E-Paper news and resources

Plastic Logic announced that they decided to quit the e-reader market, and will not produce new devices. The company will use its plastic-based flexible e-paper (E Ink) displays in other applications. The company does want to find e-reader partners and will license the technology, and will "actively develop licensing and technology partnerships to exploit its e-reader related capabilities in terms of rugged, plastic displays as well as driver and viewing optimization software.”

Bridgestone announced today that it is withdrawing from the e-paper business. This is sad news for the e-paper market. Some analysts believe that tablets are killing the dedicated e-readers and that the e-paper market will drop fast. Even E Ink, the clear market leader, posted large losses in the past quarter as panel shipment dropped fast.

Bridgestone's technology (named Aerobee) was developed in partnership with Delta Electronics - who had plans to start producing medium and large (40") panels in 2012. It'll be interested to see whether Delta will withdraw from the market as well, or whether they will find another partner and continue their e-paper program.

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.

Seiko Epson announced a new SoC aimed towards e-paper applications, the S1D13M01. The new chip integrates an MIPS-24Kef CPU core and also includes Epson's multi-pipeline e-paper display controller, which has been optimized for E Ink display panels. The new SoC was jointly co-developed with Taiwanese Magic Pixel.

The S1D13M01 has a hardware JPEG engine, PNG decoder engine, color space conversion engine and 2D graphics engine. The S1D13M01 is also designed to realize low cost, low power consumption e-paper applications by optimizing the e-paper application system.

The Eton Rukus Solar is now shipping for $150. The Rukus Solar is a portable Bluetooth sound system with solar panels and a SURF (segmented) E Ink display. This is an outdoor sound system - hence the Solar and E Ink display makes sense...

Back in March we reported about LG Display's upcoming XGA (1024x768) flexible plastic-based E Ink panels. Now we hear that Wexler is that ODM, and the upcoming reader will be called the Flex One. And as was expected, the device itself isn't flexible or bendable: but however it is very durable, thin and light.

E Ink Holdings reported a net loss of NT$787 million (about $26.5 million) for Q1 2012 (the company's first quarterly loss in 10 quarters). The company's revenues dropped 63% from Q4 2011, and gross margins were only 0.8% (down from 28.5% in the previous quarter).

The company says that sales of e-paper products dropped and they also experienced low capacity utilization.