E-paper technologies

Lux Research posted an interesting grid that shows how different display developers rate on technical value and business execution. It includes mature technologies like OLED and electrophoretic and emerging technologies such as electrochromic and electrofluidic displays.

E Ink comes up on top in both technical value and business execution is E Ink - with high score in technology and IP and strong partnerships and management team. In face, E Ink is the only company that scores a "strong positive" - with their nearly 100% market share of the electrophoretic market - which is used in products such as Amazon's Kindle and B&N Nook e-readers.

A while back E Ink made these cool large "MicroCapsules" - these are little snow globes showing how E Ink works (they actually sent me several, I'll post about these one day). Anyway if you're attending CES, you'd be happy to know that E Ink will be giving away a thousand of these little capsules... here's more info.

Coop Denmark, Denmark's leading consumer goods retailer plans to start using e-paper shelf labels in their stores. The first phase will rollout the labels in 77 stores (in a $9.2 million investment), and is already under way.

They are using ZBD's bistable LCD e-paper labels.

The Telegraph is reporting that some Kindle users (one user really, according to the report) are complaining that baggage scanners in airports are damaging the E Ink display in their e-reader. They suggest that the X-Ray radiation may permanently damage the display.

It's highly unlikely that this is a common issue - there are millions of E Ink e-readers on the market (in 2011 alone E Ink will have shipped over 25 million e-reader displays) and many people are taking their e-readers on a plane. If it were a real problem, we would have noticed before. E Ink themselves told us that they're not aware of a single display failure as a result of an X-Ray machine. It's also possible that the failure in the e-reader is not related to the display.

A new Chinese-Finnish joint project aims to bring low cost e-paper devices and broadcast technologies to remote population and disaster struck areas. The plan is to create a low-cost, energy efficient (enough to run from solar power) e-paper device. This device will only receive information, and not transmit any.

The information will be broadcast via a digital television signal, and will bring news, education material and official government bulletins.

Taiwan's ITRI developed a new technology called i2R e-paper. It's a 're-writable' paper. The idea is that the image on the paper does not change - until you pass it through a special thermal printer which can then change the image - but only about 260 times or so. The i2R uses heat-activated liquid crystals and can achieve up to 300dpi (monochrome).

Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) is showing new large (100x24cm) flexible e-paper based on Cholesteric LCD. It's shaped like a scroll - printed on what seems to be a red/gold fabric.

According to reports, this display is very power efficient and doesn't seem pixelated at all. The monochrome display itself is showing some Chinese characters (translated as 'establish country 100 years', apparently, referring to the overthrow of the Ch'ing dynasty in 1911). It seems that this is a segmented display and not a matrix display. It's a shame that we do not have any technical info on this display yet.