Technical / Research - Page 11

Hitachi Displays is showing a new MEMS display prototype (2.5", 320x240), using Pixtronics' technology. They say that the power consumption is about half of a regular LCD, and it has 3 modes: transparent, reflectance (monochrome only) and semi-transmissive (a combination of the transparent mode and the reflectance mode, which is also monochrome only). The displays will be released towards the end of 2011 (or early 2011) in 10" or smaller sizes (for mobile devices). 

Pixtronixs's technology is based around a MEMS shutter, backlight LED unit and a TFT driver element. Color is done via opening and shutting the MEMS shutter at a high speed and changing the amounts of the light from the LED backlight unit and natural light.

A couple of days ago we reported about a prototype flexible e-paper display that Sony demonstrated. It turns out that this wasn't actually made by Sony - it was simply loaned to them by E Ink. Sony has no current plans to commercialize such technology and use them an a product.

Update: it turns out that the display is actually made by E Ink, not by Sony.

Sony is showing a new flexible e-paper display. It has a plastic substrate, and can be rolled up like a newspaper. We don't have any technical information about the display, and when Sony expects to commercialize it...

Qualcomm plans to invest $2 billion in a 4.5 Gen Mirasol production plant. Volume production will being in 2012. The mainly aim to produce 5.7" color panels. There are reports that samples have been shipped to customers already, and at least one 'major client' has started the design-in process.

Mirasol displays claim a 6X power advantage of E Ink, offer a fast response time (enough for Video!) and color.

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...

HP is reportedly developing new e-paper materials that will be sued to make bright, efficient, video-capable displays.

E Ink has announced their next-gen display technology called Pearl, to be released in July 2010. This new display has about 50% improved contrast ratio compared to the current Vizplex displays. The Pearl has 16 levels of gray, improved power consumption (and of course they do not require power when images are not changed).

The Pearl is the display used in Amazon's new Graphite Kindle DX, which will ship on July 2010, and cost $379.

Update: It seems that Nemoptic is bankrupt, and even their site is not online anymore...

Nemoptic has released a video showing their new active-matrix e-paper prototype:

There isn't a lot of information on this monochrome display, but we'll keep watching.

Sriram Peruvemba, VP of marketing at E-ink is showing new plastic-based flexible display prototypes. This is a long video, in which he also shows all sorts of other E Ink based displays :

Check out this nice video showing how Liquavista's displays behave outdoors. This short clip shows a couple of displays and a regular LCD (the laptop in th top-right). The liquavista's display are better, of course: