E Ink Creates Full-Color Electronic Paper Display (mashable.com)

SkinnyGuy writes: The reflective display company finally figured out how to make those ultra tiny balls produce 32,000 colors in one super-low-powered display. It's a breakthrough for E Ink, display advertising and, maybe someday, e-readers and digital photo frames. The new prototype display, which can be manufactured in an array of sizes, features a 20-inch, 2500 x 1600 resolution and is equally as power-efficient as the monochromatic display. E Ink Holding's Head of Global marketing Giovanni Mancini said it can be powered with solar cells used in bus stop signage, for example. Some of the limitations center around the resolution and refresh rate. As of right now, the resolution is only 150 pixels per inch (ppi), which is about half the resolution of a typical 6-inch, monochromatic E ink display. It also takes about two seconds to fully resolve images, which is pretty slow when compared to today's e-readers. The company is currently only focused on using the new color display for commercial signage.

Comments

Arduino!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I'm dying to get ahold of an e-ink display that is roughly iPad-sized that I can program with an Arduino. Why? Oh I dunno but I feel like I could come up with tons of ideas really fast.

Re:Arduino!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like some really large colour E Ink displays to cover the walls in my house. No more repainting, I could just load a new colour or picture.

Re:Wait.... Again?!

[Immerman]

I seem to recall that the folks behind the Kindle's e-ink screen had color versions as well, but it was prohibitively expensive to make. As I recall it used basically the same technology as the two-tone version, except instead of a uniform sheet of e-ink it had subpixels of the different colors printed in a grid. Unfortunately that made the displays FAR more expensive to produce, as it required precise alignment between the e-ink layer and the controlling electronics, unlike the greyscale models where the e-ink layer was uniform, and pixels were determined entirely by the electronics laminated to them.

I would assume the required precision also meant that the color models couldn't benefit from the the free sub-pixel anti-aliasing that makes the greyscale screens look so incredibly crisp and smooth even at relatively low resolutions.