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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."
Anyone have any idea on what the refresh rate on these things is? I've always imagined the whole e-paper thing must be fairly slow at scrolling/turning the page - but I hope I'm wrong!
i have one problem with this: memory stick; e-paper has to be flexible in the sense that it cant only support memory stick, thats like releasing paper that can only be written on with a special brand of pens, for the e-paper thing to take off we need multi format e-stationary
where's the source for their modified linux?
Seems like every time an announcement like this is made a week later we find out they aren't making the source available..
and can be seen in sunny environments? Erm, is that right?
So the question is, would this be possible? Can the screen refresh its contents fast enough for normal computer use? Can it be used interchangably as a regular monitor? If so, this thing sounds great.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
What's the point of 170dpi? My Palm has perhaps 40dpi at the most and it has perfectly readable text.
I think this is a case of a company marketing a product for a niche that doesn't need anywhere near the complexity or cost of the product they're pushing.
Does this unit have support for PDF's? Lack of PDF support is what kept me from buying the last generation of dedicated ebook readers.
Very close to my ideal writer's tool: a portable writing pad consisting of a high-resolution B&W screen like this, a fold-up wireless keyboard, a long battery life, and just one application: a word processor. It should run entirely from flash memory . And a $400 price tag would be sweet too.
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I thought the whole point of having ePaper in the first place was to have an inexpensive alternative to LCD which could be used in places LCD couldn't (like on product labels). At nearly $400, I don't see the ePaper providing a noticable savings over a comparable B&W LCD display, which could easily be used in a similar device. "So, 10 out of 10 for style, but minus several million for good thinking, okay?"
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
The technology behind these things sounds very similar to the Fisher-Price MagnaDoodle, which is a kickaround portable whiteboard that I cannot live without. It uses iron filings suspended in a white opaque oil, and it has a dot pitch of about 1/6" inch. The electronic version of these sound really great - especially the nonvolatility of the display. There is little doubt that these things are ultimately going to trounce LCDs.
This particular implementation, however, does not sound appealling due to the advertising whores that want some screenspace and the DRM that cripples its functionality. If they can sell these things for under $400 at such low volumes, then much better device that use essentially the same display technology cannot be too far off.
In his enthusiasm, Ukita lets slip that flexible electronic paper which can handle Harry Potter-esque moving images and colour is in the research and development labs and may be just two to three years away.
Having not read any Harry Potter, I may well be missing something obvious, but what is so 'Harry-Potter--esque' about 'moving images and colour'? Why not just say "can handle moving images and colour"? I'm pretty certain we had them before Harry Potter came along.
Or is it just a desperate attempt to interest people in the article?
"The e-paper is coming to reality in the form of a 6" screen" Whoa - wait - hold the phone. Paper does not have a screen and it does not require batteries. E-paper looks like a sheet of paper (but stronger) and is imbedded with tiny spheres that are rotate from the white side to the dark side by a device that looks like a printer but requires no ink. A couple of companies are working on this and they need to sue Sony's arrogant butt!
..yet. Give it a generation or two to iron out the problems that bound to pop up, and practicly everyone will buy them. The first videorecorders, personal computers, walkmen, mp3-players and whatnot wasn't perfect either, but these days 'everyone' has one.
For me, I would like to see this for at least half the prize and with the ability to display colour photographs (but then, a lot of the books I read has colour pictures in them), as well as support for wirtually any fileformat that displays text under the sun - as well as beeing able to display photographs from my digicam. Oh, and add a CF-card slot to it too, please ;)
Seriously thought - drop the price in half and I'll prolly buy one, memorystick, monocrome text and all.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
To give an example of how this kind of thing might be handy... I'd guess that my PDA has the dead tree equivalent of my weight in medical references (plus a few novels) stored on its memory card.
well, AAA batteries, 10,000 pages reades, 500 books in memory, why in Hell have they packed such a wonderful geek-toy with this poor memory and energy technology? For 350 euros more or less they should have put at least memory for enough books you cannot read in a lifetime and battery for reading them all.
DON'T PANIC
I never tried to learn Japanise, but I've tried to leran Chinese. Looking for character in the dictionary is a science in itself. There are special sytems for look up in the dictionary - "Four corner" and "Root", which are qute difficalt to learn. On top of it there are communist-modified characters and classic character. And prononsation with tones. In fact chines could understand more easy student speaking without tones, then student reproducing tones not perfectly...
Philips invented the paper, they work closely with Matsushita, so I'd wait for a Panasonic competitor to hit the market. Matsushita seem to have come up with a lot of neat stuff over the past year, hopefully it's a renaissance that will continue.
Personally, I find that paper back books are worthless. I have been telling my GF to buy up any hard bound books esp. the leather bounds. They tend to be done up right. My guess is that in about 10-15 years from now, paper backs will not exists and the leather bounds will cost the equivilent of 200-500 in todays USD$.
The reason for this is simple economics. A paper back involves tress (good, but costly), huge printing presses (mechannical things that must be bought), huge amounts of ppl that work (typical union) that is involved in nothing more than mmaking and transportation of these. Suddenly, the whole industry disappears. I would also guess that most publishing houses will disappear. Instead, it will be a large number of critics that will read/examine the media.
E-paper will be hearlded as one of the bigger temporary changes that will wipe out and industry. It is close to working on a flexable surface which will enable displays to be rolled up (think parchment), or others will be the exact dimension of paper-backs, and I suspect that we will see coffee table size tablets laying around the house (in about 10 years or so).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That's perfectly fine. But the generation has already been born that will not share your preference. It's a matter of what's available when you grow up. My teachers' teachers wrote everything by long hand, including final versions of thngs. My teachers used the typewriter for final versions but composed in longhand. I write everything in a word processor first time through but still prefer hardcopy for reading. My students will soon be comfortable composing and reading electronically.
Gee, I wonder where I fit in. I'm 30ish (well, I'll be thirty this year), and I prefer typing to writing on paper, but I actually prefer the Grafitti on my Clie to typing. Sure, it's not as fast, but it's much more portable than a keyboard. I can't even remember the last time I read something on a paper book. I fill up all available memory on my Clie with books, and as I finish each one I delete it. When it's empty of books, I fill it again. I've been reading more and at a steadier rate for the last 6 months than I *ever* have in my life, and I"ve got much less time to do so than I ever have in my life.
And I just know that when we can write into a computer, we can search what we've written, and when the computer shows us what we wrote, it can be read by anyone in any font they prefer. Beats the hell out of rating someone's penmanship everytime you try to read their longhand.
My question is, what's next?
Um, penis tattoos?
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In order to do color reproduction without a backlight, you need overlapping colored pixels, and that is an order of magnitude harder than just putting colored pixels next to each other, as on a TFT or CRT screen. If you want to create white and put red, green, and blue reflecting pixels next to each other, the result will be reflecting roughly 1/3 of the light in the best case, which is grey. It's comparable to a colored mobile-phone display with the backlight switched off.
Wrong on several counts.
1) 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.
2) As this is a reflective display rather than an emissive display, the primary colors would be cyan, magenta, and yellow (possibly with black), not RGB.
3) I have no idea where you get the "1/3 of the light" figure from. This technology is quite different than LCDs -- LCDs have fundamental limitations on their ability to transmit light due to the use of polarizing filters. e-paper does not use polarizing filters, just plain ol' reflection, and this means that (theoretically) there is nothing stopping e-paper from having brightness comparable to good paper. It's just a matter of refining the technology.
The real reason you haven't seen a color version yet, and aren't likely to anytime soon, is that e-paper is currently a strictly on/off display. It does not do grayscales at all. Suppose you figured out how to triple the resolution of this device and switch from B&W to CMY. You now have a display capable of showing exactly eight colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, red, green, blue, black, and white. That's it. You need intermediate steps (say, 50% cyan and 25% yellow) to display any other colors.
Either somebody needs to figure out how to make e-paper do grayscales, or the resolution needs to be way higher so that many subpixels of each color can be devoted to each pixel.
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They, (actually, we :) had encountered the Indian writing system about the same time as Kanas were invented. But it did not contribute to the Japanese writing system. Indian writing systems, being syllabic, indeed well suited to transcribing Japnese. Also, the majority of the intellectuals in those days being Buddhist monks, some of whom were familiar with the Indian wrting system, adopting a writing system derived from an Indian system might have happened if they were willing.
However, it did not happen. The Japanese already had a system of transcribing their syllables in Chinese characters, called Man-you gana. Hiragana and katakana were different ways of simplifying that Man-you gana.
A benefit of this development, or more precisely the fact that the Japanese used the Chinese characters to transcribe their language was that it allows us to figure out the pronunciation of Japanese in those days.
On the other hand, the knowledge of Indian writing system did contribute to the Japanese culture in the form of the table of 50 sounds. That was inspired by how syllables are arranged in Indic grammer, especially Sanskrit. Columns of consonants and rows of vowels, arranged to reflect the positions of vocal organs when a syllable is pronounced. This table, too, tells us how the syllables were pronounced in those days. So, for example the sounds that are pronounced as "ha" "hi" "fu" "he" "ho" today must have been pronounced as "pa" "pi" "pu" "pe" "po" because the the column for them is placed between "n" and "m". Pretty neat.
What I've found is that it's no substitute for sitting down with a real book, but it's great when waiting around at the post office, eating lunch, or any time I have some time I'd like to read but may not have planned for and brought a book.
The article and Sony seemed to be concerned with content, with the focus on this product that you can get a cheaper eBook than a real book. That, to me, is not a compelling reason to buy the thing. The collection at the Gutenberg Project would make it compelling for me, and I'm surprised that the eBook world has not embraced that in their marketing. Perhaps it's because consumer technology traditionally enables the sale of "content" (records, DVD's, etc.), and pointing to free content might be a no-no to publishers of current works. But if they wanted to sell the hardware, it would be a pretty gutsy move to advertise "thousands of free classic titles".
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
I'm not terribly knowledgeable about linguistics, but I do know that Korean is written in a bona fide alphabet that separates vowel and consonant symbols (contrast to the two syllabaries {katakana and hiragana} used by Japanese). It's invention is attributed to a king many hundreds of years ago.
Academic Korean writing (I've been told) still uses lots of Chinese characters. I get the impression it's a style/showoff thing.
Like English, with germanic-derived and latin-derived vocabularies combined ["hate" versus "detest"], Korean has "native" Korean words and chinese derived words.
You are considered an eloquent speaker if you use a lot of "chinese character words" -- words derived from the Chinese that in previous decades might have been written with the Chinese characters, but these days are probably spelled out like almost everything else. This is somewhat analogous to English, where the sentences comprised of latin-derived words are usully considered more erudite.
Yes, students spend upwards of $500/semester on books. I do. And I have seen countless occasions where book publishers issue revision after revision, often making changes as minor as just re-ordering the problems at the end of the chapter, just to render the previous revison ( no longer available, reproduction of previous revision forbidden by copyright law ) obsolete, forcing teachers to adopt the new version, also rendering student's investment in the earlier version a sunk cost.
Think its gonna be cheaper to "lease"? We already do. Cost of reproduction is not that much. Geez, if printing is so expensive, how can you justify the literal tons of printed junk mail generated daily?
For my stuff, I generally keep my books anyway. Geez, they are the ones I fall back to when I am trying to remember some little quirk in Control Theory or some obscure little DSP goodie I remember my professor talking about. I even still have my books discussing control theory algorithms using Vacuum Tubes!!! Although the mechanizations change, the basic ideas are identical. I see over and over again where often things get way, way, way more complicated than they need to be. I can perform integration with a fullbore DSP. I can also do it with a capacitor. Or, I might use a combo approach to use the digital side to store constants which compensate for analog tolerances. But then, think of all the techniques I was taught that I would lose reference to if my books expired!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]