February 2010

We had the good chance to talk with Mary Lou Jepsen, Pixel Qi's CEO. She agreed to answer a few questions we had...

Q: Can you tell us about Pixel-Qi? the company and the displays?

A PQ panel looks like normal LCD with backlight on, but with backlight off it becomes a highly reflective screen that rivals the performance of electrophoretics in terms of reflectance, but with video rate fully available (for fast typing, multitouch, fast panning, and video). 

We have already done self-refresh screens in the roots of this technology to lower the power – Pixel Qi actually spun out of One Laptop per Child where that architecture was implemented to create a ~1W laptop (and what is widely considered the netbook that launched the recent netbook revolution).

Q: Can you tell us of any upcoming Pixel-Qi products? Are you working also on other displays beside the 10" one?

Only our customers can announce their products, and we have brought on several more since our last discussion in January. We have been in early production since December and are now scaling it volume in the current 10” size and in process of designing new sizes that we will announce in the future. Our customers are pulling us into a variety of new product categories.

Q: What kind of products do you think can benefit from PQ displays?

Our panels are easy on the eyes – they combine the best of LCD and best of EPD together in a single screen and are excellent for reading. Anything that uses a battery can benefit from our technology. Anything that is used outdoors and indoors can benefit from our technology. 

Thanks Mary, and good luck!

LiquaVista and TI are showing a new color e-reader demo. This prototype will soon be available as a system developer kit. Last month both companies announced the collaboration to support Liquavista's monochrome and color displays on TI's OMAP platform, it's good to see them move so fast.

Update: Liquavista are also working with Freescale and is showing a prototype based on the iMX5x platform. This one will also be offered as a system dev-kit soon:

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.

PVI's chairman says that they plan to release color and flexible E Ink displays. They are also working on touch-enabled E Inks, and ones that support video. They predict that the market share of touch-capable e-readers will increase sharply in 2010. PVI wants to place the touch sensors behind the display, so image quality will be better.

PVI also reveals that E Ink's response time has increased, to the point where animation can be played.

PVI will triple its E Ink film and back-end modules capacity by the end of 2010 (in a $1.5 million investment). Their chairman says that global e-reader sales may exceed 10 million in 2010. Over 50 new vendors are expected to launch e-readers this year.