CANON UNVEILS CREDIT CARD-SIZED PRINTER

[Anonymous]

Canon Unveils Credit Card-Sized Printer,
E-Paper

Canon Inc of Japan has disclosed the next generation of
core technologies for its products. Among the items revealed, the two that
attracted perhaps the most attention were the bubblejet-type inkjet printer, and
electronic paper.



Pushing Inkjet for Success



In the inkjet
printer sector, Canon Inc showed a compact printer small enough to be mounted on
a digital camera. It measures only 75mm x 46mm x 15mm – about the same footprint
as a credit card. Already sublimation thermal transfer and fluorescent tube
print head technologies have been put into commercial use in digital camera
printers, but Canon says that inkjet technology offers even smaller size and
lower power consumption. The power consumption during printing is only several
W, which means it does not require an AC adaptor, unlike sublimation
printing.



Normally the inkjet printer head (carriage) holds internal ink
tanks, which have made miniaturization difficult. The firm got round this
problem by placing an extremely small tank in the carriage, and an external tank
with more ink (enough for 20 prints) elsewhere. The internal tank is filled with
only the ink needed for a single print at a time, and the external tank (which
is integrated with the cartridge and supplies the ink to the internal tank) is
sold together with 20 sheets of the special paper. The firm plans to productize
in mid-2006, and expects that each cartridge will cost under
700yen.



E-Paper Planned for 2007



The super-flat display
known as “electronic paper” attracted as much attention as the inkjet. Only
300micron thick, the display can be bent like paper. R&D is continuing with
a product release target of 2007.



The Canon electronic paper sandwiches a
fluid known as dispersion medium between two substrates. Characters are
displayed via the electrophoresis phenomenon, which causes particles in the
fluid to move. The prototype used charged black particles (toner) mixed with a
transparent dispersion medium to express black by distributing toner throughout
the medium. When voltage is applied toner accumulates at the electrodes,
allowing the medium to become transparent, appearing white. The black/white
coloration can be controlled by changing the voltage between plus and
minus.



A reflective panel was constructed, which uses scattering of the
input external light for display. By combining this with red, green and blue
color filters, a full color display would be simple to implement.



A key
problem in implementing electronic paper is the slow response of the display.
This is because when particles are moved in electrophoresis, the voltage must be
kept on until motion is complete. The Canon prototype offers a per-pixel
response speed of 20ms, or about the same as reflective liquid crystal display
(LCD) panels. A line sequential drive system is used, however, which means it
takes time to redraw the entire screen.



The firm is now considering
placing a transistor and capacitor under each pixel, just as in existing thin
film transistor (TFT) LCD panels, and applying voltage to all pixels
simultaneously to resolve the problem.

[Author]

June 9, 2005 at 9:38 AM