Bridgestone Shows Off Ultra-Thin, Full-Color e-Paper

Bridgestone, the company which debuted the "world's thinnest" sheet of two-color e-paper last year, has turned around and delivered a new version which is capable of displaying over four thousand colors. "In case that wasn't enough, the company is also touting what it calls the "world's largest full color e-paper that is A3 size, which is equivalent to a 21.4-inch screen." As you'd expect, the latter is expected to be used solely for advertising and could hit the market as early as next year, while the former technology is set to be commercially available in 2009."

Now about distortion...

[Penguinisto]

...can you bend the critter (or at least build it as a wrap-around type screen), without optical distortion (or at least some sort of compensation against it by a GPU)? It would add one hell of a dimension to gaming, simulators, immersion-type entertainment, things like that.

I realize it's probably possible to do when building it, but it takes a pretty (relatively) hefty chunk of time to do anisotropic conversions of flat images (e.g. when creating image-based lighting maps for CG artwork raytracing and such), but if that could be fixed, a semi-spherical screen with the focal point being a person's head would be hella nice.

(of course, they'd still have to add about 15.9-something million colors in capability and perhaps a tighter resolution to it as well, but still... looks like it could go to some interesting places if they actually get it working).

/P

I'm Lovin It! (TM)

[CODiNE]

Can't wait til these babies start rolling out as it'll seriously push the display market with some nice competition to increase pixel density and so on. Once people figure out how to hack these things it's going to seriously affect LCD prices. Wheee. Sadly that'll lead to DRM usage on them so people don't hijack their ads. Eh.

Flexible? Color?

[owlstead]

What I need is a rather thin (.5 mm is enough), black and white e-paper screen with high res and low power use, in an A4/letter format. This would save me hundreds of copies of paper. I'm willing to pay up to a grand for that. Why are these idiots always focusing on full color, bendable screens? I would consider them nice extras, nothing more.

Re:Plugging the analog hole

[Telvin_3d]

As I understand it, part of why everyone is so excited about e-paper is that the image remains on the page when the power is no longer being applied. So, the fail-proof way around ANY e-paper DRM is just take out the batteries before you photocopy/scan it.

Re:Don't make them too thin...

[BlueParrot]

You can't DRM digital paper because you can just photocopy it, right?

You can do better than that. Use a lens to focus the thing into a high quality digital camera and you can capture a whole video stream ( this works for TFTs as well ). Only issue is to synchronise the camera to the paper's refresh rate, and this is fairly easy to do if you have good equipment.

Thing with DRM is that it can't work in a free society. The only way it could work would be if the government banned all recording equipment other than that controlled by the media industry (and the DMCA is certainly playing with the idea by banning you from distributing circumvention methods, given that a non-DRM-crippled digital camera is a perfectly decent circumvention method ). I just hope the media industry will fall apart due to its own incompetence before it comes to that.

Re:Plugging the analog hole

[GroeFaZ]

That would require some form of brightness sensor that a)would drive up costs and b) could be easily defeated by just taping over the seonsor area. Covering the whole of the reading area with tiny sensors seems a little like overkill (not that this would ever have stopped DRM proponents, but still).

Re:Two Words: Refresh Rates

[MightyYar]

Yeah, but just watch out for the older engineer with his red pencil.

Re:Plugging the analog hole

[riffzifnab]

Sorry, netcraft confirms you can't see anything anymore because your optics are dead. d: