E-Ink-info - Page 7

Bookeen are a France-based e-reader maker, that currently offer two models that use E Ink displays (the Cybook Gen3, available now for 350$, and the Opus, available now for 215$). They are set to release a new one, the Orizon, which uses Sipix e-paper instead. We have posted an interview with their CEO over at E-Reader-Info, discussing this, and other e-reader issues. If you don't want to read the whole interview, here's the 3 reasons why they moved to Sipix:

1. AUO (Sipix) touchscreen is light year away from Sony resistive technology. You keep the optical quality of ePaper and you get an incredibly reactive touchscreen. For us touchscreen on such a large display is a must-have.
2. AUO has great developments and move incredibly fast.
3. They did not want to depend only on one screen manufacturer (PVI).

A few months ago Art Technology released a new range of E Ink watches, called Phosphor watches. Now they have released a new model (black case Digital Hour), and have kindly send us one for review. The watch is now available for 190$.

The watch

The Digital Hour watch is a curved, light-weight watch. It's not thin, though, which is surprising because the display itself is very thin (more on this later, but it's under 400 micron thick!). The watch functions are pretty basic: you can view the time (in two modes: analog/digital combined, and just digital), the date, and there's also an alarm you can setup. The watch is always in 12-hours mode (no military time).

There are two buttons: one is used to flip between the 4 display modes (analog/digital time, digital time, date and alarm setup). The other button is used to flip the display between white on black or black on white. The two buttons are also used to setup the watch. You can see the analog/digital mode above, and here are the other 3 modes (from left to right: digital time, date and alarm). You can tell it's the date mode because of the small icon on the top-left.

I had the good fortune of talking to Sriram peruvembra, E Ink's marketing VP. Sriram is always happy to help, and has agreed to do a short interview with us.

Sriram Peruvemba is VP of Marketing for E Ink Corporation. He has over 20 years of experience in the electronics industry including extensive background in the electronic display industry, having held management positions with Suntronic Technology, Planar Systems, TFS and Sharp. He holds a BSEE and a MBA.

Q: What kind of displays does E ink currently offer?

E Ink makes a display platform referred to as E Ink Vizplex. The E Ink Vizplex imaging film is used in Active Matrix displays for applications such as eBooks. For SURF displays for applications such as wrist watches. And in Ink-In-Motion displays used in applications such as signage. The active matrix displays have a glass based backplane whereas the SURF and Ink-In-Motion displays use flexible backplanes.

The kind folks at E Ink have sent me some demo displays. The first one is the Lexar Jumpdrive mercury. This is a USB drive that has a capacity meter. The E Ink displays needs refreshing only when it is connected to the computer anyway, so it's the perfect display. The display looks rather good, and it's a nice use for E Ink. The jumpdrive costs 9.99$ for the 2GB version.

Lexar jumpdrive mercury

The second thing I got is the Esquire magazine with the E Ink display. It's a big display on the cover. It basically consists of several words and photos, and the display just lights on or off in all sorts of sequences. It's not an active-matrix display, but a segmented one. Ir runs on batteries, and still goes on since October 2008 - much more than they originally anticipated...

Esquire magazine E Ink cover

There's actually a second E Ink in the first page of the magzine (sharing the electronics with the first display). This time it's an advertisement for ford. This display is really simple, just lighting up a third of the photograph each time. It's not very bright, and actually not so easy to notice.

Esquire ford ad E Ink

Hello, and welcome to E-Ink-info. This site focuses on E Ink displays, and other next generation display technology.

We'll bring you daily news, and we also plan to have a lot of e ink related resources - photo and video gallery, aritlces, list of devices and more.

Enjoy the site!

Ron