UK Company Demos Color Video Animation On Electronic Paper

sweetpea86 writes with an update on color e-ink screens. From the article: "Plastic electronics company Plastic Logic has demonstrated color video animation on a flexible plastic display, which it claims is the first example of an organic thin-film transistor (OTFT) driving electronic paper at video rate. The demonstration proves that the potential uses of electronic paper extend far beyond monochrome text-based e-readers to more sophisticated tablet-style devices that can run color video, while still keeping power consumption low." SlashGear also took a look at it and has a short video of the animated e-ink display.

Comments

Video Link...

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be cool if the video link had... Ehm... A link, tho.

Re:Video Link...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard to slashvertise if you link directly to the video in the slashvertisement.

Smart Move

[Osgeld]

"Last month, Plastic Logic announced it was abandoning plans to manufacture its own e-readers, deciding instead to to license its flexible display technology and software to OEMs, system integrators, and device manufacturers."

Good, there is nothing worse than a company who makes something interesting, then tries to beat the market in a game they dont understand. Just make the shit and sell it to all the other people who have design and marketing departments larger than your entire company, and let them deal with Q public.

They could win if everyone wants it, and if a reader fails they might have plenty of others to sell it to, instead of all of the eggs in one basket, and raffled off to the richest patent troll.

Re:Smart Move

[TheRaven64]

Of course, they still need to find partners willing to use their technology. Pixel Qi, for example, has been pursuing this course, and it's still really hard to find devices that use their screens and often the devices you do find are let down in other areas. If you make a great screen and the first product that a licensee ships has an anaemic CPU and GPU then the poor perception of the device will reflect badly on your screen and may harm future sales ('I got a thing with one of those screens, and it was crap'). That's why it's often a good strategy to put together a reference platform that can show off the functionality for showing to journalists and potential customers, even if you don't sell it as a consumer product.

HTML FLash tag

[flyingfsck]

Finally, flashing advertisements can now be done on paper. This will be so 1995.

Re:HTML FLash tag

[SuricouRaven]

I eagerly await the time when this tech is down to less than a dollar a page including controls and a week of battery. Because when that happens, you'll start seeing them used as magazine advertisments. Which hackers should be able to disassemble with some effort. Thus giving hobbiests access to vast areas of color e-paper subsidised by advertisers and so cheap that people can (and will) use it as wallpaper.

Re:HTML FLash tag

[AmiMoJo]

I remember years ago when Kindles first came out one US newspaper (New York Times?) calculated that it would be cheaper to buy every subscriber one and deliver the editions electronically than printing and distributing paper copies. I'm somewhat surprised that no newspaper has offered its readers some kind of eReader+subscription offer yet.

Re:HTML FLash tag

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you only get the cost savings if everyone switches (no printer, no distribution). If half of them switch, you still have huge static costs.

Re:HTML FLash tag

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Much of the battery advantage comes from the fact that e-ink doesn't draw power unless its changing the picture. I guess if its showing video, that advantage will disappear.

Re:HTML FLash tag

[michael_cain]

Plastic Logic's website also describes work to allow them to incorporate a sensor layer along with the display. Heck with typing -- I'm willing to pay well for an electronic piece of paper that I can use to take math notes, sketch graphs, and so forth, at something approaching the size and resolution of paper and pen.

Re:HTML FLash tag

[Hognoxious]

Good luck with that. Apple have patented anything that's thin, think they own touchscreens and if the corners aren't sharper than weasel's ears there'll be holy hell to pay.

Heck, the background is probably white - Apple think they own that too, the bunch of foppish nonces.

Re:Magic

[Osgeld]

Whats a newspaper?

Being 33 years old, every time I pick something up that I am told is a newpaper, all I get is 1 paragraph of a day old story and 4/5th of a page full of ad's for old lady underwear and flat out scams for gold, homes and used cars... I have given up on finding these fabled papers of news.

NOT at video speed

[lgftsa]

A maximum of 12fps is not video speed.

Re:NOT at video speed

[TheRaven64]

No, but it's getting close. I have a first generation eInk device, and it takes about 0.9 seconds to do a refresh, so it's managing 1.1fps (and in 16 shades of grey, not colour). The jump from that to 12fps is a lot bigger than the jump from 12fps to 24fps (cinema speed). More importantly, they can have the pixels switch from one colour to another directly, while the earlier ones needed to go via white, which would have made video flickery at any speed.

As they say in the video, it's not 'true video speed', but it does mean that you can have interactive UI widgets on an eInk device. 12fps is enough, for example, to be able to type into a text field without seeing irritating lag. It's enough for buttons to respond as soon as you click on them. It's enough for simple animated effects. I had some pop-up textbooks when I was a child that managed simple animations of things like the inside of a jet engine by having you pull tabs to make parts of a picture move - it's more than enough for that kind of thing, which could be very useful for textbooks.

Re:NOT at video speed

[Anonymous Coward]

A maximum of 12fps is not video speed.

Actually it is. Perhaps it's not what we are used to by now but above 10fps and a healthy brain is fully capable to join the still images together into a motion.

Re:NOT at video speed

[michael_cain]

A bit faster at 15 fps would be better, but as you say, that's not a big jump.

When I was doing research on little video windows on computers 20 years ago, 13-15 fps was a critical speed because it was the rate at which people could determine if the audio and video were synced by watching lip movements. At 10-12 fps, the motion wasn't smooth enough to tell. For some applications, like some virtual classrooms where the video was a secondary medium -- the slides and the audio were the primary ones -- 15 fps video in a small window was adequate because what was important was the broad body language and overall facial expressions, not the fine detail.

Shopping is about to become a nightmare

[Spacejock]

Animated web ads are the pits, but you wait until you're invited to punch the monkey, bid now!, sign up for e-newsletters and hear from nine out of ten dentists whilst browsing shelves at the local deli. I, for one, will be carrying a tiny sharpened screwdriver.

Re:Shopping is about to become a nightmare

[mianne]

What you describe is already widely used at Big Box stores such as Walmart. It's an LCD display, not E-Ink, but they not only detect your presence, but try to determine your age and sex to deliver a targeted ad to you as you walk by.

Now when the butcher paper that holds my cold cuts starts advertising products to me as I drive home or when I open the fridge to make a sandwich, Fahrenheit 451 will come true, only it'll be the populace, not the authorities, on patrol with blowtorches.

Re:Magic

[vigour]

Whats a newspaper?

Being 33 years old, every time I pick something up that I am told is a newpaper, all I get is 1 paragraph of a day old story and 4/5th of a page full of ad's for old lady underwear and flat out scams for gold, homes and used cars... I have given up on finding these fabled papers of news.

You need to read better newspapers. Find yourself a quality broadsheet.

Page switching speed

[oever]

e-paper is nice way of reading. The only reason why i do not own an e-reader is that the time to go from page to page is too long. With these improved speeds (12 fps or 80ms) this last drawback is being solved. That is very good news. Playing video well on these screens will take longer, but already the speed improvement will really help selling e-readers.

Re:Page switching speed

[TheRaven64]

He's right. It doesn't take much longer to turn a page with an eInk device than a real book, but it feels a lot longer. When you turn a page in a book, you're turning a page. When you turn a page with an eInk device, you're waiting for the page to turn. I saw one UI that worked around this by turning the top and bottom halves of the page independently - when you get past the top half, you flip the page turner and it's replaced by the top half of the next page, when you get to the bottom, the next bit is already there and you hit the flip bar to update the bottom. It's a bit clunky, but it works much better than the page-at-a-time model. The problem isn't the speed so much as the interruption. If the speed is fast enough, then you can do it entirely synchronously without there being a problem of interruption.