Refresh rate

Bookeen has been researching high speed E Ink displays for over two years, and now they have unveiled the technology - which they call High Speed Ink System technology or (HSIS). Basically, HSIS is an E Ink Pearl touch display, a TI Cortex A8 processor (which Bookeen said was developed in partnership with TI) and optimized software and algorithms developed by Bookeen.

Bookeen recently announced the Odyssey e-reader that includes all HSIS components - and is capable of fast page refreshes, video, scrollable menus and scrollable web-browser and more - all this on a monochrome 6" E Ink pearl display of course. Bookeen has been showing prototype HSIS devices since early 2011.

Here's a nice short video showing a 6" E Ink Pearl panel running on the Freescale i.MX50 EVK, showing the quick refresh rate possible with such a setup:

Fujitsu is showing a new color e-paper eReader prototype - with a 4096 colors, 8" display (157 PPI that offers 8:1 contrast ratio. This is a linux-based system with a new fast processor (refresh rate of 0.7 seconds) and ePub and PDF support. It weights only 220 grams.

This new prototype probably uses Fujitsu's "improved" e-paper technology announced back in May 2010.

It's been a while since we heard some news regarding AUO's Sipix e-paper technology. IRX Innovation tested the new panel and found it's fast enough for video (6fps):

In fact IRX engineers say that this could be improved to 10fps just by loading the images into a memory buffer. The panel on show offers VGA resolution (480x640), 100Hz refresh rate and 4 gray levels (although this will be improved to 16 levels). Here's a closeup of the panel:

Bookeen is showing some real time web page scrolling on an E Ink panel:

Pretty impressive, although they've already shown us smooth video playback on such a display. Now we're waiting for their upcoming fast e-reader...

E Ink's Sri Peruvemba says that there's generally a two-year cycle in E Ink technology as it takes some time to develop and test new generation displays. Sri says that we shouldn't expect a new monochrome E Ink display (to replace the Pearl) in 2011. I guess we'll have to wait till 2012!

What we are likely to see soon are speed improvements - full-motion video (24fps) using updated drivers and faster processors. Bookeen has already been showing about 10-15fps video on Pearl displays.

Back in January we saw an e-reader playing video (by Bookeen) - and today we found out that someone ported Doom 2 to an E Ink e-reader (a prototype PocketBook 360 Plus). Pretty neat:

via E-Reader-Info