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Rollable E Ink Displays Get Real
An anonymous reader writes "Two years ago Philips unveiled a prototype of a functional electronic-document reader, called the Readius, which could unroll its display to a scale larger than the device itself. Unfortunately, that was only a prototype. According to Cnet, however, Polymer Vision, which spun out from Philips in 2006, has redesigned the Readius and turned it into a real product that it is going to be available by the end of this year. There are some notable differences between this Readius and the prototype version, in particular, the ability to display 16 shades of grey instead of just 4 and the connectivity options. What doesn't make sense though, is given the energy efficiency and easy-to-read high contrast functionality of E Ink, why other than Motorola with its Motofone, has no other cell phone manufacturer incorporated E Ink technology into its handsets?"
It has indeed been over 2 years since this was announced. I wonder what is going wrong ? Are these displays too expensive ? Too many patents ? Difficulty in designing ? What is going wrong here ?
They're not expensive compared to LCDs, but they're expensive compared to paper. Since e-ink is supposed to make cheap and portable e-books a reality, you need to have an e-book that's cheap enough for consumers to want--the technology isn't well-suited to anything but static text and images, so you can't try to sell an e-book that, for example, also plays video games.
Since more people want to make phone calls than read books, e-books need to be pretty darned cheap to sell well (schools could be a prime market, but they're all broke, too). Personally, I wouldn't buy one until it broke the $99 barrier AND was as small and portable as a paperback book, and they haven't gotten to that point yet.
The reason none of these rollable devices have been brought to market yet is not the E-ink display, their grey scale display is quite good, and already used in consumer products (the Sony E-reader for example). The problem is the flexible back plane needed to drive the display. Currently, every system demonstrated including the Readius uses organic polymers for the drivers, which have a shelf life of a couple of days if you're lucky. They are incredibly sensitive to moisture, and the only system so far capable of protecting them requires the deposition of many layers of transparent metal oxides, which alone cost somewhere in the range of $60/ square foot. Anytime you see news about a flexible display, look to see if they are using organic drivers, if they are and they don't explicitly address the moisture issue, the product will never reach consumers.