There are reports that Nemoptic declared bankruptcy. That's a shame, they seemed to have very interesting technology. Hopefully someone will pick it up and continue development...
Nemoptic has developed the world's first display that combines a color OLED with a monochrome Bistable Nematic LCD (Binem). The idea is that you can choose whether you want to have an OLED displays, or a e-paper like display, depending on the application and lighting condition (this somewhat reminds us of Pixel-Qi displays).
Researchers from the University of Cincinnati and startup Gamma Dynamics have developed a new Electrofluidic display. The display can retain images without power consumption (like e-paper), has a >70% white reflectance and is fast enough for video. The idea is to use a colored fluid between the front and the backside of a reflective sheet. The space above and beneath this special sheet is similar in geometrPixel Structurey enabling the fluid to remain stationary in any position without an applied voltage.
The concept has been realized years ago, but the manufacturing process was only developed recently - in a collaboration between the Univ. of Cincinnati, Gamma Dynamics, DuPont and Sun Chemical.
Samsung Electronics announced today that it has stopped production of e-paper displays. Last year Samsung have unveiled a 10.1" color prototype, but now we'll never see that mature into a real e-reader products....
Geek.com has posted an interesting comparison: comparing the iPad's IPS-LCD (or Super-LCD) to the Kindle's E Ink up close. There are two photos. One at 26x magnification, in which you can already see the 'dots' in the LCD (the right image):
The second image is at 400x magnification:
As you can see, the E Ink display is way better up close - it's not just a series of dots. So obviously the LCD has a lot of advantages (color, fast response time, bright), but for reading, nothing beats an EPD...
Zikon has developed a new kind of nano-technology based electronic-ink display. They say it can be cheaper than E Ink (as it can be printed more easily and does not require encapsulation)and is much faster (and can show videos). They estimate that simple displays can be made within 1 year - and are considering making a "color-changing" fingernail (or nail-polish, really). Here's a short interview with their CTO explaining how this all works:
Liquavista is based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands and was founded in 2006 (a spin-out from Philips Research Labs). They have developed a new type of display technology that can operate in transmissive, reflective or transflective modes, has a great optical performance and is very efficient. Liquavista's display are based on the principle of Electrowetting (when a voltage is used to modify the wetting properties of a solid material). With Electrowetting displays, a simple optical switch is obtained by contracting a colored oil film electrically.
Johan Feenstra, Liquavista's CTO, was kind enough to answer a few questions we had. Johan joined Philips Research Labs back in 1999, where he co-invented Electrowetting displays and co-founded Liquavista.
Q: Johan, can you explain Liquavista's three product families?
LiquavistaBright: monochrome display with improved optical performance compared to existing readers, while providing a seemless UI (iPhone-like) or even videos.
LiquavistaColor: full-color reflective version with video rate, so also seemless UI
LiquavistaVivid: Hybrid version with a highly reflective, low power monochrome mode and a full-color mode with saturated colors. The color is made with so-called Field Sequential Color Mode, so no color filter, but a fast switching Red/Green/Blue backlight.
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:
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.
AUO has great developments and move incredibly fast.
They did not want to depend only on one screen manufacturer (PVI).
