*NEWS*EPSON AND THE E-PAPER BANDWAGON

[Anonymous]

http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207801665
E-paper bandwagon gathering steam
LOS ANGELES — Epson emerged at the Society for Information Display conference this week as the latest in a string of E Ink Corp. licensees bringing e-paper products to market.The company demonstrated several active-matrix electrophoretic displays (EPD), based on low-temperature polysilicon (LTPS) thin-film transistors, with unusually high resolution. Creating a high-res image that looks like ink on paper was motivated by the company’s traditional involvement with real paper in the printer business, a company spokesman said.

Epson demonstrated a 6.7-inch-diagonal display with a 1,200 x 1,600-pixel format, yielding a resolution of approximately 300 pixels/inch; and a 13.4-inch-diagonal display in a 3,104 x 4,128-pixel format with 385 pixel/inch resolution.The company has e-book reader applications in mind, and it is also exploring other e-paper applications that would be “thinner and lighter than e-books.” The combination of E Ink’s EPD technology and Epson’s LTPS technology, the spokesman said, enables the fabrication of displays that are “as big as one might want them to be.” Commercialization is expected “soon.”As for E Ink itself, that company demonstrated its latest design win at its SID booth: a Hitachi cellphone with a display “skin” that lets users personalize their phones. The phone offers a choice of 95 different patterns on its front face, including a butterfly that moves across the screen and grows when the phone rings.Kent Displays Inc. demonstrated a concept cellphone at SID that uses this company’s cholesteric-LCD e-paper technology to personalize a phone. In this case, a stack of red, green and blue subdisplays gives the user a choice of front face colors: eight colors in the demo but a bigger pallet is also possible, according to a company spokesman.

[Author]

May 22, 2008 at 2:53 PM