Competing technologies - Page 45

Some interesting E Ink related news today:

Amazon announced that the Kindle DX will be released on June 10th. The DX has got a 9.7" 1200x824 (at 150 ppi) E Ink display, with 16 shades of gray. It costs 489$, you can pre-order now.

Amazon Kindle DX

The DX weights 535grams, and the size is 10.4" x 7.2" x 0.38". It's got 4GB of internal memory (around 3.3Gb of which are available to the user). The modem is a EVDO 1xRTT (Sprint 3G). It supports many formats, including PDF.

Prime View (PVI) announced that they will acquire E Ink for 215$. PVI is the largest ePaper display maker, it will be interesting to see how they integrate E Ink (which is more of an IP company).

Cuttlefish are able to change their skin color quickly. Now scientists from MIT are working to create displays that are extremely efficient - using less than one-hundredth the power of today's TVs. Cuttlefish use chemicals to change the space between membranes on their skin. The researchers have created an artificial electrical system that controls spacing between layers in their display, thus changing the color.

The prototype display is several inches across, and only one micron thick - inside there are around 20 layers of polystrene and responsive poly-2 vinyl. The poly-2 vinyl expands as the voltage increases, becoming thicker, and reflecting longer wavelengths of light. Without electricity it is clear.

Researchers from the University of Rochester, together with Kodak has created a nanocrystal that constantly emits light, and does not 'blink'. The findings, detailed online in the journal Nature, may
open the door to dramatically less expensive and more versatile lasers,
brighter LED lighting, and biological markers that track how a drug
interact with a cell at a level never before possible.

The researchers think that one day it'll be possible to 'paint' such nanocrystals on a large surface - creating a flat light source that may one day replace OLEDs. 

Amazon has launched a new, larger Kindle e-book reader yesterday: the Kindle DX. The display is a large 9.7" 1200x824 (at 150 ppi) E Ink, with 16 shades of gray. It will cost 489$, and it's available for pre-order. 

Amazon Kindle DX

The older Kindle had a 6" display, and is available for 359$. 

Can OLEDs compete against ePaper displays such as E Ink? I'm not sure. Those screens have better battery life, look more paper-like, and are great in direct sunlight. They are also much cheaper currently.

Back in February, Mitsubishi stopped making their Laser TV (LaserVue) - those high-end TVs using laser technology, costing around 7,000$. 

Now Mitsubishi says that they are back in production. Here's some more info on those TVs.

Amazon has officially announced the Kindle 2.0 reader. The display is a 6" diagonal E-Ink electronic paper display, 600 x 800 pixel resolution at 167 ppi, 16-level gray scale.

The whole device weights just 290g (less than a normal paperback, they say), and it's extremly thin - just over 0.3-inch. More info at amazon.com, of course.

The governments of Hong Hong and neighboring Shenzhen, China will fund R&D projects, with a 4.7M$ fund.

One of the areas in which they are interested in is "Development of high-performance silicon driver intellectual properties for display panel (TFT-LCD and OLED) applications."

QD Vision, developer of nanotechnology-based solutions for displays and lighting, announced it has achieved significant improvements in brightness, efficiency and lifetime thresholds for its Quantum Light product platform.

Their technology is not ready for commercial use yet, but they are apparently on the way.

Uni-Pixel and Samsung announced that they will collaborate on UniPixel's TMOS display etchnology. TMOS (Time Multiplexed Optical Shutter) will potentially bring displays that are lower in cost, have better performance and lower power consumption that LCDs or even OLEDs.

TMOS is based on temporal additive color. Short bursts of red, green and blue light are emitted through the same dot so quickly that the eye also sees them as a single color. But in this case, different durations of red, green and blue create different shades and hues.