Slashdot Mirror
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.
I may be a little addled in my ability to remember, but I have this deeply nagging feeling at the back of my mind that they had a full color e-ink prototype waaaaaaaaaaaay back in the late 90s that used a super hydrophobic cell layer with electrically conductive partition walls.
IIRC, the paper was made from 4 transparent layers over a white back layer. Each layer held a CMYK pigment component in the form of an aqueus solution, held into a tight microdot form by superhydrophobic coatings inside each cell. When the cell is energized, hydroelectrodynamic forces cause the droplet to spread out and cover the cell, with the applied voltage to the cell determining how fully the droplet flattens and covers the cell.
That was waaaaaaaaaaay back though. I will dig to see if I can find the old press releases.
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.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
...if e-Ink displays didn't cost a fucking arm, leg and half a kidney. Can't get any reasonably-sized, reasonably-priced displays for use with Arduinos/ESP8266/STM32/etc. I would be all over that shit if only the displays were cheaper.
... would certainly be fine for, I can say quite confidently that I would not be in their market.Although the 15 bit color depth is slightly disappointing, it's something that I could live with. However, the resolution needs to be kicked up a notch. Resolution is going to impact readability at close distances, so while this resolution might be fine for things like billboard ads, it's not going to be very good for books that you hold in your hands. Also, I'd want a refresh rate that's probably capable of at least showing full motion video. If I'm going to use a display simply as a reader, I don't want to get distracted by visual artifacts of screen refreshing when I am flipping pages... The page should update the instant that I make the gesture on the device to do so... I should not be able to consciously perceive a delay, particularly since the kinds of things I would want to store on a portable ereader are books that I would as likely as not be quickly skimming for particular information as opposed to simply spending extended time on a single page, and waiting two seconds for each page refresh is not remotely usable (of course, neither is normal epaper refresh speeds IMO... but maybe that's just me).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Yes, I'm aware that what I described is not a pure catch-22 because there is an out, while in a real catch-22 there is not. The out being feature improvement to the point that it offers advantages over alternatives that would justify the expense. My point is that such features have not been forthcoming for eink, so the result feels a lot like a catch-22.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I have to assume that you are always the wise man in the room.
Somebody who has a memory more voluminous than the elephant, combined with the details comparable that of the photo. Photographic memory, so to speak.
You work for a large corporation. And you are a smart ass director.
You either have PhD, or considered having one.
20" high resolution color zero-power-while-not-refreshing photo frame? Shut up and take my money!
This is precisely what a digital photo frame should be. Program it to change the photo once a week from the internal SD card and a single battery charge could last half a year, if the designers are smart enough to implement it with a microcontroller instead of an Android-running behemoth. And it should have the longevity, too. I still use my eInk bookreader I bought in 2007 daily, and it works great, after far more frequent page turns than a photo frame is likely to need.
I would advocate for non-removable internal storage accessed via USB in order to avoid paying the Microsoft tax on FAT32, but it would be a shame not to make the storage upgradeable given that Samsung seems to be determined to make it possible to lose a terabyte in the couch cushions.
But anyway, details. Shut up and take my money!
When I was town commissioner (probably about 6 years ago), our president was talking about getting one of those horrible LED monstrosities that you see in front of mega churches.
I convinced the others that they'd be out of character for our historic village, and they're horrible due to causing night-blind issues.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a *single* company that sold an e-ink display of any considerable size. The closest was a company that packaged up tiny squares (I think they were 6"x6") that you'd assemble into a larger screen.
You can finally pre-order a 32" screen for $5k ($6k for color) ... but for it to be visible from the road, I'd likely need an array of 4 of 'em. I could care less about high DPI -- I'd be happy with WXGA so long as it was around 60" diagonal, and could be packaged for outdoor use.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
So, "four girls, one micro-cup"?
It's the screen:
http://www.vdweerd.nl/wp-conte...
Pebble watch uses a Sharp Memory LCD, which is a regular trans reflective LCD with storage so it only updates the pixels that change between frames. This gets rid of the constant full-screen refresh you get from a standard LCD, which means that if you're not watching video, it uses a whole helluva lot less power. But it has the same fast response as LCD, which makes it more capable as an interactive device than eink.
It's still miles more power consumption than e-ink when nothing is happening (it requires standby power AND switching power, whereas e-ink just requires switching power), but it manages to find a happy midddle in battery power between normal backlit LCD (1-2 days battery life) and e-ink.
But that's why it costs nothing. It's LCD with memory.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
This would be very, very nice. Currently, I'm using Pocket to save articles offline. It's integrated with Firefox plus has a dozen plugins. But more interestingly, it also comes standard on the Kobo eReaders. It's bliss -- I can read articles in bed from an eInk display with really subdued lighting.
However photos really suck. That hasn't been a problem so far, but recently I got interested into electric cars: Nissan Leaf, Volkswagen e-Up!, Renault Zoe, etc. However.... articles on cars are nice, but much better with some decent pictures. Color displays would really make a difference on such subject matter.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
equally as power-efficient
which I assume is marketing speak for "also uses zero power once the image is set."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I don't see people who want colour in an e-reader wanting this. They want to read magazines, graphic novels, comics, perhaps even web content. They expect those things to be rendered faithfully in the reader, not the way this thing appears to render them.
Maybe the tech is fine for store displays where garish saturated logos are eye catching and useful. I don't see e-readers getting it the tech in this form. Maybe they need to reverse what they did with E Ink Triton and put the black over the colour E-ink using a grayscale LCD layer.
Actually that's not bad at all for a beta version of a new cheap technology.
It may not look the best for random photos (like those in a magazine), but it would be great for showing diagrams (useful in companies); and advertising companies might fine-tune their designs to be displayed on that and still look good.
And surely, it it catches on, further versions will have higher resolution and thus more accurate colors.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Unless it's CMYK. Then it might be 8 intensities for Black and 16 intensities for each color component.
I thought the image quality and feel was very close to that of 1970s magazine print.
i.e., Warm, slightly golden, slightly odd contrast and range.
If they could sell these 20" displays with a DisplayLink driver and USB port for a reasonable price there could be a reasonable amount of interest. I wouldn't mind throwing a PDF onto one of these (and being able to carry it around), using it as a textbook, etc. But for me the price would have to be very attractive to buy on a whim.
But no to reader..damnnnnnnnnnnnnnn http://readnews247.com/detail/...