E Ink - Page 36

Sri Peruvemba from E Ink has talked to PC Magazine, and he gives some very interesting information. He expects color E Ink to arrive soon, and devices based on this technology would ship in the beginning of 2011. This color will be more like the color you would see in a newspaper, and not like an LCD display. We can expect more on this from E Ink at the SID show in May.

Sri also reveals that they are working on much-faster E Ink displays, but it can take around 2-3 years for such technology to show up in shipping products...

Western Digital has released a new range of external Hard Disks that come with small 12-character E Ink displays. The My Passport Studio offer FireWire 800 interface and 256-bit H/W based encryption and come preformatted for Mac computers. They come in 320GB, 500GB and 640GB sizes, and are ready to pre-order now for $119.99, $139.99 and $159.99.

This is actually WD's second HD series to use such displays.

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.

IntertechPira and +plasticElectronics have announced an upcoming webinar (18 of February) called "e-readers and e-paper: technology and applications" that will discuss the evolution of e-paper for the e-reader market. The webinar will be given by Ian French, a principal scientist at Prime View International (PVI).

The webinar will provide an overview of e-readers to date, technology advances in three key areas: flexibility, color and video and will also discuss future applications for e-paper displays.

LG Display is showing a new 19" flexible E Ink prototype - that's almost as big as an A3-sized newpaper. It is only 0.3mm thin and weights only 130 grams. 

The display uses metal foil, and so it can recover its original shape after being bent. 

Engadget has got some new information on Qualcomm's Mirasol display exhibited at CES:

• Qualcomm claims a 6X (!) power advantage over E Ink in a typical usage scenario, even with the color and video.
• Qualcomm expects that the first product that uses their display will indeed use the 5.7" XGA display that Qualcomm are showing.
• The display can be paired with a capactivie or resistive touchscreen (which impairs visibility a little, just like it does with any other display).
• Qualcomm has a method to light the display from the edges, which will provide even lighting across the display.

TI has collaborated with E Ink to create new chips for E Ink e-readers. The new chips integrate E Ink's e-paper displays with TI power management ICs and OMAP 3 processors - in the world's first power management integrated circuit for E Ink displays. TI has also developed a new software-based display controller.

The companies says that this will result in smaller silicon footprint and cheaper hardware that are more energy efficient than before.