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LG.Philips Develops World's First Color E-Paper
An anonymous reader writes "LG.Philips LCD has announced it has developed the world's first 14.1-inch flexible color E-paper display, equivalent in size to an A4 sheet of paper. The 14.1-inch flexible color E-paper uses electronic ink from E-Ink Corp. to produce a maximum of 4,096 colors. It can be viewed from a full 180 degrees, so that images always appear crisp, even when the display is bent."
Now how about a damn picture?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Now you just know the advertisers are gonna get a hold of this technology and slap animated ads on cereal boxes or something.
Minority Report anyone?
Once they get more colors I'd like to tack it to my wall and use it as a monitor.
Im suprised this e-ink hasnt caught on yet. Reading on regular lcds and crts is really tough on the eyes. Not to mention the saved paper.
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i predict this will become a success since we can use it while lying in bed like a paper magazine and look at photos and stuff, unlike current monitors :thumbsup:
Oh, you didn't mean motion picture?
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The opportunities for this kind of technology are limitless. Really - books, notes, travel, magazines, anything can be digitized and made incredibly accessible.
Not to mention there is no doubt that the low power nature of it makes it ready for solar power, making it an incredible communication tool in non-power friendly places, like say deserts or jungle for military use. The fact that it's flexible makes it able to handle harsh environments - simply roll it up, stick it in a tube and keep on going. Computer on top of Everest, anyone?
Really, this is an incredible breakthrough and deserves plenty of attention; I'm not sure the market is ready for it yet, but this kind of technology will absolutely become a part of our day-to-day lives in short order.
Clearly, this new technology will rapidly sweep aside the many current applications of black-and-white e-paper.
i predict this will become a success since we can use it while lying in bed like a paper magazine and look at photos and stuff, unlike current monitors :thumbsup:
I happen to be in my bed with my laptop right now. What I want is to take it to the park.
Imagine it's a beautiful day, and you can just grab your notebook and sit in the sun. There are batteries/solar panels, UMTS flat rates and eskies, but I still can't read my screen in the sun.
BTW, anything about the resolution somewhere?
I have the eReader and it's great for reading paperbacks. But tech docs fall short due to it's smallish screen. If this is really the size of an A4/Letter and has a high dpi then I see it taking off. If it's just color with a low dpi then it'll fail. I'd love an eReader with a letter display and 300dpi :-) They grey screen is cool.
or whatever people want to call them have failed to catch-on in any meaningful way, mostly for the same reasons that the paperless office hasn't caught on yet. People where I work have more or less given up giving me anything on paper because I don't like it. The last two things I printed were tax form and a joke photo for my cube wall, and that counts months without/between printing anything at all.
Electronic books exist, making them in color won't make them more appreciated by consumers. I don't think this product will be used how you imagine that it will.
I can see it as a foldable/rollable screen for PDAs that would be simply AWSOME! Portable devices could use tech like this, and it will probably revolutionize fixed screens. Something this small might make that kitchen PC on the fridge door a real possibility, or a cookbook etc.
I further predict that any advances this tech makes will be with PDA users as they are more likely to want to do computer things when not sitting at their computer.
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I've never even seen a device with black and white e-paper in it, and now they smugly announce the colour version. Why aren't the B&W e-paper devices more popular? Does it have to do with the fact that they don't work very well, or that they are extremely expensive?
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A slimmer, more portable way of viewing porn!
Now the nekked chicks can hump themselves when you fold the paper double..
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So finally I have real good digital photo frame....wait a min...can that be video frame also
Apparently they have not improved it, otherwise they would have given it in the PR.
If memory serves, it's higher than 1s, waiting that long each time you "turn the page" on your book reader must be quite annoying..
It might be 'color', but looking at the photo on Philip's website, it seems that the quality still leaves a lot to be desired... Especially when it comes to brightness & contrast
Don't get me wrong -- it's a great start, but I doubt it will replace your monitor any time soon.
I've yet to see a A4 display. This is a real breakthrough, if it's affordable and available for purchase.
I want one for viewing electronic spec sheets - all PDFs, all A4, and I have thousands of them. It would be nice to have a real "paper" like display instead of doing what we do now, which is print them. I've played with the e-ink stuff before, but the resolution was far too low and the screen size was paperback-sized.
..don't panic
.... flushing the fucking thing if you thought the words on the e-paper were only good for wiping your ass with. Or in emergency TP shortages, what are you going to use now?
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This could be the biggest book revolution since Gutenberg. Combine the vastness of digital media out there with the paper medium which can be taken anywhere, anytime. Books, newspapers, journals, office paperwork, faxes -- all could be replaced to a large degree by e-books. Imagine wanting to read a new novel, and instead of going to buy the book, just go to the seller's website, pay a fraction of the cost, and download the text right onto your e-book, then take it with you anywhere you want and read it in your free time, on the bus, subway, in bed, anywhere you want, without having to deal with the posture and eye strain problems of continuous reading from computer monitors, or having to carry a notebook around with you. Also imagine how much trees will be saved by this. Although, I'm pretty sure your friendly neighborhood copyright conglomerate will think otherwise. Anyone else thought of an organization like BIAA, hard at work to curtail the enlightenment of those who cannot afford the Knowledge Tax?
..the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, like what they use in the movie? something like that could be a reality in 5 years, voice activated and all, with a few hundred GB of flash memory.
When I played with some eInk a few weeks ago it had a lot of after images. It's not (yet) appropriate for animation or video. But it is amazingly easy on the eyes. At first I thought the e-reader at the store was just a model with some fake image on the display, not so it was a real working unit.
eInk won't be replacing your PC monitor any time soon, it seems to only be practical for specialized users.
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How come they didn't have this technology in Star Trek? They are still using chunky old 90s looking laptops!
I'm starting to think everything they have in the 2400 century, they traveled back to the glorious 90s to get. Hey, that reminds me...
h
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I see this technology eventually being used to coat devices, producing a "display-skin". Imagine an iPod without a screen, but which displays the song info directly on the iPod's case. Combine that with touch-sensitive input, and we have some slick UIs.
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I want my E-Shirt to be tye dye, and all the colors to continually go towards the center of the shirt and disappear
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That meas I can receive E-mail on the toilet and clean my *** with it?
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i just order an Iliad iRex and the next days coloured ePaper is announced ;-).
I think ePaper will do a huge jump ahead the next years. For me it is very practical. Usually i take 1kg of books per 3 days of vacation with me. With an eBook reader this will free up a lot of travel luggage.
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Obviously, its so damn thin you can't see it.
it's wipe-clean!
is LAPTOP COMPUTERS!! imagine a pen sized computer or pda that rolls out 10 inch screen...and hopefully extended battery hours. i wonder how much energy efficient this is compare to other screens.
That's one of the two main questions anyone should be asking right now, although I guess it would still be useful in some ways, if it even had the refresh rate of turning a page in a book. The other big question is... what's its resolution?
;)
I mean, come on... "A paper display with a maximum of 4,096 colours"? I can get that with a bit of paper, a robot arm, and 4,096 tins of paint. How about some news FOR NERDS, instead of just PR crap?
is a video of this display in action. I'd like to see someone bending and flexing the panel while playing Terminator on it or something,
Also, I did not notice mention of how the panel is lit. Is this like a color LCD display that requires a backlight, or is it self-luminescent? There's no point to a flexible panel if it has to be backlit by an inflexible light source. The e-ink I have seen in the past requires a backlight.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
It's not E-Ink, it's Ink-Two-Point-Oh.
Call me skeptical on the viewable from 180 degrees part.
This would have to convert all typical RGB content to CMYK on the fly, no?
Check out this article on Fujitsu's color epaper from 2005:
p aper/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/13/fujitsu_e
With an e-paper monitor, you can work outdoors in bright sunlight. Enjoying a beautiful summer day and getting some computer-related work done are no longer incompatible. I bet that also in general e-paper is better for your eyes than CRT or LCD; the light intensity is always well balanced with the surroundings.
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If they're really looking for a market of people who would latch on to technology, they just have to market to research scientists. Journal articles are always available in PDF, but it's just not physically reasonable to read several ~10 page articles on a flickering screen--meaning that I and everyone I know have piles about 6" high of printed journal articles on their desk. I would love to replace all that with a simple device that could display/store PDFs.
I wonder whether this technology is inherently limited to a very steep saturation-brightness tradeoff.
In the picture (provided earlier, by thedohman), the color E-ink panel looks very dark.
Clue: Phillips explains that they made the colors with a plastic overlay.
Speculation: the overlay could be a transparent RGB grid, where each cell transmits (and therefore reflects) only Red, Green, or Blue. Just like an LCD, right? Unfortunately, because it is purely reflective, that would cut its brightness way down, because you'd be blocking most incipient light even in your most-white state. In the simple case, with equal numbers of Red, Green, and Blue cells, the max brightness would be 1/3 of incipient light, since each cell could only reflect its own color. If you, say, threw in a white cell too, you could get at most 1/2 of incipient light, but at the cost of saturation (because your colors would have to be either washed out by the white quarter, or dark because they can only use a small fraction of the total surface for reflection).
Can anyone give a cost and availability? Until the 14 inch screen comes down to a reasonable price (~$500), this is just an amusement.
E-ink had color flexible e-paper on display years ago.
http://www.eink.com/press/releases/pr86.html
There are a hell of a lot more ways to create e-paper and paper-like displays so it is understandable that there is some confusion about who is doing what first. Next week is the Society for Information Display show, and there will be at least 20 e-paper developers displaying. Almost all of them will have color prototypes at their booth.
http://www.sid.org/conf/sid2007/sid2007.html
But seriously, current LCD, cholesteric LCD, plasma, e-paper, inorganic EL, DLP, LCOS, elecgtrowettting, and EL display tech is so mature and competitive that any new display tech better be f*cking perfect or it will never have a chance.
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D'oh!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.