A while back E Ink made these cool large "MicroCapsules" - these are little snow globes showing how E Ink works (they actually sent me several, I'll post about these one day). Anyway if you're attending CES, you'd be happy to know that E Ink will be giving away a thousand of these little capsules... here's more info.
Update: The giveaway rules have changed a bit - in addition to liking the OLED-Info page, you'll need to like the giveaway post on facebook as well... The random winner will be chosen from all the people who like the post and are an OLED-Info fan as well. Good luck!
Our sister-site OLED-Info is running an holiday giveaway - with a chance to win a free copy of The OLED Handbook, and two phosphor world-time E Ink watches (which were kindly provided by E Ink). These three cool prizes will be randomly given to three lucky fans of OLED-Info's facebook page on January 1st. To participate, click like on the OLED-Info page, and also like the giveaway post.
The Phosphor world-time E Ink watch has a SURF (segmented) E Ink display that offers 24 time zones and several displays modes. It's a large watch, and it takes some time to get used to, but it looks good and draws a lot of attention... Here's our hands review of this watch. This watch costs $125 at Amazon.com (although it's currently out-of-stock).
The Telegraph is reporting that some Kindle users (one user really, according to the report) are complaining that baggage scanners in airports are damaging the E Ink display in their e-reader. They suggest that the X-Ray radiation may permanently damage the display.
It's highly unlikely that this is a common issue - there are millions of E Ink e-readers on the market (in 2011 alone E Ink will have shipped over 25 million e-reader displays) and many people are taking their e-readers on a plane. If it were a real problem, we would have noticed before. E Ink themselves told us that they're not aware of a single display failure as a result of an X-Ray machine. It's also possible that the failure in the e-reader is not related to the display.
iSupply performed a teardown analysis on the Kindle 2011, and according to them the 6" E Ink Pearl display costs $30.5. This is the most expensive component on the Kindle - which costs $84 on the whole (BOM and assembly). This means that Amazon is actually losing $5 on each ad-supported device sold - which cost $79
E Ink released three nice videos of its FPD-2011 booth: showing the new E Ink displays, panels and applications:
E Ink is showing e-paper displays used in educational applications at the FPD 2011 exhibition. You can see a large board display, a music stand and some 'desktop' displays - all based on E Ink of course:
We just found this video of a new flexible (curved) E Ink display from LG. The title of the video says that the E Ink panel uses a plastic substrate, but unfortunately we do not have any more information yet:
Bookeen has been researching high speed E Ink displays for over two years, and now they have unveiled the technology - which they call High Speed Ink System technology or (HSIS). Basically, HSIS is an E Ink Pearl touch display, a TI Cortex A8 processor (which Bookeen said was developed in partnership with TI) and optimized software and algorithms developed by Bookeen.
Bookeen recently announced the Odyssey e-reader that includes all HSIS components - and is capable of fast page refreshes, video, scrollable menus and scrollable web-browser and more - all this on a monochrome 6" E Ink pearl display of course. Bookeen has been showing prototype HSIS devices since early 2011.
E Ink's Pearl e-paper displays are made in a roll-to-roll manufacturing process, and these can be made up to one kilometer in length. Our friends over at E Ink sent us these cool photos of a long E Ink roll, they seemed to be having fun with that one:
The display roll is made in E Ink's factory in Massachusetts (USA), but the TFT backplane lamination and final processing is performed in E Ink's factory in Taiwan. Here's another great photo of the roll from above:
Amazon announced three new kindles today, two of which use E Ink displays. The new Kindle Touch e-readers feature 6" Pearl E Ink displays and an infra-red touch sensor. The $79 non-touch Kindle 2011 is a streamlined version of the older Kindle 3 - with only 5 physical buttons (beside the next/prev ones, anyway). The Kindle Fire is a $199 7" IPS-LCD tablet/e-reader.
The Kindle Touch will launch on November 21st, but you can order it today. The Wi-Fi version costs $99 with screensaver ads and $139 without ads. The 3G version costs $149 (ads) or $189 (ads-free). The Kindle 2011 is shipping now: $79 for the ad-supported version and $109 for the non-ads variant. The Fire will launch on November 15th for only $199 - you can pre-order it now.
