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Technology

Full Color Electronic Paper a Reality 202

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-isn't-that-special dept.
alumniac.com writes "Good riddance to backlighting, full color electronic paper is set to take the market by storm. On another note, this will add a lot more zing to my paper airplanes." This is a little light on the technical details but it's an interesting read, especially because this isn't as far away from hitting the market as a lot of the stuff we see around here.
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Full Color Electronic Paper a Reality More

Full Color Electronic Paper a Reality

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  • Dude, that is soo 1897.

    Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
  • Dear Ghod, didn't anyone teach these cretins about paragraphs?

    --
    I noticed

  • Does the EU then consider silicon dioxide to be a hazard on beaches worldwide?
  • The publishing industry is probably drooling over the opportunity to publish EBooks using digital paper. And why not? With the data in digital format, it looks and quacks more like "software" than like a book. Enter the DMCA, "Intellectual Property" lawyers, and all the bad things that come with commercial software.

    No more secondhand book shops, no more giving that book to a friend when you're done with it, no more libraries. You won't buy books anymore -- you'll buy licenses to read them.
    --
  • It should've been labelled "Funny".
    Cuz it is. =-)

    ".sig, .sig a .sog, .sig out loud, .sig out .strog"
  • No it's not either on or off. Its intensity is continuously varied by some electrostatic process (attracting charged white particles to the top or to the bottom of a black fluid). Plus, the output from each such object is filtered red, green or blue. This gives you a continuously varying intensity of each of the primary colours, from total black up to some maximum value (which could produce a light shade of grey, but I don't see how it can produce white).
  • That's not what it looks like. Where do you get these ideas from? Not the article, surely. There is only one sort of charged particle, and it is white, and it floats in a black fluid. Colours are generated by filters which are completely static and separate from this machinery.
  • And another thing, oppositely charged particles most certainly will want to mix, thoroughly, since they attract. To separate them, you need an electric field, but a weak field can only weakly separate them (you need to balance the lower energy due to the field with the higher energy internally due to your separating them).
  • The light doesn't care whether it was reflected or emitted; if you have a mixture of red, green and blue spots, whether the spots are emitting their own light or giving you reflected light, their wavelength composition is the same (except that emitted stuff may be brighter).

    The reason you have yellow paint is because it is impractical to make a fine mesh of red and green paint spots every time you want yellow. But it is possible and it is additive. There's no way light from a red spot will subtract light from a separate green spot. But when you mix the two, then of course the subtraction happens.

  • Well ok, since black ink is really black particles in a suspension.

    A very small electric field will do very little to separate them (they attract each other too strongly). A very large field will separate them totally (their mutual attraction isn't good enough to overcome it). An intermediately strong field will partially separate them. Clear?

  • Re:Colorspace? (Score:3)

    by rsidd ( 6328 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:26AM (#160743)
    I thought so too at first. But it will be additive. Only, the intensity may eventually be low.

    Think of it this way: if you mix green and red paint, you'll get an ugly mess. But if you make a fine array of alternating green paint spots and red spots, you'll actually end up with something like yellow. Similarly, mixing cyan and yellow paint make green, but an alternating array of those colours will make something greyish (maybe tinged with blue or yellow, but not green).

    It seems to me that the surface would need to be highly reflecting, indeed, to reproduce white; but RGB the system is, not CMYK.

  • Re:Colorspace? (Score:3)

    by rsidd ( 6328 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @09:26AM (#160744)
    OK let's be clearer here: you can have addition with pigments, and subtraction with filters too.

    When you shine light through a red filter, it absorbs everything except red.

    When you shine light through a green filter, it absorbs everything except green.

    If you put the filters on top of each other, it absorbs everything (or would if the filters were perfect). This is subtractive.

    Similarly, if you mix red paint and green paint, the result will absorb both red and green. But if you have separated dots of both, it will emit both red and green. It's additive. There's no way a red dot can subtract light from a spatially separated green dot.

    Try thinking about the physics, rather than the terminology. Whether the source of light is in front or behind is irrelevant, what matters is only what's reaching your eyes. (Incidentally, this whole RGB stuff is an approximation made possible by biology, and not perfect: eg, the blue green line of mercury light can't be reproduced by RGB.)

  • Or content "tailored" to the prevailing community standards. So we don't have to expose our kids to any pesky thought-provoking ideas we don't approve of.

  • If/when we ever develop truly useful nanotech this will easily come to pass... along with just about every other dream of that sort.. Nanotech on a level that can rearrange matter on an subatomic scale could potentially solve MANY of our current problems, from pollution (nanites that change pollutants into O2 for example), food could be created almost effortlessly, nanites in the body could keep us VERY healthy... There are downsides too.. they could be used VERY effectively to create a doomsday weapon.. or make our problems even worse.. like a nanotechnological disease... (ala Deus-Ex)
  • I was thinking of maybe using chemically-powered nanotech... there's a lot of energy in just about any matter, you just need to find a way to get it out Maybe some sort of quantum-power would work too... at those sizes it could be possible to take advantage of some of the sub-atomic forces to generate power...
  • I bet you hit it on the head....FSCK'n publishers are jealous because the recording industry has such a stranglehold on music that they want to own EVERY PRINTED WORD.
  • I doubt shaking it would erase the image: as long as the correct electrode is still charged, it should attract the bead back to its proper location.

    I wonder how long it holds the charge for, though?

    Crumpling the paper would probably ruin it along the creases. And, it would be a whole lot more expensive than a sheet of paper, too.

    Jon Acheson
  • Which is thick for paper, but pretty thin compared to anything else.

    Jon Acheson
  • As long as you're not right on top of it, 80 dpi is certainly good enough to use.

    You could probably put solar cells on the top of the frame and a pager network download mechanism inside and run it without any outside connection, especially if it only has to update every 10 minutes or so.

    Jon Acheson

  • I thought from your first post that you might have been in a print shop, where you were merely proofing other people's jobs that were sent to you electronically.

    The types of jobs I see being threatened by working high-res e-paper are things like "we're the marketing staff of XYZ Corp, and we need light box transparancies made up for a convention at the very last minute, 'cause we're just not very organized." A printer nowadays makes thousands off of chumps like that, albiet at the cost of increased job pressure. With e-paper, the companies will be able to DIY at the last minute and actually save money.

    Jon Acheson

  • About that "no need for a printer"... (Score:3)

    by Thag ( 8436 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @10:37AM (#160755) Homepage
    But will the client still need you?

    If your dream comes true, it will wreak havoc on the printing industry, because users will be able to DIY a lot more. There will still be a need for print, but there will certainly be less need, and some types of jobs will completely go away.

    Of course, you could get into the digital paper support industry...

  • Anyway, why is it that my monitor (20in at 1024x768, so the dpi is less than 75) looks almost as good as that old LJIII output?

    Because a pixel on your monitor can represent millions of gradations of color, whereas a dot on your LJIII can only be one of four colors. Gradations of color provide perceived resolution too.

  • no, we should teach them to ignore it, by dismissing it as something not even worth spending a second of brain-CPU on, as naturally as possible. if you don't expose children to advertising at all, they won't know how to cope with it, and they'll fall for it much more when they eventually grow up and see it.

  • I doubt it would react to a magnetic field, but it would react strongly to an electric field. Statics would be a problem.

  • The B&W has been around five years from Xerox
    and MIT. Spin-off companies have demoed at
    conventions. The display is not really paper,
    but plastic about as thin as those "for sale"
    signs you can buy at a hardware store. They
    basically can go anywhere you'd put a thin
    plastic sheet, so dynamic store window and real
    bulletin board displays are an obvious use.
    Any you could have notebbook/tablet/ebook portable
    computers less than a millimeter thick too.

  • Doesn't hold up as well as paper: (Score:3)

    by sammy baby ( 14909 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:14AM (#160762) Journal

    Not nearly as well, by the sound of it.

    Eventually, they hope e-paper will be flexible enough to be a paper substitute. Meanwhile, E Ink expects it to rival liquid crystal displays and the emerging organic LED displays (New Scientist, 21 October 2000, p 48).

    So at present, the real value to this stuff is that it doesn't have to be backlit (and, I suspect, uses less power as a result), not that you can make paper airplanes out of it, as alumnniac writes.

  • What they need to do is to place a color gradient on the ball...RGB around the equator, and black and white at the poles. Then orient the ball instead of just flipping it. That gets around the filter problem (of course now you need to orient it in two dimensions, but there are permanent electrets as well as permanent magnets, so that might be possible. (Or maybe there's a better way.)

    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • P.S.: I claim all patent rights (HAH!) on the foregoing idea. So nobody can use it without my say-so.

    Sorry to reply to myself, but I just had to say that.


    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • Please do remember to consider energetics. Many of the more far-out nano-tech ideas will remain forever impossible because they just don't consider that. And there are a lot of possible answers, so I'm not shooting it down.

    My favorite answer is the develop something analogous to cholrophyl that works on a certain (selected) wavelength of radio. Then everything is tuned so that the radio-noise that it emits is on that frequency (possibly in that set of frequencies). This would give a limited amount of free energy for nano-tech, but when you wanted them to get busy, you would need to fire up a transmitter and beam it onto the selected area. (Shouldn't need to be a very energetic beam, but it would be needed.)

    Actually, this would minimize some of the potential dangers of nanotech, also. Many of the nightmares are based on chemically powered mites. Some of them on cholorophyll. Radio wave eaters have an obvious (if dismal) method of control. (And then because you nanos were designed for use in the FCC controlled air-space, you won't be able to use them in the EUC ... well, everything has it's drawbacks.)

    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • My guess is they haven't figured out how to place different colored dye capsules precise enough on the paper. Getting the alignment between the wires, and capsules could be tricky, but doable. They may also be trying to come up with a truely multi color capsel. That is one with all three colors in it. That would be a control problem. I can't see a way to control it. The filter method is hokey in my mind, but it works.
  • Looks like my bosses old assistant was ahead of her time when she was tip-exing the mistakes on screen.

    The next thing you'll have is screen friendly erasers.
  • You actually could. I recall reading in Popular Mechanincs a while back that one of the prototype applications was changing signage in department stores. Apparently they produced some poster size prototypes (monochrome at this time) that could be hung from the ceilings.

    So one would seem to believe that you can produce massive displays with this. What it would cost... That's probably another story.
  • From how it sounds in the article, it seems like they just used this filter technology, because it already existed and would allow them to get to market quicker.

    I too think that using different colored dyes in the capsules would be an ideal solution. Probally make for brighter colors, and would definatly present the ability to use the CYMK color model.

    --

  • Yeah, a little light. (Score:4)

    by Neon Spiral Injector ( 21234 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:21AM (#160773)
    This is the first I've heard of this.

    Does anyone have any more information? Like refresh rate. How long does it take to turn one "page" into another?

    I was impressed with the 300 dpi. But for true printed work, that is a little low, I have a 1200 color laser at my house now. But for a display that would be nice. Until I saw at the end, that in color because of the filters you are limited to 80 dpi.

    Oh well.

    --

  • Re:Colorspace? (Score:5)

    by Neon Spiral Injector ( 21234 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:36AM (#160774)
    If the surface was truely changing color, then it would have to use the subtractive primary colors.

    But from how it sounds, the light passes through a filter, and is either reflected by capsule behind it, if it is white, or the light is absorbed if the capsule is black.

    If the capsule is white, the light is reflected back up through the filter. By grouping the additive primaries together (RGB) you then pick what combined wave lenghts are coming back to the eyes.

    So it is still pretty much color LCD, with a reflective background, but now instead of making the pixels opaque to be black, you just turn off the reflection behind a the pixel.

    --
  • The display may match the room lighting better, but it's still RGB, not CMYK.

  • Potential pr0n problems (Score:5)

    by Brento ( 26177 ) <brento.brentozar@com> on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:48AM (#160777) Homepage
    Once an image has been produced it will remain visible even with the power switched off.

    Whoa, not good. That means I can't just hit the power switch and pretend I was done for the evening when the girlfriend walks in. Might have to actually run another application and switch over to it. Not good.

    On the other hand, this could mean a self-updating Hustler magazine. Hmmm. You could pull out that ten-year-old magazine and see what the chick looks like these days - see what all those years of tanning beds got her. Heh.
  • ... the power socked on the side of your ultra-thin laptop was fiddly.

    Bob.

  • Get your stocks now! (Score:3)

    by Lord Kenja ( 45995 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:29AM (#160783)
    Well... Donno about you guys. But I am off to buy stocks in companies making flashlights RIGHT NOW! I can't WAIT to have the same trouble using my portable in dark places as I would have reading a book...

    Anyone tried to read with a flashlight in the mouth or balancing it on the ear to read in a car? Or maybe holding it with one hand while struggling to turn the pages without dropping the book or the flashlight?

    I wonder if how long it will take before it becomes a feature of portables that they have a build in telescope arm with a halogen light on the end. And for the first half year of selling these babies the good deals will include a MagLight and an extra set of AA's.

    Oh well. Not all steps forward can truly be all forward.
  • A red dot reflect red light, or in other words, it absorbs non-red light. A green dot absorbs non-green light.

    So how can a mixture of red and blue dots reflect yellow light, whatever the resolution? The blue dot is actually absorbing yellow light! The red dot is reflecting yellow, because red is a mixture of magenta and yellow.

    I will tell you, it doesn't, and two computer graphics courses at university and normal art qualifications tell me this. Yet you got +3 Insightful. Gah.

    Have you heard of primary colours? Yellow, Cyan and Magenta? These colours are subtractive.

    What you are saying is correct with additive colours - lights in other words. Put a red light and a green light close enough together, and it will appear yellow.

  • Re:How Sturdy is it (Score:3)

    by Monte ( 48723 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:43AM (#160792)
    One thing that wasn't noted in the article - how sturdy is it? You fold/bend/crinkle paper and it still can be read. How well will this hold up when it ends up in the hands of the lowest common denominators?

    The article did mention the trick that makes this work: suspend a tiny white bead in what amounts to black "ink", electrodes all through the paper will create a charge that will either make the bead come to the surface (white pixel) or push it down into the soup (black pixel). Lots of beads means lots of resolution.

    I imagine that crumpling the paper would not only destroy the electrodes but give your hands an annoying ink stain.

    My question - how well does the bead stick in it's programmed posistion? If I shake this like an Etch-a-Sketch, does the image fade?

  • GREAT (Score:5)

    by vbrtrmn ( 62760 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:19AM (#160797) Homepage
    This is great, now MacDonalds will be able to market to children right on their textbooks. We can have scrolling banner ads with history, about how WalMart founded the west! Then in algebra we can learn how Coke is better than Pepsi!

    This will rock!!

    --
    microsoft, it's what's for dinner

    bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com
  • Haven't you seen/read "1984" ?

    We are at war with Eurasia.

    --

  • Squeezably? (Score:5)

    by tarsi210 ( 70325 ) <nathan AT nathanpralle DOT com> on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:39AM (#160801) Homepage Journal
    You know who's going to jump on this, don't you?

    Charmin [charmin.com]

    Combine it with Playboy [playboy.com] and you have a whole new protocol: PTP (Porn via TP)

    HONEY?! What the *hell* were you looking at???
  • True.... Just think of the copy protection techinques.... combine it in a book with some of those paper batteries that were mentioned awhile ago, some photo sensors, etc. Imagine how easy it would be to implement photo-copier/scanner protection.

    I could also see companies using this for protected and trade secret documents. If you could add a small gps, you could even make it erase itself if it was ever removed from the building.

    Definately some interesting and scary potentionals.
  • That's weird. I thought the same thing as the original poster (that 80dpi is ass.)

    When I saw your post my bullshit detector went off. "No way that a monitor is only 72dpi. My old HP LJIII was 300dpi and it was good, but not great (like the 1200dpi ones today) a monitor looks almost as good.

    So, I whipped out my mad trig skills.

    17in, 1024x768 ~= 75.29dpi.

    Gotta' get that bullshit detector fixed.

    Anyway, why is it that my monitor (20in at 1024x768, so the dpi is less than 75) looks almost as good as that old LJIII output?

    -Peter

  • So how does tripling the dot-count to achieve colour reduce the dpi by about a factor of 3? Shouldn't that be a factor of sqrt(3)?

    The article probably just glossed over it. The pixels are 300x300/sqin, but the colored filter overlay can be 300x80/sqin. You'd think 300x100, but the filter reduces the resolution further to keep the colors separate, I would guess. Maybe they just enforce 80x80sqin for square pixel mapping.

    I'm also not sure which way you'd cut the resolution, horizontal or vertical. Most LCDs pack the filter horizontally (columns of RGB), but they stick to squarish pixels. This would be an application for that Microsoft color-edge mapping algorithm that takes the hue-vs-luminance (or here, hue-vs-value since it's subtractive) tradeoff into account.

  • ID cards... (Score:3)

    by blackholebrain ( 90909 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:05AM (#160810) Homepage
    If driver's licenses were made of this stuff, they'd be tough to forge...esp if combined with smart card technology.

    Imagine showing your id to buy beer, it being run thru like a credit card, and the card automatically updating its 'display' face to the cashier showing that indeed you who you say you are, and that you are old enough to buy beer. Hmm.

  • Simple answer: b/c printers are sucks

    Better answer: most printers never truly approach their physical resolution in terms of actual accuracy, just like all those "32 bit" soundcards that only have about 12 significant bits of audio. I think laser are generally much better because of the toner bonding process, rather than ink jets which bleed even on high quality paper.

    I think the other factor is a psycological one; since the monitor looks good at 12-18" we never go in and peer at it 2" away, whereas we are often not so kind to printed paper or photos. Since they both look "good" we assume they are the same, even though different benchmarks are being applied.
  • Here's a closeup [eink.com]

    Personally, I'd like a bit more resolution, at least for reading. But maybe they'll make b/w versions for that?
    It would sure be nicer than reading on my ipaq.

  • Oh, sure (Score:3)

    by Viking Coder ( 102287 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:07AM (#160818)
    Now that we've got electronic PAPER, are we going to have electronic SILLY PUDDY?!

  • No more Silly Putty... (Score:4)

    by Wag ( 102501 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:59AM (#160819)
    With electronic paper we will deprive a whole generation of Americans the experience of stretching Beetle Bailey's face to gross and distorted proportions.

    Many of these troubled children will go on to live lives in a state of confusion and will take careers as politicians.
  • It seems to me that every point on the page doesn't reflect some fraction of the light falling on it (whatever colours that pixel won't reflect.) Even if you turn every pixel on, something like 2/3 of the light won't be reflected, and you will get a mid-gray at best.
  • I've not seen the colour display but I have been able to take a close look at their banner blue and white display. It had letters about 100mm high and must have been about a 1m long. It ran from a PP3 battery and was controlled via a serial port. The update rate was about once every 2 secs but I believe this was more to enable people to read the messages more than anything else. The clarity was fantastic and it really did look like it had been printed. I was impressed anyway

    It did suffer from some image ghosting which meant that every 4 images are so it had to go to all blue and then all white to get rid of this problem. This took about 1 sec which made me believe that the max update was about 2Hz. Not really suitable for connecting to your laptop but then this was over a year ago and they may have been able to improve on this since then.

    The E-ink site is at www.eink.com [eink.com] but I guess you guessed that.

  • Re:Colorspace? (Score:3)

    by nickovs ( 115935 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:40AM (#160823)
    In this case it's not about printing something onto the paper to absorb the incident light, it's about filtering the colour of the reflected light. CYMK stands for Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and blacK. If they printed black filters of the page it would always be black. With the RGB filter a spot will either reflect Red, Green or Blue light, or it will not reflect at all, and the colour will be formed by additive lighting, rather than subtractive absorbtion.

  • Why on earth would I want a 300 page novel where one page could contain the whole book. I supposed that I can imagine a magazine where pages contain video, not just words and photos but I already have a couple of versions of that - my computer and my television. The TV picture is still a bit better but the laptop with wireless modem is closer to truly asynchronous.

    I didn't see anything about size restrictions. I could see using this to wallpaper my room -- a 10 square meter screen might come close to what I want, once they get the resolution up there.

    What are the real applications? Live video display on id- and credit-cards? Blueprints that can display and calculate? Smart x-rays (once resolution jumps 3 orders of magnitude or more)?

    Almost anything makes sense except books!

  • Money could be printed with electronic paper. Even when the worst inflation hits (It's all good - and you know it!) Your hundred dollar bills would all of a sudden become 10s. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA :) HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

  • Re:even better (Score:3)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:47AM (#160831) Homepage Journal
    When everybody's clothing is online, the greatest hacker's challenge of the time would be hacking into central clothing processors and switching the colour off completely, trying to make the clothing transparrent.
    Imagine the metaphysical and psychological ramiffications on the above metioned idea...

  • even better (Score:4)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:38AM (#160832) Homepage Journal
    in a short while we should be able to import clothing from Taiwan made completely from flexible e-paper. That way we could follow fashion and latest news much more precisely. The news could be downloaded into your e-paper jacket and printed on the sleeves. Advertisements could be printed on our backs... Scrolling messages in Taiwaneese would be the latest fashion outcry... Why Taiwan? Just like the Armaggedon character said: American parts, Russian parts - all made in Taiwan.

  • Customisable, full-colour Magic 8-Ball! (Score:3)

    by ozbird ( 127571 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @02:10PM (#160834)
    There was a Slashdot article some time ago (which I couldn't find) that referred to a Magic 8-Ball disection [ofb.net].

    The Magic 8-Ball technology is similar to "electronic paper" - the ball is filled with an oily blue/black fluid, and contains a plastic icosahedron (polyhedron with 20 triangular sides.) The message appears when the plastic icosahedron floats to the top and a side (usually) presses against the "window" to reveal the message.

    In "electronic paper", an electric charge controls the display instead of gravity; I suspect gravity may cause the image to fade over time as it pulls the microcapsules back to the inky depths.
  • Pay-Per-Read, of course. Close the book and it erases itself. <shiver> God, I scare myself sometimes.
  • Ok, now how would the tobacco companies make money? (insert snare drums here)
  • There is, technically, emmitted light. The light passed in unobstructed and then is reflected through a filter to get the color, versus print where ... eww ... I see the problem here. Both are *forms* of subtraction.

    However, that's not how you made the decision, it's much more simple: is the base color black or white? In this instance, it's black, and then bits of white are activated and then filtered, much like a CRT, which is RGB, and thus, additive. Paper defaults to white, where bits of color are added to bring it closer to black, hence subtractive. So this is additive technology and thus, appropriately RGB. Hence them using it. ;)

  • Re:How Sturdy is it (Score:3)

    by ahknight ( 128958 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @09:38AM (#160840)
    It's not in the article, but a photo of it wrapped around a pencil is on the site [eink.com].
  • except it doesn't change without sitting in a "printer". The "paper" is non-powered.

    John

  • Ewww, the Brigitte Bardot effect -- stunning in her day, looks like something I scraped off a frying pan now...

    That is an interesting point, though. I got lazy and didn't notice what the refresh rate was, unfortunately, but it's pretty interesting anyway.

    The big question: will it replace Dead Trees? I don't really think so -- I suspect it will always be a bit too expensive for most purposes, but the idea of making recyclable newsprint out of it isn't such a bad one. (Though the day they start printing newspapers on this stuff is the day I start buying shitloads of Xerox stock...)

    /Brian
  • CMYK would actually be the Right Thing for some applications anyway -- say Apple started using EInk displays in a PowerBook with CMYK capability. The publishing industry would go nuts -- this is as close to pure WYSIWIG as you're going to get, I should think.

    /Brian
  • Advertising everywhere? Sure. Along those lines, be afraid, and consider this;

    1. genitics + advertising + fishing = Pepsi Fish

    I'll give it 15 years before corporate sponsored 'wildlife' starts showing up -- and they'll be tasty too! :)

  • Thanks! I thought that one up when I was out fishing with a buddy. It kept us amused for about an hour...so many variations.
  • True, true! We forget, the electronic paper will require a 5-pound battery/charger/port expander/whatever appliance to make it work. Joy!
  • Xerox's idea is similar (although as far as I know they don't have color yet); but they (not unnaturally ;-) think that a laser-printer type scheme is better.

    That way it separates the paper from the drive circuitry. And the drive circuitry is expensive in fact because it needs relatively high voltages, and you need a lot of hardware around the edges of the paper to get all those pixels to do the right things.

    Putting the drive circuitry inside a laser printer box means that the paper moves past it and hence the paper is much cheaper. However color is probably harder that way. Still, how often do you NEED color?

    Where I work, we have a lot of B&W printouts of things that aren't needed to be kept for long; and the reusable paper would be ideal in that case.
  • Ah... the death of print? The loss of jobs due to new tech? Heh.

    My clients will still need me, yes. The web was supposed to make them stop using paper, they were supposed to start self-designing/self-publishing everything electronically with fabulously easy desktop tools -- and if they didn't want to self-design, they could always hire one of those $10/page "designers" that proliferated in the 90's.

    Current trends are not in the hacks' favor. Rather it would seem that people (business-people) recognize the need for well-trained (and well-paid) communications professionals (like me). The curve seems to peak early ("Hey, if I can use a mouse, I must know what I'm doing!"), but it doesn't last at that level for long. Those that don't recognize the difference between professional work and $10 work deserve what they get.

    Not to mention the fact that half my job entails explaining options... I know those options, because I'm an expert -- the client doesn't know what they can do, or how to accomplish it. I consult to their ignorance, and there will always be ignorance.

    So I'm not worried about my own job security, and since we're in my dreamland, people will come to treasure real ink and paper, they'll clamor for it, and compensate the specialists accordingly. :)

    As for the printing industry...

    When I said "printer" I really meant the office machine, not the printshop, which might be your reading here. The death of the printshop is a long way off... an evolutionary time scale, rather than a revolutionary one.

    I can make very good proofs in my home studio right now for very little money -- and so can my clients, if they choose to not be clients -- but the quality is nothing compared to what my printshop can output, and of course in terms of mass quantity there's no way client or I can take care of production ourselves. So... In the mystical and hazy future (where my cheap and ubiquitous reflective displays live) issues of quality and quantity may be solved for the DIYers, but at that point I doubt it will be wreaking any havoc on an industry that won't exist in today's form anymore, and will have plenty of time to adapt, to adjust the target of their manufacture (at which the designer can always aim), or to phase themselves out of our ability to mourn their loss, like a blacksmith or something.



  • My dream (Score:5)

    by table and chair ( 168765 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:07AM (#160858)
    I once had a dream that I owned a truly reflective display on which I ran Photoshop and QuarkXPress. I could lay out a color-critical job on that display that, due to its reflective nature, was capable of reproducing color almost exactly as it would be reproduced with ink-on-paper, rather than via the crude approximation of an emitive display.

    I could then unplug that display, slip it into an envelope, overnight it to a client and plug in a new display, because they were so cheap and ubiquitous (I'd buy 500 "sheets" at a time at the local office supply superstore).

    No need for a printer. No need for an inaccurate CRT to calibrate. No need to worry that the color on-screen and on-proof wouldn't match, because they'd use the same model, and our eyes would see them the same.

    It sounds like this "electronic paper" is nothing even remotely like my dream (low resolution, an RGB color model, prolly expensive...). And it doesn't address the fact that ink is tactile and three-dimensional, or that it reacts differently to different surfaces.

    What I need is a surface that could rearrange itself molecule-by-molecule to create something indistinguishable from printed output, but that's probably not going to happen anytime soon. :(

  • Links (Score:5)

    by chaidawg ( 170956 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:35AM (#160859)
    Eink can be found at Eink.com [eink.com] There is also an image of there product with text from hamlet here. [eink.com] Hope that gives everyone some insight.

  • Wallpaper? (Score:3)

    by hartsock ( 177068 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:49AM (#160863) Homepage Journal
    I want this product adapted to function as wallpaper so I can turn one wall in my house into an enormous Monitor/TV! At 80dpi that's better than the average TV... and If the drawing rate is too slow for TV it would still make a killer wallpaper since you could then load custom art onto your walls! Imagine your whole apartment/house in "Propaganda" print wallpapers! Ooh the swirls! Or you could have a random wallpaper every day, and display custom senery for lunch!

    --// Hartsock //

  • It sounds like a dot is either on or off. That means you can only have eight colors, unless they can somehow do shading of the pixels. It doesn't seem to imply that, based on how the article was written.

    That would suck. They shouldn't even bother with color, unless they can either increase the dot density to simulate decent color, or fix this problem.


    --

  • It looks like one color particles are negatively charged, and the other type is positively charged. Two problems that I see: 1) since both types are oppositely charged, they might not want to be mixed, and 2) they use an electrical field to move them around. How do get only part of the particles to move?


    --

  • According to their technology page [eink.com], there are both white and black particles, oppositely charged. Given that just an electric field is applied, how do you only move some of the particles?

    Given that they have white particles, I wonder why they can't have particles of different colors, rather than using filters.

    As to your other post, it's a good point that the particles will attract each other, so that's not an issue.


    --

  • An intermediately strong field will partially separate them. Clear?

    Well, that's the obvious answer, but it's not obvious that it will work. Remember that particles are moving around. Their position is not proportional to the field strength. The field strength probably only determines how fast they move. Also, all the particles will probably move in unison, not just some of them in proportion to the field strength.

    Even if you tried to move them "half way" to try and get gray scales (and that actually showed gray scales), it's not clear that you could accurately position them. You would have to know the viscosity of the suspending fluid and run the electrical field for a certain amount of time. I'm not sure the process would be accurate enough to give you smooth color.

    --

  • Re:No doubt, the EU will be wondering... (Score:3)

    by Erasmus Darwin ( 183180 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:19AM (#160870)
    How do you make this recyclable?

    I believe that's merely a subquestion of the larger issue -- "What is the net environmental impact?"

    For example, things to consider include the lifespan of paper vs. the lifespan of electronic paper, the environmental impacts of the ink used on both, the recyclability of both (including the inks), the fact that paper comes from a renewable resource (no clue on how renewable the electronic paper components are), and the environmental issues involved in the printing process itself (I believe normal printing involves harsh solvents, while electronic paper "printing" would just involve moving the little things inside the paper around). Overall, I doubt it's something Slashdot could do more than offer wild ass guesses on (although if anyone has any insight on some of the issues, the data's always welcome -- it's just that it'd never be enough to draw a final conclusion), but I think a formal investigation, with access to lots and lots of information covering both paper and electronic paper technologies, would probably be able to cook up some results.

    Also relevant is the end-user application. Newspaper and books, I think, would be your big winners, best exploiting the reusability of the electronic paper. Also interesting would be using it, in conjunction with a digital camera, as a poor man's version of a digital picture frame. On the other hand, printing out webpages (which I do when I want to carry information with me to the store, which means the paper will get folded up) and class notes (and similar applications where you want to scribble in the margin) just ain't gonna cut it, short of a few more nifty advances (namely, the ability for the paper to be folded without being permanently affected and the ability for a pen-like device to non-permanently "write" on the paper, with the writing capable of being read back by the printing device, for storage with the original page).

    As for the book issue, I can see having a single "book" as a major potential win. I generally only actively carry one book around with me to read, unless I'm near the end of the current book. However, with this technology, as I'm nearing the end of the current book, I could just reprint it as page 200+ of the current book and then as much of the next book as will fit. That way, if I finish the current book when there's no printer accessible, I can just keep going. On the plus side (tying back in to the environmental issues above), if we compare an electronic paper book to the current digital book machines (which have all kinds of nasty chemicals in the battery and such), I suspect it'd be a clear win.

    However, I am worried on how well electronic book technologies will do. Unlike music and movies, books can much more easily protect themselves from Napster-esque piracy by simply refusing to embrace electronic distribution. It takes almost no effort to rip a CD. It takes only a little more work to DivX encode a movie. It's a major pain-in-the-ass to scan an entire book and then OCR it (although I suppose you could skip the OCR bit, especially since you'd be printing it back out in this case). That's not to say it isn't done, but if the results in the movie and music industry are any indication, I doubt electronic distribution would be in the best interest of book publishers.

    (Wow -- I think I managed to hit 3 different and only marginally related topics in this comment. I need to cut back on my coffee intake.)

  • Re:GREAT (Score:3)

    by SubtleNuance ( 184325 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:07AM (#160872) Journal
    Ha. Great. If Ronald has 6 BigMac(TM) Happy Meals(TM) and he gives 2 to one of the McFryKids(TM) how many BigMac(TM) HappyMeals(TM) does Ronald have left?

    We should ban *ALL* advertising to children. No toys, no shampoo, no music, no food. Nothing.

  • I would think they could compartmentalize the areas with ink inside the sheets. They could make pre-folding sections that would have creases already there. as long as there are contacts running along the edge of the sheet to connect everything it "should" work.
    I think this is how the Titantic sank...

  • A Magna Doodle has a similar principle of operation whereas you trasnsfer iron filings (or the like) from the top side (drawing) to the bottom side (erasing) using magnetic styli and a magnetic erasing slide bar.
  • Can it stand up to the one handed reading test? You know, the test where, in the long run, the pages end up stuck together.

    --
    "Linux is a cancer" -- Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft.
  • I had this dream, oh, probably about a year ago now.

    Technologies like this e-ink become commonplace. Eventualy, they can "tatoo" a PDA onto your skin. It really just "floats" on the surface of your skin, and washes off after about a month. So you have to keep getting it re-applied. But this also allows you to get the latest model.

    Next in the dream, this becomes commonplace. Everyone now has a PDA tatooed right on their hand, just like a wristwatch used to be. But some people can't afford this.

    So good ol' corporate greed steps in to save the day. They'll tatoo a PDA on your hand in exchange for you also allowing them to tatoo a color animated advertising banner on your forehead.

    Now as you walk down the street, and glance across a sea of foreheads, you see zillions of ads. Among teens, it becomes a status symbol of who's ad is on your forehead.

    I posted this on slashdot some months back when a similar type article ran. All things repeat on slashdot.
    --
    "Linux is a cancer" -- Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft.
  • Advertising everywhere? Sure. Along those lines, be afraid, and consider this;

    genitics + advertising + fishing = Pepsi Fish

    I'll give it 15 years before corporate sponsored 'wildlife' starts showing up -- and they'll be tasty too! :)


    This is hilarious! The images it brings to my head are great.. things like "We've engineered our fish to desire the taste of plastic, so they will be much easier to catch with artificial lures", and we'll finally be able to go out to the woods and kill animals to eat that have NO nutritional value, just like the food we buy from these companies everyday! I just can't wait until Boca comes out with a genetically engineered vegitarian cow! Finally I can get REAL MEAT and still be vegan! :)
  • IMHO (and I'm sure there's a really good technical reason for this), they missed the boat using a RGB color filter over a b/w pixel. Wouldn't it be much better to have three different-colored pixels -- cyan, magenta and yellow, perhaps?

    They would still have the 1/3 of the resolution problem, though that seems pretty unavoidable with this kind of approach. But at least they'd have a truly CMYK reflective electronic display.

    I suppose the really good techincal reason not to use CMY pixels has to do with the problem of assembly. Would keeping track of which pixels were which color be much harder than producing the filter they use in the current setup?


    This was my first thought too, but in reading the article it sounds like a time to market thing. They decided the filtered approach would put them in the market very soon (the technology is already there) and other approaches were off in the distance. Even the company was complaining about the filtered approach in the article, so I would imagine we will see a better implimentation later, after they make a bit of money off the filtered idea.
  • This is probably the technology I anticipate the most because I think most people have reached a limit where they just cant spend more time of their lives in front of a back-lit screen. Back lit screens are very tiring to look at from up-close.

    I am a bit skeptical of these hypeflashes though, because of all the articles I've read about electronic paper, not a single one has discussed printing speed, cost, quality (not just dpi, but does it look 'good') or anything else in detail.

    If they really believe these will be in market in two years, why have we yet to see an extensive demonstration of a prototype and how it works? My guess is there are hidden problems about these screens, that will make them less of a super invention than they sound like today.

    I hope I am wrong. Reading an e-book without getting dizzy would be nice.
  • This is great, now MacDonalds will be able to market to children right on their textbooks. It's also nothing new to get children's comic books at restaurants featuring the icon being conciensious or even heroic and then retiring to a healthy meal from said fast food depot, illustrating how it fits nicely with all the food groups.

    There's nothing stoping them from doing this already, product placement is on the rise. I'm more concerned with receiving junk mail, buying packaging, anything else which has a short life span, packaged thusly.

    Probably in the short term the costs will make this prohibitive, but who knows where theses costs will be in a few years, after all, we've had musical greetings cards (only slighly more annoying that a mosquito flying around your ear) which aren't terribly expensive.

    --
    All your .sig are belong to us!

  • No doubt, the EU will be wondering... (Score:5)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:38AM (#160888) Homepage Journal
    How do you make this recyclable?

    There's a great push in the EU to make PC's recyclable, reducing hazardous waste and sparing landfill space for truly non-recyclable garbage. IMHO, one of the worst materials for recycling is composites, i.e. Drink Boxes, which can be aluminum, plastic and paper.

    Defined as an unusually high concentration of any substance, which may threaten the environment. e.g. Honey is not, in small quantities hazardous, but 50,000 gallons in your backyard would be.

    --
    All your .sig are belong to us!

  • How Sturdy is it (Score:5)

    by buff_pilot ( 221119 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:18AM (#160889) Homepage
    One thing that wasn't noted in the article - how sturdy is it? You fold/bend/crinkle paper and it still can be read. How well will this hold up when it ends up in the hands of the lowest common denominators?
  • I always thought DPI was a 1D measurement, ie. 300dpi means 300*300 dots per square inch.
    So how does tripling the dot-count to achieve colour reduce the dpi by about a factor of 3? Shouldn't that be a factor of sqrt(3)?

  • Better than "good" resolution... (Score:5)

    by The Monster ( 227884 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @09:17AM (#160893) Homepage
    I was confused hy the article's explanation of the resolution:
    The spaces between electrodes are small enough to give a resolution of 300 monochrome dots per inch (dpi).

    ...

    A drawback of the filter approach to colour generation is that the filters need a single pixel for each primary colour. This effectively reduces the resolution by about a third, to 80 dpi.

    First of all, 300/3 = 100, not 80. But that isn't even right - there are still 90,000 dots per square inch, so 30,000 color pixels in the same space, theoretically about 173 per linear inch, arranged perhaps somewhat like this:
    rGBrGBrGBrGBrGB
    gbRgbRgbRgbRgbR
    BrGBrGBrGBrGBrG
    RgbRgbRgbRgbRgb
    As you can see, any L-shaped grouping of adjacent primary pixels can represent a color pixel at resolution 200h x 150v. If this thing is designed correctly, sub-pixel antialiasing can be done to retain nearly the full 300 dpi resolution WRT brightness. There's a great explanation of this on Gibson Research [grc.com] (Poor guy just got over a DDoS attack, and now I'm slashdotting him) as well as a demo of how it works.

    If we can patch together segments of "digital paper", it could be a crucial step in making affordable the wall display panels from Arnold's apartment in Total Recall....

  • I'd be perfectly happy with something with the flexibility of Mylar, I don't see a need to really fold it, although that'd be neat eventually, but we have to be realistic. Accept the technology we can get.

    For now though, it sounds like the rigity of the display is something that is engineered in so as to avoid the breakage previous posters hypothesized, would occur. With that in mind, give me a display that is 50% lighter and 50% thinner than standard and organic LCDs and I'm happy. It's certainly a big step in the right direction.

    --CTH

    ---
  • Wonderful. So if this catches on, now Kevin won't even be able to write notes to himself or messages like "Back in 5 minutes". And you can only imagine if they start using this stuff for toliet paper...

    liB

  • but if you can't pay $100 and sell it back for $4, how are the colleges suppose to make money?

    .kb

  • If you're interested in the technical details... (Score:5)

    by lysie ( 411443 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:38AM (#160921)
    There was an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in April:

    http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/98/9/4835 [pnas.org]

    It describes the methods used to create the paper (authored by people from Bell Labs and by E Ink corp).

  • The only important consideration is: can I read it in the bath?

  • You can read a somewhat longer, though not much more technical, article written by Charles Mann in Technology Review [technologyreview.com]'s March 2001 issue.

    I'm hoping they make display units you can put your vehicle, so that one has more choices for imparting information than honking, flashing your lights, or flipping the bird. I want a to be able to display the following message on a big sign, in reversed characters, on the front of my car:

    HEY, YOUR TURN SIGNAL IS ON!

  • Wow... (Score:5)

    by return 42 ( 459012 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @07:35AM (#160932)
    ...imagine reading Beowulf on a cluster of these.

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