E Ink Corporation and Toppan Printing Co. Ltd announced today that their engineers have built a full-color electronic paper display that is suitable for mass production. The display will be shown at the E Ink booth of the annual FPD International trade show in Japan.
This electronic paper color prototype achieves 12-bit color in a 400×300 pixel format with resolution of 83 pixels per inch, using a custom color filter from strategic partner Toppan. The color filter design has a high-brightness layout (RGBW) that preserves the paper-like whiteness of the background page while enabling deep blacks for text and a range of colors and tones for images. A smart algorithm uses color sub-pixels to smooth black and white text, for enhanced legibility equivalent to a printer. The display diagonal is 6 inches, similar to a paperback book in size.
Applications for this new kind of displays are mostly portable devices. E Ink views its product very well in digital cameras, GPS devices, kiosks and electronic signs that needs to be seen under different kind of lighting. The display will also be useful for any portable electronic device that has a battery. The new display module will let cellphones, PDAs, and wireless tablets run substantially longer on a single charge, enabling designers to make the devices more compact by cutting battery size and weight.
During the summer, the Fujitsu Bendable ePaper was unveiled. I think that both technologies are comparable and might serve some similar purposes. We should see a lot of research and development in that field in the next few years and it’s a great thing. More competitiveness gives faster advances and ultimately, better products for us to use.
I dream of the day where we will purchase an electronic Newpaper based on a similar technology and instead of having it delivered to your doorstep each morning, you plug it into your computer and you get today’s paper. This will be a great step for technology and for ecology as well…
October 20th, 2005 | Technology