Technical / Research

Qualcomm plans to invest $2 billion in a 4.5 Gen Mirasol production plant. Volume production will being in 2012. The mainly aim to produce 5.7" color panels. There are reports that samples have been shipped to customers already, and at least one 'major client' has started the design-in process.

Mirasol displays claim a 6X power advantage of E Ink, offer a fast response time (enough for Video!) and color.

Geek.com has posted an interesting comparison: comparing the iPad's IPS-LCD (or Super-LCD) to the Kindle's E Ink up close. There are two photos. One at 26x magnification, in which you can already see the 'dots' in the LCD (the right image):

The second image is at 400x magnification:

As you can see, the E Ink display is way better up close - it's not just a series of dots. So obviously the LCD has a lot of advantages (color, fast response time, bright), but for reading, nothing beats an EPD...

HP is reportedly developing new e-paper materials that will be sued to make bright, efficient, video-capable displays.

via Engadget

E Ink has announced their next-gen display technology called Pearl, to be released in July 2010. This new display has about 50% improved contrast ratio compared to the current Vizplex displays. The Pearl has 16 levels of gray, improved power consumption (and of course they do not require power when images are not changed).

The Pearl is the display used in Amazon's new Graphite Kindle DX, which will ship on July 2010, and cost $379.

Nemoptic has released a video showing their new active-matrix e-paper prototype:

There isn't a lot of information on this monochrome display, but we'll keep watching.

Sriram Peruvemba, VP of marketing at E-ink is showing new plastic-based flexible display prototypes. This is a long video, in which he also shows all sorts of other E Ink based displays :

Check out this nice video showing how Liquavista's displays behave outdoors. This short clip shows a couple of displays and a regular LCD (the laptop in th top-right). The liquavista's display are better, of course: