E-paper technologies - Page 4

Amazon announced a new Kindle e-reader today, the Kindle Paperwhite. This is pretty much the same e-reader as the Kindle Touch (which is no longer available), but it's got a new E Ink panel with built-in light, 25% improved contrast and a higher resolution (1024x768). This is quite an improvement over Pearl E Ink panels, we do not know yet what's the name of the E Ink panel itself yet.

The new Kindle will ship on October 1st 2012. The Wi-Fi model costs $139 (or $119 with ads) and the 3G model costs $199 (or $179 with ads). Amazon also reduced the price of the non-touch Kindle 2011 to $69 with ads (and $89 without).

E Ink is showing an interesting prototype at IFA 2012 - a smartphone that has two displays, an LCD and an E Ink - one on each side. The E Ink will be used for reading and showing "persistant" data such as network status, battery level and information that the user needs for a long time (such as boarding pass information). This will not only conserve the battery but also free up space on the main (LCD or OLED) display.

The most interesting thing is that E Ink says that several vendors are considering this idea, with at least one vendor that plans to release such a phone in 2013. We can't wait!

Fuji Xerox developed a new technology that enables color electrophoretic e-paper displays without using color filters. They call the new technology Independently Movalbe Color Particles (IMCP), and the idea is to use colored (Cyan, Magenta and Yellow) particle that each have a different electrophoresis threshold. Only the particles that are drawn to the front substrate can be seen. There are also white particles in between (they do not move) and so white can be displayed.

Fuji Xerox says that the new displays are brighter and have more vivid colors compared to color-filtered e-paper displays (such as E Ink's Triton panels). They have shown a 5" 600x800 (220 ppi) prototype featuring a contrast ratio of 10:1. The backplane is a-Si.

The Wexler Flex One flexible e-reader is now shipping in china, and we've got the first video of this exciting new device. The reader uses LG's flexible plastic based E Ink panel (6", XGA 1024x768), and in fact the whole device is made from plastic and so can be bent - and is quite shatterproof (and very light). Here's our friend Sri from E Ink demonstrating it at SID 2012:

We do not know the price of this device yet, but according to Sri the flexible E Ink panel itself is only about 10-15% more expensive than a glass based display. The major downsize is that the resolution and speed of a plastic-based display is not as good as a glass based one. I personally think this was one of the most exciting demonstrations at SID...

Plasic Logic has unveiled a new flexible e-paper prototype display. The new plastic-based display features 4,000 colors at 75 ppi. It's quite large (they say it's almost A4 in size) It is made from over 1.2 million plastic-based transistors. It can be bent without distorting the image. We're not sure how close the company is to actually produce such panels. We assume that the new display is E Ink based, but we're not sure.

Seiko Epson announced a new SoC aimed towards e-paper applications, the S1D13M01. The new chip integrates an MIPS-24Kef CPU core and also includes Epson's multi-pipeline e-paper display controller, which has been optimized for E Ink display panels. The new SoC was jointly co-developed with Taiwanese Magic Pixel.

The S1D13M01 has a hardware JPEG engine, PNG decoder engine, color space conversion engine and 2D graphics engine. The S1D13M01 is also designed to realize low cost, low power consumption e-paper applications by optimizing the e-paper application system.

Lux Research posted an interesting grid that shows how different display developers rate on technical value and business execution. It includes mature technologies like OLED and electrophoretic and emerging technologies such as electrochromic and electrofluidic displays.

E Ink comes up on top in both technical value and business execution is E Ink - with high score in technology and IP and strong partnerships and management team. In face, E Ink is the only company that scores a "strong positive" - with their nearly 100% market share of the electrophoretic market - which is used in products such as Amazon's Kindle and B&N Nook e-readers.

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.

Coop Denmark, Denmark's leading consumer goods retailer plans to start using e-paper shelf labels in their stores. The first phase will rollout the labels in 77 stores (in a $9.2 million investment), and is already under way.

They are using ZBD's bistable LCD e-paper labels.

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.