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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."
http://www.lgphilips-lcd.com/homeContain/jsp/eng/i nv/inv101_j_e.jsp?BOARD_IDX=1280&languageSec=E&kin ds=IN1
includes a picture, and a little tiny bit more info.
It's TFT LCD on a flexible plastic substrate instead of glass.
http://www.fujitsu.com/global/news/pr/archives/mon th/2005/20050713-01.html
I think this came first.
Motorola is selling a cellphone sporting E-Ink display - it's rather crude, as the display is not dot-matrix but a segmented display (not unlike LCDs) sporting some assorted graphical icons. The kicker is that the phone sells well under 50 bucks unlocked and it's 9mm thick. Apparently, the E-Ink display is way cheaper than LCD displays to mass produce, and, since it doesn't need glass nor polarizer substrates it allows the phone to be this thin.
As for the device itself, it's a nice barebones phone, which feels very study. The display looks great, and i only wish they used a finer dot matrix display, as SMSs can be rather hard to read on it. I've been considering getting one for myself lately.
No, it's not an LCD, as it uses E-Ink (little black and white capsules) - that's what makes it e-paper. It does use TFTs to rotate those capsules and change the color, however.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
It's just that a monitor is vivid due to a backlight, and that's what kills your eyes. The pic shows a newspaper-like quality, and that's really the point of it; having a display strictly for reading text... not at all for replacing your monitor.
I'm a skeptic. If it were so great, then where is it? We've had all kinds of half-baked technologies foisted upon us. I can think of a bunch right off the top of my head. 8-tracks; Apple Newtons; steam powered cars; ISDN; COBOL; alcohol-free beer. Those were the HALF-baked things that were sold by people who wanted to just make a buck from suckers.
This lectro paper must be even WORSE than half-baked, because nobody is selling it anywhere. I don't know why everybody's jumping every time there's some new hype about this crap. Sorry to be a skeptic, but it's my nature.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
There are two commercial black & white e-paper devices available to my knowledge. I happen to have one.d er/
The iRex iLiad http://www.irextechnologies.com/ is the one I have, but Sony also makes one http://www.learningcenter.sony.us/assets/itpd/rea
The quality of these b&w displays is phenomenal. The difference with colour or b&w LCDs is striking, especially outside and in full sunlight.
One reason they're not so popular might be that E-Ink is prohibitely expensive; they have a monopoly on the digital ink liquid.
Also a lot of people tend to think colour is very important, neglecting the fact that 99.9% of their book library is monochrome.
Hmm, funnily enough the ones I've seen (well, the Sony one which is really the only one I have seen) is too big for me.
I just want an e-book reader that I can easily hold in one hand. I'm using an ipaq at the moment which is almost the right size, but a little bit too small - another inch or so wider would probably be good. Then I could comfortably hold it in one hand whilst reading in almost any position.
I suspect e-book readers are still too far away though due to the DRM issues. The Sony one is probably the best tech, but its crippled by lack of available titles. I've been keeping an eye out for the Hanlin Ebook after seeing it posted in a Slashdot thread ages ago, but I haven't seen any of these over my side of the pond (Australia). They look good, but again you're short on titles - at least they'll read a huge variety of formats though.
The picture on that page is compressed into poststamp size format by your browser, if you right-click on the picture and do "open in new tab" you get a very detailed picture (the link includes utf-8 characters, so I can't link it directly)
This sig is just as redundant as the rest of this posting
The problem with the Sony Reader (I have one, too) is that it does not reflow PDF documents. I thought I'd be able to read stuff from O'Reilly's Safari on mine, but on average, it's more trouble than its worth. Gutenberg books work, but there's too much work involved reformatting them so they will reflow properly (i.e., fixing the line breaks). The books purchased from the eConnect store work perfectly, but the selection is awful, you have to use Windows to download them (which in my case means using virtualization), the software is terrible, and in many cases the book descriptions are not accurate (for instance, for translated books, they often have the wrong translators listed! - this would be rather like thinking you're downloading the Yo-Yo Ma performance of a cello suite only to discover that it was performed by a 17-year old at his high school recital).
http://www.lgphilips-lcd.com/adminContain/files/(% EC%82%AC%EC%A7%84%EC%9E%90%EB%A3%8C)color%20flexib le%2001(20070511)1.jpg
Ah, TextMate, is there anything it can't do?
I didn't realise 2001 camera phones could do 3008 x 2000 resolution.
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.