Slashdot Mirror
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!
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..
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?
for the e-paper thing to take off we need multi format e-stationar
Well it won't happen here. Sony has been pushing their proprietary "memory stick" which uses heavy drm called "magicgate" in all of their products hoping that the sheer number of devices they can put it in will give it a valid/default market base.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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.
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.
It is a wonder why anyone buys Sony at all these days. I know on principle that I'm not going to lock myself into their products or media when I can't use the cards interchangeably with other devices I might own.
You need a license for the other formats, they are not free
What about one of those USB flash pen/thumb drives that are showing up everywhere? Universal in nature and not proprietary.
Their DRM is barely used
But yet it lies in wait.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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.
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?
Like what I said? You might like my music
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.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
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.