Bridgestone announces flexible touchscreen color e-reader

[charleski]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

The resolution is higher than ebook readers, most likely greater than 1024x720 pix, but I have no concrete numbers.

It's a 13.1" screen and seems to be 16:9 aspect ratio.

For that to have a resolution of 170dpi, which is comparable to current eInk readers, it would have to be at least 1941x1091.

Unlikely.

LCD is a very mature technology will well-tuned manufacturing processes and you can't get a 13" LCD that's over 1440x900. It's larger than the top end of current eInk displays, but larger invariably translates into lower dpi resolution because size multiplies the difficulties in quality control. And in terms of the readability of text, it's the dpi that counts, not the total pixel count.

[ProDigit]

@Charleski:
If it is 16/9 perhaps it uses a 1280x720 screen; or a 1024x600 screen like a netbook.
But the way I see it, the screen looks to be more like a 8:5 ratio. A resolution like 1280x800 seems more likeable...

[Lilly]

It's good for magazines too. I have 3 magazine subscriptions, I don't read the paper since I read the news on the internet. But I do get People, Tennis, and Essence magazines at home. I have no e-subscriptions since I prefer my magazines in color. It would be great for someone to come up with a 13 inch color screen just for magazines. Maybe it could be like a cell phone deal, a deep discount for a 2 year subscriptions of several magazines.

[calvin-c]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

And I don't see how holographic displays will ever be anything more than a science fiction fantasy. Light and lasers simply do not work that way.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science...ion/index.html says it's been achieved in the laboratory. Which is a long way from being practical, but it does refute your statement that 'light and lasers simply do not work that way'. Of course maybe CNN got it wrong? I do recall the news stories about cold fusion a few years ago, but until proven otherwise I'll take CNN's reports over your opinions.

[charleski]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

@Charleski:
But the way I see it, the screen looks to be more like a 8:5 ratio. A resolution like 1280x800 seems more likeable...

Which gives it a resolution of 115dpi, no better than a run-of-the-mill LCD, and inadequate to the task of displaying arbitrary fonts properly at small sizes. An LCD running ClearType and using fonts that have been specifically and extensively tuned would look a lot better, so if you really need a large 13" display you'd be better-off getting an LCD-based tablet PC running Vista or Win7.

The whole point of eReaders is to make text look good. Colour and video may be desirable, but if they cause the text quality to be sacrificed then they're useless.

I'm sure there are several applications that can justify designing a very low-power mid-res display that can do video, but they don't include eReaders.

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by calvin-c

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science...ion/index.html says it's been achieved in the laboratory. Which is a long way from being practical, but it does refute your statement that 'light and lasers simply do not work that way'. Of course maybe CNN got it wrong? I do recall the news stories about cold fusion a few years ago, but until proven otherwise I'll take CNN's reports over your opinions.

Reports about science and technology from the general media almost always get things wrong-- sometimes only a few small things, sometimes major blunders. In every field of science in which I have some passing familiarity, I find mistakes in almost every article written in popular media by general reporters. I'm confident that they are just as mistaken in areas that I don't know enough to notice them.

This is how science reporting works:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1623

A laser is a tight beam of light. You do not see that beam unless it is passing through a medium that scatters some of that light. Think of the very common red laser pointers-- you see the dot where the laser beam touches a surface, you do not see the path of the beam through air unless there is smoke, steam, or some other type of fine particles suspended in the air. Now, with much more powerful red lasers and with somewhat more powerful green and blue lasers (wavelengths the eye is more sensitive to) and if the room is pretty dark, you can make out a beam. You have to have DAMN powerful lasers to make beams strongly visible in normal daytime lighting. I'm talking about lasers that burn skin and boil eyeballs with a moment's contact.

And even then, we are talking about a beam-- a beam which will continue on into infinity until it has lots it's focus too far to be visible. Not a volume pixel. The ability to make a laser show up as a single pixel in a volume of open air, not showing up as a beam before or afterward, is a FANTASY. You will never, ever, ever have any type of display that displays real, 3-dimensional images in open air. It is not how light physics works. There are ways to make things that look kinda-sorta like how we expect a hologram to look, but they involve rotating mirrors and bulky equipment-- nothing that you will ever have in a flat device that will fit in your pocket.

Here's an interesting discussion:

http://holography.ning.com/profiles/...-be-lovin-this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holograms

[ProDigit]

Originally Posted by Lilly

It's good for magazines too. I have 3 magazine subscriptions, I don't read the paper since I read the news on the internet. But I do get People, Tennis, and Essence magazines at home. I have no e-subscriptions since I prefer my magazines in color. It would be great for someone to come up with a 13 inch color screen just for magazines. Maybe it could be like a cell phone deal, a deep discount for a 2 year subscriptions of several magazines.

I wouldn't expect too much from the colors though!

Originally Posted by charleski

Which gives it a resolution of 115dpi, no better than a run-of-the-mill LCD, and inadequate to the task of displaying arbitrary fonts properly at small sizes. An LCD running ClearType and using fonts that have been specifically and extensively tuned would look a lot better, so if you really need a large 13" display you'd be better-off getting an LCD-based tablet PC running Vista or Win7.

The whole point of eReaders is to make text look good. Colour and video may be desirable, but if they cause the text quality to be sacrificed then they're useless.

I'm sure there are several applications that can justify designing a very low-power mid-res display that can do video, but they don't include eReaders.

It IS a laptop LCD screen. But don't forget that in B&W mode these LCD's would have a resolution of about 2400x1280,which is more than adequate for reading ebooks.
Seehere for details:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...865#post452865
(there's another thread about colors and pixels (used as B&W on a reflective background) too which I can't find right now..)

Also LCD screens do not give a good B&W ratio. Most of the text will be dark grey/green to dark yellow/light grey.

[Dylrob]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

From the video on the first page, it is clear they are using an LCD screen without backlight on a white background.
The reason of low contrast is the polarization filters.
This is something PixelQi is fixing in their screens.
The color mode faces the same issues as PiQi's screens, in that the colors are washed out.

The description Bridgestone gave suggests that their technology is on electrophoretics. And if you look at the color eInk prototypes they're also dark and washed out. Which makes sense since the screens are already "gray", and color filters have an unfortunate effect of eating light.

As for Pixel Qi, my limited understanding is that they placed the color filters below the reflective element. Which makes the reflective mode essentially black and white. Saturation is entirely dependent on the intensity of the backlight relative to ambient lighting.

[ProDigit]

Originally Posted by Dylrob

As for Pixel Qi, my limited understanding is that they placed the color filters below the reflective element. Which makes the reflective mode essentially black and white. Saturation is entirely dependent on the intensity of the backlight relative to ambient lighting.

PixelQi uses the same basics as an LCD. They have a layer of reflective white plastic, pol.filter, color layers, and the other pol filter.

They do use a very transparent type of polarization filter; or exactly how they get their screens so light I don't know.

The saturation effects of the colors follows the same pattern as a laptop with glossy screen, set to low backlight, in an outside environment (under sunlight); but minus the green-greyish color LCD's have.

[charleski]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

It IS a laptop LCD screen.

Er, no. It's a variant of electrophoretics: http://www2.bridgestone-dp.jp/global.../overview.html

Aha, just found some concrete specs on their site. They list res for their monochrome models and it's around 150dpi.

[calvin-c]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

Reports about science and technology from the general media almost always get things wrong-- sometimes only a few small things, sometimes major blunders.

As I pointed out. Sometimes it's the reporter who doesn't really understand the science & sometimes it's the scientist making false claims. But the claim is that it's been achieved-nobody who knows what they're talking about denies that it can, theoretically, be done.

Originally Posted by ardeegee

This is how science reporting works:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1623

Irrelevant. The link is satire & has no relationship to reality.

Originally Posted by ardeegee

A laser is a tight beam of light. You do not see that beam unless it is passing through a medium that scatters some of that light.

You mean like an interference pattern? Which is what creates a hologram? Sorry, that's also satire because you inadvertently explained how it works-while trying to explain why it wouldn't work.

So once it passes thru the interference pattern we're no longer talking about a beam. And you're correct that current technology requires bulky equipment-that's one of the reasons why it's still in the labs. (And they don't really need rotating mirrors, but it's easier. If I remember correctly, what they need is two beams interfering with each other in order to produce the interference pattern we see as an image. (And it won't be a single pixel unless that's the image you want to produce. The basic nature of a hologram, as an interference pattern in light, requires that they 'produce' the entire image rather than a portion of it.) The mirrors & prisms are currently used to 'split' a single beam into two synchronized beams, then bring them back together to produce that interference pattern.

Will it ever be miniaturized enough to fit into a pocket-sized device? I don't know. It's certain that it theoretically can be, but that theoretical device requires all sorts of technology that is also still theory. It's possible the human race will die out before this proves true. It's possible some other technology will be developed to do essentially the same thing before this proves true. And it's possible that there won't ever be enough 'need' for this that people will continue to develop it. But it's also definitely true that it is possible. Whether or not that possibility will ever become reality is something else.

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by calvin-c

Irrelevant. The link is satire & has no relationship to reality.

I'm sorry-- I was unaware that your absence of a sense of humor matched your absence of scientific knowledge.

So once it passes thru the interference pattern we're no longer talking about a beam. And you're correct that current technology requires bulky equipment-that's one of the reasons why it's still in the labs.

Holograms are not "still in the lab." You have holograms on your credit cards. You can make holograms at home. You used could buy kits on making holograms at home, including the lasers, mirrors, and holographic film, but I believe a few years ago "they" stopped making the film. Just like all real holograms are-- a static image permanently stored on a holographic film or a solid substrate. Not projected into the air. What the CNN article was about is that someone has developed a medium for storing holograms that can be erased and rewritten. But no matter if they did get the erase time and the rewrite time so fast that it can produce full-motion video, it will still be just an image embedded in the surface of the material like that little bird on your credit card. It will not float above a surface like Princess Leia. That is fantasy, not reality.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/hologram1.htm

I see that kits are still available, and cheaper than when I first looked at them maybe 10 years ago:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=...c9ea851cee2c5b

[Dylrob]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

PixelQi uses the same basics as an LCD. They have a layer of reflective white plastic, pol.filter, color layers, and the other pol filter.

They do use a very transparent type of polarization filter; or exactly how they get their screens so light I don't know.

The saturation effects of the colors follows the same pattern as a laptop with glossy screen, set to low backlight, in an outside environment (under sunlight); but minus the green-greyish color LCD's have.

I know Pixel Qi uses LCD. My point was that one of the ways they improved brightness was by not trying to give the reflective mode color. Color filters and reflective screens have never been great bedfellows.

If you're interested, you can read the patent filed by May Lou Jepsen here (warning: PDF).

[calvin-c]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

I'm sorry-- I was unaware that your absence of a sense of humor matched your absence of scientific knowledge.

Sense of humor has nothing to do with it-I just don't think false 'information' has any place in a rational discussion, whether intended as humor or not.

Originally Posted by ardeegee

Holograms are not "still in the lab." You have holograms on your credit cards. You can make holograms at home. You used could buy kits on making holograms at home, including the lasers, mirrors, and holographic film, but I believe a few years ago "they" stopped making the film. Just like all real holograms are-- a static image permanently stored on a holographic film or a solid substrate. Not projected into the air. What the CNN article was about is that someone has developed a medium for storing holograms that can be erased and rewritten. But no matter if they did get the erase time and the rewrite time so fast that it can produce full-motion video, it will still be just an image embedded in the surface of the material like that little bird on your credit card. It will not float above a surface like Princess Leia. That is fantasy, not reality.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/hologram1.htm

I see that kits are still available, and cheaper than when I first looked at them maybe 10 years ago:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=...c9ea851cee2c5b

I guess we're in the realm of competing experts then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holography talks about the 3-D holograms, which are the *original* holograms. I'm not a lexicographer so maybe Gresham's law applies here, but I tend to keep the original meanings for words. And by that meaning, the pictures on credit cards, etc. are hot holograms.

But I do see that your references call them holograms, so I guess at this point I'll just note that there appear to be two different meanings for the word.

As to how much science I know, I at least know enough to tell that something which has been demonstrated in the laboratory, regardless of the name that's applied to it, is not fantasy.

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by calvin-c

As to how much science I know, I at least know enough to tell that something which has been demonstrated in the laboratory, regardless of the name that's applied to it, is not fantasy.

If you are trying to say (as I have been thinking, correct me if I'm wrong) that "real" 3-D images have been projected into clear air by lasers, making a visible image like in Star Wars, Star Trek, or similar, then you do not know what the hell you are talking about, plain and simple. You are making a fool of yourself. Yes, the holograms on credit cards are real holograms-- it is your silly science fiction fantasies that are not real holograms-- those are NOT REAL.

"3D holograms" are stored in crystals, and thus store data in 3 dimensions, not in 2 like a holographic film like that used on credit cards. "3D holograms" are NOT free-standing displays of laser light floating in the air-- and they never will be, as I have already explained that only very dangerous, high-energy lasers have visible beam paths in clear air. That is not an engineering issue, that is a fundamental physics issue. Your sci-fi fantasies will never come true. Yes, it is possible to make volumetric displays, but they will always be confined within something-- inside a glass cylinder or sphere, or inside a case with a projector and a spinning mirror, for example. But there will never be a device that you hold in your hand that projects visible, 3D laser holograms.