution is easier on the eyes.. and recall that this is a japanse product which means it has to be able to display japanse letters (kanji and katakana I believe they are called) which needs a higher resolution then the latin alphabet to remain readable.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Here is source http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/Download/EBR-10 00EP.html
Japanese is a highly phonetic ( and also highly inflected) language. They have had their own phoentic alpabet for centuries. There is particular resourcfulness in typing this alphabet.
The problem comes in two forms. The first of which is an early resistence by the intelligensia to actually use the Japanese alphabet (which was the invention of mere women). Chinese was the language of culture, and most Japanese works written before and around the time of the invention of the Japanese phonetic alphabet were not written in Japanese using the Chinese Kanji, they were actually written in classical Chinese (sometimes with a certain amount of skill, but often rather crudely). Much as the learned of Europe wrote in Latin, even though Latin was not their native tongue.
With this dissimilarity, many of these people had a language that was either descended from or a close relative of Latin. Chinese and Japanese have no common base. They are very, very dissimilar.
And just as these European scholars, when they did write in their native tongue they couldn't help themselves from sprinkling it liberally with Chinese.
And so, despite their being a native alphabet, the Chinese Kanji became imbedded in the native style of writing.
No we come to the second issue. Why don't they just, in modern times, simply drop the use of Kanji and write in Japanese? Because Japanese is a highly polyglot language, just like English. It has adopted into itself many foreign words, English, Spanish, Dutch, Portugese (the "Japanese" word for the kimono's (actually a western word in a sense, although composed of a Japanese phrase)undergarment, "Juban," is the Portugese word for "undershirt," gibao,( And the pattern of the garment itself is transformed from its traditional Japanese form into the European form)), and, of course. . . Chinese.
But, as I've already pointed, out Chinese and Japanese have no relation, in particular Chinese is not phonetic, and thus there is no way to spell these Chinese words in the Japanese phonetic alphabet. So they need to use Kanji.
Had the Japanese encountered the Spanish before the Chinese things would have turned out rather differently, as the Latin alphabet is not only a very good fit with the Japanese language, it fits Japanese a bit better than it does the Germanically derived English.
KFG
Resolution has an impact even before detailed character-based pattern matching occurs. Better type definition improves the brain's ability to gestalt process the word/sentence shape (which is why lower-case type is more legible than upper-case, there is better shape definition); thus the eye movements (saccades) are more effective, permitting 2/3 eye movements per line rather than constant reiteration as the brain prepares the data for a finer degree of pattern matching.
You know what I miss? Leeches.
There is no such thing as a refresh rate on a progressive display. There is pixel refresh latency -- but that is quite a bit different, technically speaking, and does not matter when looking at a static image. Anything above 15ms pixel refresh is annoying if you are playing a FPS. 25ms or less is good for an RPG. Anything higher, and smooth scrolling text will begin to ghost.
Progressive displays simply turn on or off a pixel and set a color to it. Non-progressive displays, like your CRT, constantly refreshes the information in a sweep across the entire screen. Thus it has a refresh rate.
It goes to show how many people got their display education from the Windows display control panel. I cracked up when I saw I still had to set a refresh rate with my LCD panel hooked up via DVI in XP.
In addition, they are thinking that they'll have flexible (i.e. paper-like) e-ink displays in these things in a few years, but that they're not really ready for prime time yet in the format they wanted with the resolution/contrast that they wanted.
In short, read the Guardian article. It covers who they've been working with to develop the technology.
Pretty good and accurate write up, however there are a few missing points. There's a good reason that the Japanese continued to use the Kanji (Chinese Characters) even when they started accepting the useage of Kana (phonetic alphabet). Although the Japanese Kana is strictly phonetic, there is no way to specify the intonation of the Kana, thus this must be recognized by context. The Japanese language does have subtle differences in pronunciation, but the written language has no way to reflect this. As an example, take the English word "Bear". It sounds the same as "Bare" but means something entirely different. However, you don't need context to notice the difference in the written language, whereas in Japanese Kana you would, because it would be written in exactly the same way. What's a bit interesting is that in the English spoken language, you WOULD need the context to realize whether the speaker means "bear" or "bare". In Japanese, the word "Kuma", depending on the pronunciation, can mean either "bear" or "dark circles under your eyes", but the pronunciation is different, and can be recognized immediately.
Back to the original issue though, the Japanese language also has many words where the context is required to understand the meaning. For example "Kumo" (spider/cloud), "Kami" (hair/paper), "Hana" (nose/flower), and so on, all have identical pronunciations.
Under such circumstances, using full Kana will result in a very difficult to understand sentence that is long, flat, and hard to read. Using Chinese Kanji for specific vocabulary makes it very easy to read. The Kanji provides the context, and often the pronunciation.
One misperception is that the invention of Kana by women allowed them to write strictly in Kana alone. This is neither true nor accurate. As the parent had mentioned, the full Chinese Kanji writings of the time were written in a crude interpretation of the Chinese language, and was more often than not pretty poor as Chinese. It had it's own structure that was vaguely Japanese in grammatic structure, but you couldn't read it directly into Japanese. Hard to explain, but it was sort of a written language that was a language to itself. There was no way you could read it straight, it required interpretation.
This meant that writting in Kanji required more than the knowledge of the written language, but a background in an entirely different spoken language (Chinese) too. Just imagine if English was merely a spoken language, and the written language was Russian. (French and Spanish are way too similar to English than Japanese and Chinese are.)
By creating Kana, which was phonetic, it was possible to write sentences that could be read as Japanese by filling the gaps that the Chinese-esque writing simply "assumed". (I suppose you could say that prior to Kana, the written language was similar to Arabic where you need to assume the vowels by reading the context, as there are no vowels in the written language. Or so I'm told.) Of course, this was a very "Femminin" thing to do, and naturally was NOT a "Macho" (=Manly and Intelligent) thing to do in those days.
Either way, the use of Kana was gradually accepted, and the written Japanese language evolved a little at a time. It's still evolving today (as is the case with most any active language) so even works from 100 years ago are hard to read or understand. The Japanese written language is still very different from the spoken language, but it's much more Japanese these days. There is also a trend in decreasing the ammount of Kanji and increasing Kana, although I believe this is more attributed to lower educational standards these days, with people that can't read a lot of the more complex Kanji. For better or for worse, that's the case.
As a side note, Kana itself was derived from Kanji, and was a "simplified" form. I'm not sure how the Korean language evolved, but they too use a mixture of Chinese characters and their own phonetic characters. (Although it's rarely seen... the only areas I've seen Kanji in Korea were in a few signs, and occasionally in newspaper headlines.)
...however, most people can't type using the Kana-key layout. It's superior in that you can REALLY type fast (one keystroke for a phonetic sound), but 99% of the population that types using a keyboard uses Romaji input method.
;-)
Let me explain a bit. Say you were to type "Kuma" (bear). You would, literally, type K-U-M-A, which would display the two Kana characters "KU" and "MA". Press the space key, and voila! You have a list of Kanji characters to select from. The invention of the front end processor (which converts the kana to kanji) made it possible, and these things are wickedly smart. Back 20 years about you converted to kanji, and often had to go through a long list of possible matches. Today, the FEP actually reads the context and very often gives you the correct match on the first try. It's pretty cool when you think about it.
Given the fact that you can type using the QWERTY layout, and use the space key to convert to Kanji, there's really no need for a Japanese-specific keyboard. Most Japanese typers wouldn't have a hard time at all using a standard American keyboard, as long as the OS is in Japanese (meaning there's an FEP). The only thing they would have trouble with is a few specific differences in the keyboard layout, specifically things like doubt-quotes, quotes, colons, semi-colons, and all the shift+numerals. Of course, you can change settings in Windows/Linux/*BSD to give an American keyboard a Japanese layout, and then things would be pretty cool. It's weird though, I warn you, to be getting a different character than printed on the keyboard. I use a Japanese OS on an American model ThinkPad, and everyone else seems to have a problem until they realize I've remapped the keys.
How about a "refresh" rate of 0? There is nothing of that with this product. The idea is to use energy to change screen, but once changed, it remains without any extra energy.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If you had RTFA you would know that it only takes power to refresh the screen not to maintain a static image. So the battery life is 10,000 pages whether you flick through one a second, or spend an hour on each page.
Progressive displays simply turn on or off a pixel and set a color to it. Non-progressive displays, like your CRT, constantly refreshes the information in a sweep across the entire screen. Thus it has a refresh rate.
That is not what progressive means. Progressive is the opposite of interlaced -- an interlaced display alternates updating the even and odd scan lines, while a progressive display updates all of the scan lines in one pass. Whether it requires constant refreshing (CRTs) or not (LCDs and Plasmas) is immaterial.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
I can also jump anywhere in the book based on percent, so if I can remember where things are in the book based on the percentage (not unlike remembering approximate page numbers in a dead tree book) then I can jump to that area very quickly.
It is also nice how the book stays on the same page when you "close" it (quit the program) and them "open" it again (open the program). Say hello to the end of traditional bookmarks and/or dogeared pages. :D
I can't imagine why this bookreader would be any different...
Incidently, reading eBooks on a PDA is great for reading on a train (such as those you find in Japan). You can read one handed and use the scroll buttons to flip the "pages" (great when you are standing up and have to hold on to a handle)...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
The colors do not need to overlap. Why would they? As you noted, monitors use side-by-side colors rather than overlapping colors, and e-paper would be no different in this regard.
I can imagine technologies for colored pixels that result in either a scale from black to a saturated color (be it RGB or CMY), or from white to a saturated color (RGB or CMY). Let us take white-to-CMY as an example.
Colors are mixed ADDITIVELY. Why? Your eye is receiving light from all three pixels! But each pixel only represents 1/3 of the reflecting surface, so the
- cyan pixels can represent RGB values between (0.0,0.33,0.33) (ON) and (.33,.33,.33) (OFF),
- the magenta between (0.33,0,0.33) and (.33,.33,.33),
- and the yellow between (0,0.33,0.33) and (.33,.33,.33).
(These RGB values are without gamma correction).Examples:
- All pixels switched off (white): white color (100% reflection of all wavelengths).
- All pixels switched on: total RGB (.67,.67,.67). Light grey.
- Only cyan switched on: 2/3 of the pixels, i.e. the magenta and yellow ones, are still white. 1/3 of the pixels is cyan. The result will be an unsaturated cyan, corresponding to RGB (0.67,1,1) (ignoring gamma correction), instead of pure cyan (0,1,1).
- Cyan and magenta switched on. You may think that that results in blue (0,0,1), but it will actually be the ADDITIVE sum of cyan(0,0.33,0.33) + magenta(0.33,0,0.33) + white(0.33,0.33,0.33) = (0.67,0.67,1), an pale light blue.
So this display will be able to represent colors varying between white and light grey, and some pale colors lying inbetween.Similar problems will occur with RGB pixels, or with a black background instead of a white.
In order to mix cyan and magenta into pure blue, you have to cover the whole surface with magenta, and then with cyan on top of that, so that the magenta layer will filter out all green light, and the cyan layer will filter out all the red light. That will be very hard, though not fundamentally impossible, to implement as e-paper.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Here's a link to the japanese LIBRIE site (http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/LIBRIE/) if you're interested in getting a look at it.
Another point (since the other poster noted how you've made little sense): the refresh rate in the XP settings are for the video card, not the monitor. If you're playing a game with a decent card and a flatscreen monitor, setting it to anything above 60 mhz is a waste because the card can (and will) try to reach that refresh rate regardless. The card could care less what the monitor is set at.
It goes to show how many people got their display education from the Windows display control panel. I cracked up when I saw I still had to set a refresh rate with my LCD panel hooked up via DVI in XP.
That's because video cards have always gotten updates by polling display memory. Theoretically, you could design a video card that would update the display as soon as the pixels were written to it, but you'd have to start from scratch with the drivers. You wouldn't really gain much anyway, especially considering that most of the time you want to be able to display on a CRT with the same product.