E Ink - Page 3

HP has developed a new wearable E Ink display for the army that is flexible and solar-powered. It can be wrapped around a soldier's wrist, and could show maps or directions. The whole display is just 200 microns thick. HP plans to offer first prototypes in early 2011.

The E Ink displays will be manufactured using a roll-to-roll process. HP says it will work with a company called Phicot that it spun out recently to produce these displays.

Via Wired

Seiko has announced a new EPD Watch that has an Active-Matrix E Ink display. It's the world's first phone with such a display (there are already some with segmented E Ink "Surf" displays). The display has 80,000 pixels (300dpi) and 4 gray levels. The watch can display the time, date and a world-clock option with a nice photo of the earth.

We don't have pricing details or release date, but we did found a nice video over at YouTube showing Seiko's new watch collection (Jump to 3:15 for the E Ink watch):

Update: we've got a video of the new prototype displays, see below

PVI is now showing 6" and 9.7" color E Ink displays for e-readers at a trade show in Shenzhen, China. The displays are demoing animated color clips, although the refresh rate is not fast enough for video. PVI has shown those screens to Amazon and Barnes & Noble, although they won't say whether there are any plans to use them in future e-readers.

PVI predicts mass-production to start 4Q 2010. The new PVI screens add an extra layer of color-filtering glass on top of a standard E Ink panel. The color screens consume more energy than monochrome ones. PVI also displayed new flexible displays, made from plastic which could make readers lighter and harder to break.

Via NetworkWorld

Sri Peruvemba from E Ink has talked to PC Magazine, and he gives some very interesting information. He expects color E Ink to arrive soon, and devices based on this technology would ship in the beginning of 2011. This color will be more like the color you would see in a newspaper, and not like an LCD display. We can expect more on this from E Ink at the SID show in May.

Sri also reveals that they are working on much-faster E Ink displays, but it can take around 2-3 years for such technology to show up in shipping products...

Western Digital has released a new range of external Hard Disks that come with small 12-character E Ink displays. The My Passport Studio offer FireWire 800 interface and 256-bit H/W based encryption and come preformatted for Mac computers. They come in 320GB, 500GB and 640GB sizes, and are ready to pre-order now for $119.99, $139.99 and $159.99.

This is actually WD's second HD series to use such displays.

Bookeen are a France-based e-reader maker, that currently offer two models that use E Ink displays (the Cybook Gen3, available now for 350$, and the Opus, available now for 215$). They are set to release a new one, the Orizon, which uses Sipix e-paper instead. We have posted an interview with their CEO over at E-Reader-Info, discussing this, and other e-reader issues. If you don't want to read the whole interview, here's the 3 reasons why they moved to Sipix:

1. AUO (Sipix) touchscreen is light year away from Sony resistive technology. You keep the optical quality of ePaper and you get an incredibly reactive touchscreen. For us touchscreen on such a large display is a must-have.
2. AUO has great developments and move incredibly fast.
3. They did not want to depend only on one screen manufacturer (PVI).

If you do want to read the whole interview, here's the link.

A few monthד ago Art Technology released a new range of E Ink watches, called Phosphor watches. Now they have released a new model (black case Digital Hour), and have kindly send us one for review. The watch is now available for 190$.

The watch

The Digital Hour watch is a curved, light-weight watch. It's not thin, though, which is surprising because the display itself is very thin (more on this later, but it's under 400 micron thick!). The watch functions are pretty basic: you can view the time (in two modes: analog/digital combined, and just digital), the date, and there's also an alarm you can setup. The watch is always in 12-hours mode (no military time).

There are two buttons: one is used to flip between the 4 display modes (analog/digital time, digital time, date and alarm setup). The other button is used to flip the display between white on black or black on white. The two buttons are also used to setup the watch. You can see the analog/digital mode above, and here are the other 3 modes (from left to right: digital time, date and alarm). You can tell it's the date mode because of the small icon on the top-left.