Technical / Research - Page 17

Cuttlefish are able to change their skin color quickly. Now scientists from MIT are working to create displays that are extremely efficient - using less than one-hundredth the power of today's TVs.

Cuttlefish use chemicals to change the space between membranes on their skin. The researchers have created an artificial electrical system that controls spacing between layers in their display, thus changing the color.

The prototype display is several inches across, and only one micron thick - inside there are around 20 layers of polystrene and responsive poly-2 vinyl. The poly-2 vinyl expands as the voltage increases, becoming thicker, and reflecting longer wavelengths of light. Without electricity it is clear.

The screen can also reflect non-visible wavelengths of light, such as infrared and ultraviolet, depending on the voltage applied. It can produce images using only a few volts because it doesn't create light, it only reflects it. In a dark room with no light, the screen would remain dark.

The researchers also say that the screen is very easy to make, but have a limited viewing angle.

Philips claim to develop a new ePaper technology, that can create color images that are about three times brighter than displays using color filters (like LCDs) - the closest an ePaper tech has ever got to printed paper, according to Philips.

Philips color ePaper prototype

Philips Research's approach involves turning the traditional electronic-paper pixel quite literally on its side, in order to tune it to different shades of the spectrum. The technique, which is called in-plane electrophoretics, involves suspending colored particles in a clear liquid and moving them horizontally instead of vertically. Each pixel is made up of two microcapsule chambers: one containing yellow and cyan particles, the other, below, containing magenta and black particles. Within each microcapsule, one set of colored particles is charged positively while the other is charged negatively.

E Ink has released a new development kit (broadsheet AM-300) with the new 9.7" display, as used in Amazon's new Kindle DX. The kit includes the display, a X86 processor running Linux, API software and sample images and drivers. It also supports MMC cards, Bluetooth and USB. It will start to ship be the end of the month.

E Ink 9.7-inch Broadsheet Dev Kit

Digitimes reports that PVI, who makes the E Ink displays used in the Amazon Kindle and Sony's reader says that they are delaying the launch of a color E Ink display - till 2010 at least.

The good news is that there are rumors that Sony are working on an e-reader that uses the same 9.7" E Ink used by the new Kindle DX.

A new display technology could make electronic paper look more like the real thing. Conventional ink on paper has a much higher brightness and black-and-white color contrast than electronic paper. The new display, made by researchers at the University of Cincinnati, in Ohio, is designed to match the brilliance and contrast of paper. "We've demonstrated a technology where you have the brightness of paper, and color has the same saturation that you expect from printed media," says electrical- and computer-engineering professor Jason Heikenfeld, who led the work, which was published in Nature Photonics.

The pixels also switch between black and white within one millisecond, making the technology suitable for video (LCDs currently switch in a few milliseconds). A slower refresh speed of tens to hundreds of milliseconds is one of the main issues plaguing current e-paper.

Bridgestone Corp developed their own color e-paper technology (called QR-LPD), that also supports pen-input (sing Wacom's pen input tablet). Bridgestone's display has 0.8 second refresh rate.

Bridgestone E-Paper prototype

They have also published a short video of the new display:

MOTO dev group (not affiliated with Motorola...) have built a concept phone - running Google's Android OS with an E Ink display. It's just a prototype, but they have a nice video:

Ricoh has developed a new color e-paper technology. They claim that the new tech is 50% brighter than other technologies, and retains the picture when power is turned off.

Ricoh color e-paper

Ricoh's e-paper uses "layered electrochromic compounds", without glass - using a clear insulation layer of some sort - resulting in lighter and brighter devices.

The Flexible Display Center (FDC) in Arizona University has developed a flexible touch e ink display - that's the first of its kind.

The device that was demonstrated uses plastic materials as a substitute for the glass found in conventional touch screens; the flexible Teonex® polyethylene napthalate (PEN) substrate was supplied by Dupont. It is powered by amorphous silicon thin-film transistors fabricated on the plastic substrate.