Technical / Research - Page 4

Two months ago it was rumored that Samsung wants to sell its electrowetting display unit LiquaVista which they bought back in January 2011, and Amazon may turn out to be the buyer. Now Amazon confirmed the rumors and indeed bought LiquaVista from Samsung.

It makes sense that Amazon is seeking a color display technology for its Kindle e-readers. It may be that E Ink's colored displays are still disappointing Amazon and they need a display with a wider color gamut and better contrast.

Update: We added a nice video of Sony' prototype device below

E Ink and Sony have co-developed a new plastic-based flexible E Ink display called Mobius. The Mobius panel uses Sony's flexible TFT technology, and will be produced by E Ink. Mass production of 13.3" 1200x1600 panels will begin in 2013. Those 13.3" panels will weigh only 60 grams - less than 50% of the weight of glass based panels, and will be much more rugged as there's no glass.

Sony unveiled a prototype tablet that uses those displays - aimed for the educational market. The A4 sized tablet (13.3") features a touchdisplay with stylus input, 4GB of memory (with microSD) and Wi-Fi. The whole device is just 6.8 mm thick and weighs just 385 grams. Sony hopes to start trials in three Japanese Universities later in 2013 and will hopefully launch it during the company's 2013 fiscal year (i.e. by March 2014).

Researchers from Canada's Queen's University's Human Media Lab developed a new morphing smartphone concept that can change its shapes to give notifications without any noise. The concept uses a flexible e-paper display made by PlasticLogic. This is just an early prototype, and the researchers estimate that it will take 5-10 years to commercialize such technology.

Earlier in 2013 the same research group unveiled the PaperTab - a flexible paper-like tablet, based on Plastic Logic's 10.7" flexible touch E Ink displays and Intel's Core i5 processors.

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.

E Ink produced several E Ink phone prototypes (only five of those, in fact), and Engadget posted a short hands-on review of one of them. These are Android (V2.3.5) phones with a touch E Ink display. The prototype is buggy and slow, and obviously not intended to be released as a product - but rather as a tool for partners to play with and use to build devices with:

E Ink also gave the Engadget guys a chance to play with a flexible E Ink display, you can read more about it in the source link below.

E Ink is showing some new color Triton (Gen 2) E Ink prototypes, including one with front light. The displays are getting better, they say it's now almost like LCDs. Even though quality is better, and production costs have gone done, E Ink still does not see mass adoption of these panels by e-reader makers any time soon.

E Ink managed to get the color filters closer to the E Ink microcapsules, which means that more light is reflected from the displays. Coupled with the front-light technologies, the displays look better then before.

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.

When I wrote my post about E Ink persistency, I noted that E Ink has a display at their office that was turned off in 2001 - and it still shows the image correctly. A nice reader just sent me the following photo, showing an Active-Matrix E Ink display that was last refreshed on November 2000 - yes, 11 years ago!

This panel was developed by Philips, with the front panel made by E Ink and the back plane (AM) made in Philip' LCD plant in Kobe, Japan. The reader says that this is actually the world's first active-matrix E Ink panel, and is probably the oldest one that still shows an image. Over the years it has long some of its contrast, but the image is still clearly visible.

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.

Japan Display unveiled two new reflective LCD prototype displays. Those new LCDs, targeted at e-paper applications are low-power (there's no backlight), visible under direct light and can offer fast-refreshes, high resolution and color.

JD showed two 7" panels. The first one offers a resolution of 768x1044 and a bright reflection of 40%. The color gamut is just 5% NTSC. This panel is ready for mass production soon. The second panel has a lower resolution (576x1024) but has a much better color gamut (36% NTSC) and will take longer to commercialize. Both panels consume only 3mW when showing a static image (the display retains the current image so a static image consumes less power).