Flexible - Page 5

Plastic Logic developed a new OTFT-based flexible 42" e-paper (E Ink) display that they will show for the first time at RetailTech Japan together with Toppan printing. The two companies will jointly work to bring these displays to the market and find applications for them.

Plastic Logic's new display is actually made from 16 10.7" flexible panels tiled together (4X4 as can be seen from the photo above). The whole display is less than 3 mm thick and is very light, and so can be hung on a wall like a poster.

Plastic Logic and SERELC developed together a new low-power outdoor digital signage solution based on Plastic Logic's flexible plastic displays. Each ZED (Zero Energy Display) unit consists of two 10.7" monochrome flexible plastic displays.

Plastic Logic says that the two displays have been "seamlessly tiled together", although the photo they released shows otherwise. In any case, the final display acts like a single 15.4" diagonal (150 dpi) panel that weighs just 115 grams and is less than 1 cm in thickness.

Intel, Plastic Logic and Canada's Queen's University have collaborated to create a flexible paper-like tablet, based on Plastic Logic's 10.7" flexible touch E Ink displays and Intel's Core i5 processors. A user can use several PaperTabs devices at the same time, and these can interact between them, as can be seen in the video below:

Roel Vertegaal, a director in Queen's University's human media lab estimates that most computers will look and feel like that - within five to ten years. It's likely that the displays will be full-color ones, probably based on OLED technology.

Epson announced a new controller-driver module for flexible E Ink-style displays based around Plastic Logic's OTFT arrays (shown in the video below). The new module (named S1D13541) supports E Ink displays 1 to 5 inches in size, and the maximum resolution is 480x854. It needs an external TFT gate driver.

The S1D13541 includes four display pipelines, which can be used in parallel to represent up to 16 levels of grey, 480 TFT source driver outputs, waveform memory, DC/DC boost circuit to generate "all required display voltages and a temperature sensor.

Ynvisible (based in Portugal) is developing flexible transparent electrochromic displays (materials that change color when electricity is applied). The company is already producing some displays in low volume (with manual assembly), and were kind enough to send us a sample gift card showing off their displays.

The gift card

So first of all, the display is quite impressive. They use a material that changes from being transparent to being blue, and indeed when you press a small button on the card it displays words in blue (love in several languages). When off, it looks exactly like a normal piece of plastic - totally transparent and bendable (flexible).

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...

Here's a nice video showing Plastic Logic's new flexible color e-paper display:

This is taken at RUSNANO's Plastic Logic Technology Day (14th May 2012)

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.

Back in March we reported about LG Display's upcoming XGA (1024x768) flexible plastic-based E Ink panels. Now we hear that Wexler is that ODM, and the upcoming reader will be called the Flex One. And as was expected, the device itself isn't flexible or bendable: but however it is very durable, thin and light.

LG Display announced today that it has started to produce 6" E Ink panels on a plastic substrate for a Chinese based ODM, which will release its e-reader product next month in Europe. The panel features XGA (1024x768) resolution and is only 0.7 mm thick and weighs just 14 grams - half the weight of a glass based E Ink panel.

The display is bendable, but it's not clear whether the actual device will offer a bendable screen, it may just be curved. Another big advantage of this display is that it's unbreakable. We'll have to wait till the actual product is announced to know more details. Here's a video released in October showing LG's curved plastic based E Ink panel: