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Samsung's New Carbon Nanotube Color E-Paper
Iddo Genuth writes to tell us that Samsung and Unidym have shown the world's first carbon nanotube-based color e-paper. Interestingly, the new film is electrically conductive while remaining almost completely translucent and only 50 nanometers thick. "The company also mentions that the EPD [electrophoretic displays] has important advantages over conventional flat panel displays. EPDs have very low power consumption and bright light readability, which means that even under bright lights or sunlight, the user would be able to view the display clearly. Furthermore, since the device uses the thin CNT films, applications can include e-paper and displays with thin, flexible substrates. Power consumption is lowered due to the EPD's ability to reflect light and therefore able to preserve text or images on the display without frequently refreshing."
It conspicuously says nothing about whether you can apply a backlight to it.
But front-light readability is great for us Slashdotters who go outside and work :)
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
Awesome, I can now have a convenient way of looking at 100s of galleries of porn when I'm in the bathroom!
That might also be nice to use for head up displays in cars.. or even to put over my living room window to change the view :)
I just can't be bothered.
Sure color is nice, but I can't afford monochrome right now, and I don't want to know what all those extra colors will cost.
yes, to space elevator advertisements
...lit e-reader, and eventually an ambiently lit 'e-painting' that looks just like the real thing but I can change it as often as I want.
What the hell is up with this "http://slashdot.org/index2.pl", It is hanging my whole system for 3 seconds just for some lame heavily scripted web2.0-ness?! I want the old slashdot back! Help me tag it (which now suck though) 'slashdotsucks'!
"A waterproof MP3 player built for bright beach days is the first device with a color "e-paper" display, meaning it has no backlighting and thus can be read in direct sunlight. The display, from Qualcomm, consists of two layers of a reflective material. Some wavelengths of light bounce off the first layer; some pass through and bounce off the second. Interference between the two beams creates the color, and electrostatic forces control the distance between the layers."
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/21561/?a=f
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Cloud is pants, and idle is definitely pants, but Epaper? That's not pants. Well, there is the possibility of actual pants being made from it, so it could be pants, literally .. uh, did I just "whoosh" myself? Sigh.
Anyway, highly amusing to see this extremely British slang creeping into the everyday slashdot vernacular.
Let my new 7-digit UID be a lesson to all - write down your passwords.
Cold-hearted orb, that rules the night,
removes the colors from our sight.
Red is gray, and yellow white.
But we decide which is right.
And which is an illusion?
The Moody Blues, Nights in White Satin
Everyone might want to stay away from the paper shredder with these - It will either destroy the blades or make some pretty nasty, toxic dust.
:)
Might do both.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
I'd be more impressed if they made them out of Copper Nanotubes (CuNT).
(Ref: Bad Santa, 2003)
So, I must be at least 36 years old or so, to remember this at all.
I'll make some sandwiches.
Finally a display suitable for the ultimate comic book reader. Not that it will replace real comics, just augment them like my kindle does with books.
You're not quite right. We also have a dozen new ways to produce them cheaply, quickly, and efficiently each year, but never see any mass production. Why? I don't know, they never follow up on the almost monthly articles about the newest, cheapest way to produce nanotubes. I would call out a government conspiracy, but I only have the energy to fight 3 or 4 conspiracies at a time. So I'm guessing it's probably just media hype. you know, so we can think the world will become perfect any day now, so we can stop worrying and calm down and accept the government's rule over our lives. You know, cuz it's a big conspiracy. Down with big brother!!!
The path to enlightenment is truly through homemade drugs!
carbon nanotube-based color e-paper.
(With apologies to Bob Novella) we should put billions of dollars into this!
(Go to www.theskepticsguide.org for a super-awesome science podcast, with a bit of geek culture leaking through the floorboards every now and again; Bob is one of the hosts).
And will you be requiring the French, Spanish and Dutch help like you did in 1778, or are you going to try it alone this time ?
Like "man it sucks", or "man it blows" is any better OR worse than "its pants". But trust an American to get on his high horse over nothing.
How much extra do I have to pay for the additional unnecessary buzzword? I don't recall carbon nanotubes being particularly cheap.
B&W LCDs are so terribly under-appreciated... I still keep my decades old PDAs working specifically because B&W LCD screens are superior, but rather difficult to find (in reasonably large sizes) now.
Hell, I'd love to get a 15" B&W LCD screen for my PC... Infinitely easier to read text on without eye strain, and vastly lower power than any other technology out there. You can always do the dual-desktop thing, and only turn on your second (color) LCD screen when you need to look at something in color like pictures, maps, etc.
One for my laptop wouldn't be a bad idea either... Get rid of the backlight and you'll likely more than double your existing battery run time.
Refreshing an LCD screen has nothing to do with the backlight... Only with CRT & Plasma displays are the two issues linked.
And this conveniently ignores the fact that e-ink screens have TERRIBLE power consumption when the screen contents ARE changed frequently.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Open ink pot has released the first "free" Linux firmware to run on e-readers:
http://openinkpot.org/
ARE there anything they CANT do?
A workable e-reader would have a market here which is initially niche but would then provide the revenue to get to the fully commercialised A4 e-reader - which makes electronic delivery of newspapers and magazines fully practical. The decline in value of internet content is driven by the advertiser-funded model. Paid-for services offering real value would love a locked down e-reader. (and I personally don't mind paying for worthwhile services. By buying a subscription to e.g. Scientific American, I help guarantee its editorial independence and ability to fund articles that would lose certain advertisers.)
Proof of concept of a workable full page e-reader, during a recession when people are looking for disruptive technologies that may offer a good return? This could easily be the most important thing on Slashdot this week.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
What the hell does "almost completely translucent" mean? Does "completely translucent" = transparent?
Isn't 'translucent' merely a descriptor for a state somewhere between transparent and opaque?
-Styopa
Think of the paper cuts you might get!
Just don't drink lemonade while reading the paper, and you should be ok.
If something was completely translucent, wouldn't it be either transparent or opaque?
No; Think about glass block used in bathrooms. It lets all the light through (completely translucent), but it scrambles the light, obscuring the view and therefore making it nontransparent.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
Oh great, now Google will get involved. We'll have space elevators within 5 years, they'll always be in beta - and we'll be at Google's advertising mercy for 36 hours while we ride up.... thanks buddy.
You just had to put 2 and 2 together didn't you.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Uh, carbon nanotubes are used in quite a few common items, like electronics, golf clubs, tennis rackets and mountain bike handlebars.
What we can't do very easily is manufacture strong materials composed of aligned nanotubes (aka space elevator unobtanium).
It's only 50 nanometers thick? How does that compare to regular paper? I'm trying to figure out how much more or less likely papercuts would be with this stuff, and 50 nanometers sounds pretty thin.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Where is the "-1, Informative" moderation option?
Just fyi, If you want to ride a space elevator in 36 hours, you would be going at 1000km/hour to reach geostationary orbit. Let's assume you can make the car go at 100km/h, it would take you 360 hours. That's 15 days. Or a month at 50km/h. Or two months at 25km/h.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Paired Bluetooth devices, perhaps. You wouldn't be able to just plonk down next to any old set of monitor and keyboard, of course, you'd need to authenticate them at least once, otherwise anybody carrying around such devices could trivially compromise your system. But if you're going to be tied to a specific set of keyboards and mice and monitors which your computer will allow to connect to it, you might as well use a docking station and save the battery.
Voice command and speech recognition. This, of course, is the holy grail of pocket computing. You won't find yourself complaining about virtual keyboards if speech I/O ever works well. Clear voice technology. While on the subject of voice, it would be even better if the device could talk back to you in a clear, understandable, and pleasant voice.
I don't want to talk to my portable computer. That's utterly obnoxious: people talking loudly on their mobiles on the bus are bad enough, people chattering away to a robot in their pocket would be a nightmare. I'd quite like voice control of a home automation computer, though.
Situational awareness. The smartphone should know when to turn itself off by knowing where it is. The idea is that when your phone is in an airplane, for instance, it turns itself off. It goes to vibrate mode automatically in other situations, such as in the theater. There are a lot of different methodologies for making this work.
For it to know it's in such a place, there'd have to be a standard signal that says 'This is a place you should be switched off'. Trivial denial of service attack. I suppose you might be able to do something with GPS - detect a plane by the speed, detect cinemas by a database of known locations - but who maintains the database? Google, maybe?
Ownership awareness. The device simply will not work for anyone other than the owner.
Solve that problem and you'll be the richest man in the industry. How does the owner authenticate reliably? Whole-disk encryption with a strong passphrase, maybe. But you just know most people will set it to 'password', or the name of their cat.
Broadcast TV reception. I have never been sure why there are so many weird TV technologies for portable devices when the broadcasting grid could be used just as easily. Let the device act as a portable TV receiver.
On TV frequencies you'd need a big antenna. Wavelength is something like 50cm. There's a reason we use microwaves for Wi-Fi and mobile phones.
Extensible. There is no reason why various mechanisms cannot be put into the device to turn it into any number of laboratory instruments and useful gizmos. It could serve as a pH meter, a blood sugar checker, a blood pressure tester, and a postage meter scale. It could also be the basis for a car tune-up aid and all sorts of other things.
I'm sure that with the right USB peripherals and software it would make the tea too.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.