April 2009

Dutch company Endless Ideas is set to launch a new version of the BeBook e-reader. It will have a 5" E ink display (vs the original BeBook 6"). It will cost less than 200$.

The BeBook is manufactured by Chinese company Tianjin Jinke Electronics, which largely sells its readers under the Hanlin brand. That means the BeBook Mini will also be available as the Hanlin v5 Reader.

A new display technology could make electronic paper look more like the real thing. Conventional ink on paper has a much higher brightness and black-and-white color contrast than electronic paper. The new display, made by researchers at the University of Cincinnati, in Ohio, is designed to match the brilliance and contrast of paper. "We've demonstrated a technology where you have the brightness of paper, and color has the same saturation that you expect from printed media," says electrical- and computer-engineering professor Jason Heikenfeld, who led the work, which was published in Nature Photonics.

The pixels also switch between black and white within one millisecond, making the technology suitable for video (LCDs currently switch in a few milliseconds). A slower refresh speed of tens to hundreds of milliseconds is one of the main issues plaguing current e-paper.

I just found out this funny little video of someone trying to see just how durable E Ink displays really are. Using the Esquire magazine issue with the E Ink, he tries scratching it, drilling holes through it, lighting it on fire and more... finally putting it in the micro oven seems to much for the poor display.

Pixel Qi (a spin-off from the OLPC project) has a display technology that they say will be ready next month (samples). The 3Qi is a 10" display that has three modes:high-res color LCD, low-power black and white and e-paper. 

OLPC XO-2 with Pixel Qi Display

They say that the 3Qi will be produced during the summer of 2009.  They are also working on new kinds of displays, including on-chip displays (whatever that means, maybe microdisplays on CMOS?) and touch screens.

The FineTech Japan 2009 conference is now over, and E Ink won the Display Components & Materials Category Grand award (first prize).

Great to hear E Ink displays are getting this kind of recognition.

Motion Display today announced the launch of its retail signage products for the point‐of‐purchase (POP) market. Motion Display will design, manufacture and assemble signage products using E Ink‘s field proven Ink‐In‐Motion technology.

Ink‐In‐MotionTM (IIM) electronic paper displays are thin, lightweight, flexible and powered by small batteries. The IIM display is deployed the same way as paper and plastic signs that makes it very accessible.

iSupply has made a teardown analysis of the Kindle 2, which sells for 360$. iSupply says it only costs 185.5$ to make.

Kindle 2

The most expansive part is the E Ink display - estimated at 60$ (41.5% of the total material bill). It's a 6" diagonal screen, 600 x 800 pixels at 167 ppi, 16-level gray scale.

The second most expensive part is the wireless module from Novatel (39.5$).

Polymer Vision's Readius, which was actually planned for release last year is delayed - because of financial difficulties.

The Readius has a 16-grayscale 320x240 5" e ink based display. When closed the size is 115x57x21mm, and when you open the display, it's 160x115x21mm.

Bridgestone Corp developed their own color e-paper technology (called QR-LPD), that also supports pen-input (sing Wacom's pen input tablet). Bridgestone's display has 0.8 second refresh rate.

Bridgestone E-Paper prototype

They have also published a short video of the new display:

It seems that Kindle 2 users are complaining that small fonts appear to have contrast issues on the E Ink display. This hasn't happened in the first Kindle version (which does not have font-smoothing algorithms and has less levels of gray). E Ink are not commenting on this...

E-Ink fonts problem in Amazon Kindle 2