E Ink launches next-gen electronic ink: Vizplex

[wallcraft]

I wonder what "due his summer" really means. If these will be in volume production within months, then I would be amazed if there was a new high profile e-book reader (e.g. Amazon Kindle) released using the existing display. The original displays will presumably also get cheaper, which may be why the iBook eReader V3 will apparently use the existing "4 level greyscale" display.

[TadW]

I am not sure if it was smart of E Ink to make this announcement. A lot of e-reader vendors and manufacturers must be pissed off now because many people are going to wait for the first Vizplex e-readers before making a purchase. People been waiting for e-books to emerge for so long, so why rush now if Vizplex is just around the corner?

E Ink cuts into their own flesh because they are depending on improving sales of e-readers.

[JAcheson]

Any word of whether power requirements stay the same?

Better performance is nice, as long as it stays within the zone of good-enough weight, cost and battery life.

Looks like a nice evolutionary improvement in the tech.

Maybe Sony will throw in LED front-lighting with this and really sweeten the pot.

[Mambo]

Brightness (reflectance): 40% (previous: 32-35%)

I would translate this: not much whiter.

(or is there such a big difference between 35% and 40% in your view? I'd like to believe but it's hard to do so.)

Still these are very good news...

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by Mambo

...or is there such a big difference between 35% and 40% in your view?

Depends on how you want to look at it, I suppose.

For instance, it works out to a 14-25% increase in percent reflectance (depending on whether you use the 32% or 35% number to figure it).

For someone who sees the present contrast as 'not quite good enough' it might just edge them over the line.

I think that the speed increase and the simplified (hopefully cheaper) manufacturing are the real story here.

In any case, better is better, and since I don't plan on replacing my Reader just because the new gen of e-ink comes out (I think I'll wait two gens ), I'm pleased to see such a rapid improvement, and hope it bodes well for future advances.

[clabot451]

Every tech advancement is good news.
I wonder which specs should be achieved to consider epaper a mature tech?
I know that print on (wood) paper has a 300 to 600 range for dpi , but know
nothing about reflectivity or contrast ratio for both color and b/w.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by clabot451

Every tech advancement is good news.
I wonder which specs should be achieved to consider epaper a mature tech?
I know that print on (wood) paper has a 300 to 600 range for dpi , but know
nothing about reflectivity or contrast ratio for both color and b/w.

Ummm.... Printing for a normal mass market paperback is in the 1000dpi range, newsprint may be a bit lower (depending on the newspaper). Ordinary laser printers that you buy for a few hundred dollars US are 1200 dpi. Fancy glossy magazines, high-end text-books, art books, and the like are often printed at 3000-4000 dpi. Nothing much is printed past 4Kdpi, as you start needing a loupe to tell the difference.

Reflectivity and contrast, on the other hand appear to be spec'd differently for paper than for electronics. I have no idea how to compare those numbers.

[alex_d]

I wouldn't call this a huge leap forward as the OP implied, but it's a nice evolutionary step. However, don't expect to see anything soon! The development kits are on pre-order. This means that no one can even begin to design a product at this point. I'd say expect products next spring. Maaaybe right before christmas if a company with eInk experience has a really bad itch to refresh its product line and the new displays can use old controllers (but it doesn't seem like it).

I also really wish they'd have upped the dpi's in this generation. For the stuff I read, it counts much more.

And about screen refresh... that is a good improvement, but right now Sony isn't even reaching the current technology's potential. The damn thing renders each page after you press the button rather than keeping a ready copy beforehand.

[nekokami]

I wonder if reflectivity could be improved if they were able to create a vacuum in the cells, rather than filling them with a liquid? Or even an inert gas. They might also be able to improve the brightness of the white particles using some new findings about white substances in nature (I posted a link about this a while back). The other factor that I see is the top layer of plastic, but I don't know if that impedes brightness as much as the fluid in the cells.

[alex_d]

it's pretty easy to achieve 90% reflectance with a white paint. However, the biggest factor by far is not the inefficiency of the white and transparent materials, but the damn particles that don't stay rotated with their black sides down. If you look closely at eInk, you'll see a lot of dark specks. The increase in reflectance is probably owed to achieving greater control over the particles (as also evidenced by the 8-color spec). I wonder if this also means the blacks are blacker (and that total contrast has increased more than by 20%).

[nekokami]

I thought in this generation of e ink it was two different kinds of particles, black and white?

[NatCh]

E-ink is two sets of particles. There are other approaches that use the bi-colored balls, I think Xerox's approach did ....

[dstampe]

Actually, the current E-ink tech is not two-sided particles--that was an older idea that was not manufacturable (the old "Gyricon" display). (It's still how artist draw E-ink paper, because it's easy to explain and east to draw). See the Wiki article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper.

The E-ink used now has white charged particles in a droplet of black oil. The charge pulls the white particles to the top (for white) or bottom (for black). This means that when "white" thare is probably a bit of black oil left between the particles, thus the low brightness.

Unless you actually had a two-sided rotatable particle, it will be hard to get the brightness very high with this tech. Using a thinner oil might help. but I suspect this will cause fading to be worse--already an issue (see the posts on fading in sunlight, probably heat warming the display, making the oil thinner and allowing the white paticles to diffuse away from their position faster).

I hope the new iteration of E-Ink does more thaqn just use a thinner oil, for those reasons. What good is paper that fades away in less than a minute?

[NatCh]

I think that actual e-ink works a bit differently than you're thinking, dstampe.

From the e-ink "How it Works" page:

Electronic ink is a proprietary material that is processed into a film for integration into electronic displays. Although revolutionary in concept, electronic ink is a straightforward fusion of chemistry, physics and electronics to create this new material. The principal components of electronic ink are millions of tiny microcapsules, about the diameter of a human hair. In one incarnation, each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a negative electric field is applied, the white particles move to the top of the microcapsule where they become visible to the user. This makes the surface appear white at that spot. At the same time, an opposite electric field pulls the black particles to the bottom of the microcapsules where they are hidden. By reversing this process, the black particles appear at the top of the capsule, which now makes the surface appear dark at that spot.

To form an E Ink electronic display, the ink is printed onto a sheet of plastic film that is laminated to a layer of circuitry. The circuitry forms a pattern of pixels that can then be controlled by a display driver. These microcapsules are suspended in a liquid "carrier medium" allowing them to be printed using existing screen printing processes onto virtually any surface, including glass, plastic, fabric and even paper. Ultimately electronic ink will permit most any surface to become a display, bringing information out of the confines of traditional devices and into the world around us.

(emphasis theirs)

[yvanleterrible]

I wonder what would happen if the particles were in a white suspension liquid?