First 10.1" Flexible Electronic Paper Display

Found on PhysOrg on Thursday, 20 October 2005
Browse Technology

LG.Philips LCD and E Ink have built a 10.1" flexible electronic paper display. Less than 300 microns thick, the paper-white display is as thin and flexible as construction paper. With a 10.1" diagonal, the prototype achieves SVGA (600x800) resolution at 100 pixels per inch and has a 10:1 contrast ratio with 4 levels of grayscale.

E Ink Imaging Film is a novel display material that looks like printed ink on paper and has been designed for use in paper-like electronic displays. Like paper, the material can be flexed and rolled. As an additional benefit, the E Ink Imaging Film uses 100 times less energy than a liquid crystal display because it can hold an image without power and without a backlight.

"We all need flexible displays," said Russ Wilcox, CEO of E Ink, "They are 80% thinner and lighter than glass displays, and they do not break like glass displays. You can roll them up and put them in your pocket. You can curve them around the outside of a cellphone. Or you can throw them in your briefcase like a newspaper. As Galileo famously told us, the world is not flat."

That would be a nifty tool. If it's cheap enough to produce (and it seems like that's the case), you could make a book with lots of blank pages. Not just a single sheet with a scrollbar, but a whole book. Load it with any text you want and you're ready. No need for metres of bookshelves, a single book will do. Store all your literature in electronic form and load it when you feel like reading the old-fashioned way. Perhaps you could even add a CF-reader into the hard-cover...