E Ink - Page 21

At Intel's Develop Forum last week, the company showed a prototype laptop with a secondary outer E Ink panel. The E Ink display seems about 4-inch in size and is black and white as you can see in the image below:

Intel says that the first idea came from laptop stickers - so you can use this display to dynamically change what you show on your laptop case. In addition, Windows laptops have a very low power mode called connected standby - and in such a mode the E Ink display can be used to show notifications, news, etc - as the display is very power efficient.

Plastic Logic and Cambridge University recently demonstrated the world's first flexible display with a graphene backplane. This display is a 150 PPI E Ink panel:

Plastic Logic now aims to use a similar backplane to drive a full-color OLED.

Kobo announced a new e-reader, the Aura H20 which is the world's first E Ink waterproof e-reader, as far as I know. This e-reader sports a 6.8" E Ink Carta display (265 PPI), and it will survive up to 30 minutes in water up to one meter deep.

The Aura H20 will cost $179 when it launches next month in the US, Canada and Europe.

IDTechEx posted an interesting article discussing the current state of the most promising e-paper technologies (E Ink, LiquaVista, Mirasol, Folium Optics' Electrokinetic and Gamma Dynamics' Electrofluidic).

The article discusses the possible applications of each technology.

PostBust Switzerland is testing a new electronic timetable display at bus stops. These DynPaper displays are based on E Ink and use Plastic Logic's OTFT backplane. The Swiss company hopes that this will make it easier to change timetables in the future and allow daily updating of individual stops.

Currently, the bus timetables are printed on paper. PostBus installed 12 such E Ink timetables. The main objects of the test is to see how reliable these displays are, and how they fare against vandalism and bad weather. If the project is successful, they could equip as many as 14,000 bus stops with the new DynPaper timetables.

E Ink is showing a new flexible wrap-around display aimed towards smart watch applications. The idea is that this will be used to cover the whole smart watch, and can be used to change the entire watch design.

Besides the design, this smart watch (band?) can display information, notifications, heart rate, etc.

E Ink and GDS developed the world's largest e-paper module, a 32" 2560x1440 display that targets digital signage and information kiosk applications. The new display is available in both color and monochrome models.

The new display, like all E Ink displays, offers ultra-low power consumption, and is lightweight and readable in all light conditions (it is not emissive of course). GDS will jointly market this display with E Ink.

Sony is launching its 13.3" Digital Paper device to the US. This device, intended for the legal, educational and business environments will cost $1,100. Sony's device displays PDF documents and can accept handwriting input.

The Digital Paper uses E Ink's plastic-based 1200x1600 13.3" Mobius flexible panel that use Sony's own flexible TFT technology. Other features include 4GB of internal storage, microSD slot, Wi-Fi and PDF support (no other formats will be supported!). The DPT-S1 is 6.8 mm thick and it weighs just 358 grams.

YotaPhone's first-gen E Ink / LCD mobile phone started shipping in Europe only a few months ago, and the Russian company already revealed a new prototype. The main new feature in this new prototype is the 4.7" E Ink display - it now supports touch and can now be used for e-mails, SMS messages, browsing and much more.

The 4.3" 720p LCD has been replaced by a larger display, a 5" Full-HD Super AMOLED display (the same one used by Samsung's Galaxy S4). Seems like this is a really good upgrade, and hopefully YotaPhone will be able to release this new phone soon.

Archos are showing three new smartwatches. The two budget ones (at $50 and $85) use LCD displays, but the high-end one uses an E Ink panel.

The premium model (which will cost $130) uses a 1.8" curved E Ink display. The battery will last 1.5 weeks. The watch will display the time, notifications from your smartphone and media controls.