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Flexible, Color OLED Screens For E-Readers

Posted by Soulskill on from the still-waiting-on-a-kindle-killer dept.

nadiskafadi writes "Taiwanese researchers have shown off several flexible display technologies in an endeavor to promote e-readers and e-paper. One of the newest technologies from the Industrial Technology Research Institute was a flexible 4.1-inch color OLED (organic light emitting diode) display, which it claims is for the next era of portable devices."

3 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E. by Oscar_Wilde · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oh for goodness sake!

    The last thing you want in an e-reader is for it to be light emitting. There's a reason we're putting so much effort into developing better eInk displays.

    The only people who don't seem to understand this are the ones who don't read much or haven't read much on an eInk screen. It's a huge improvement over anything that works by shining light directly into your eyes.

    1. Re:The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E. by bertok · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, I've always wondered about that. If you go back a mere 130 years, the only sources of emitted light a person would ever see (off the top of my head) were:

      Sun
      Fire
      Stars
      Lightening
      Auroras
      Lightening bugs, etc
      Foxfire, etc
      Fish (or were they too deep then?)

      So everything the human eye ever saw was reflected light. Since the advent of the television, people began watching and focusing on emitted light directly, and computers, cell phones, etc have taken that even further.

      So what, if anything, does that mean to human vision?

      Absolutely nothing, light is light, irrespective of the source.

    2. Re:The problem with an OLED e-reader is the E. by Fallen+Seraph · · Score: 5, Informative

      There's something noticeably absent from that list: the Moon. The moon was mankind's primary source of light before the advent of fire, and the moon can be very bright at times. Yet the moon's light is entirely composed of reflected light. The poster above you is correct: light is light, irrespective of the source. The key aspect is how bright the light is. Staring at the sun is bad, not because it's a light source, but because it's a POWERFUL light source which is much brighter than our eyes are capable of handling directly. With many modern devices, brightness can be varied for increased eye comfort and reduced strain.

      That being said, the issue is that, often, reducing brightness also reduces contrast on light emitting devices. And when the brightness is high, it can wash out the darker colors, and make details hard to see because the light overwhelms it. Thus E-Ink is useful not because it's not a light source, but because it is a low brightness (when reading under reflected light) high contrast display, which uses almost no energy when the display is static, making it perfect for long-term reading.