Video - Page 8

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).

Qualcomm revealed in their latest financial conference call that it scrapped Mirasol production plans. The company will no longer attempt to produce these panels, but will try to license the technology for other companies to produce. They will also limit their direct commercialization to "certain" devices - I'm not totally sure what this means.

That's sad news, as the technology is very interesting, and the prototypes shown at SID 2012 were very impressive (above you can see 1.5" 288x192 30Hz Mirasol display panel prototypes). The company did produce some 5.7" color panels (and three e-readers are shipping using those panels) Apparently Qualcomm didn't manage to overcome the low production yields. Mirasol production was planned since back in January 2011, but were later delayed several times. The original plan was to invest $1 billion in a Taiwan-based factory.

Here's a summary of my visit to E Ink's booth at SID 2012. E Ink had a very large booth, showing dozens of E-readers and other devices that sport E Ink panels. Lot's of these used Ink-In-Motion, E Ink's segmented displays (rather then the active-matrix ones used in e-readers for example).

The largest display at the booth, and one of the most interesting ones was the hybrid EPD/LED traffic light concept. It uses a large circular e-paper panel, color filters and LEDs (in an outer ring). The hybrid traffic light provides higher visibility in direct sunlight than regular traffic lights (who need to "overpower" the sunlight). E Ink's concept uses 24 LEDs vs 200 in a regular traffic light. Great idea. Just below the traffic light E Ink built a small E Ink crosswalk - showing a nice usage of rugged shatterproof panels.

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.

Here's a great 17-minutes interview with E Ink's Sriram Peruvembra showing the latest E Ink devices and discussing their "E Ink on every smart surface" vision:

Kyobo (a leading Korean book retailer) launched its first e-reader today - and it uses a color Mirasol display - a capacitive touch 5.7" 1024x768 panel with Qualcomm's front-light LED technology that can illuminate the display. Other features include a 1Ghz processor, Android v2.3 and Wi-Fi. The e-reader is now shipping in Korea for around $300.

E Ink released three nice videos of its FPD-2011 booth: showing the new E Ink displays, panels and applications:

We just found this video of a new flexible (curved) E Ink display from LG. The title of the video says that the E Ink panel uses a plastic substrate, but unfortunately we do not have any more information yet: