Interview with newE-/ink head T.H. Peng

[Dulin's Books]

T.H. Peng executive VP at PVI is the new head in Cambridge now. He Talks about short term and long term goals at E-Ink including tripling the output this year which is on top of a 5x increase the year before. Color and better displays also and the impact of the iPad is discussed.

Hanvon will be the first to debut a color e-ink reader in early 2011

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2010/0...international/

I don't know where that slash came from in the title- please fix

[badbob001]

Some interesting stuff:

X: What can you tell me about your technical ideas for creating better color displays? Is adding color simply a matter of tweaking the company’s existing microcapsule technology, or do you have to go back to the drawing board and approach it in an entirely new way?

SP: Even if we slightly describe it, we will probably reveal stuff that we are not ready to talk about. There is more than one approach, and exactly which one we will choose in the future, we don’t know.

Translation: no solid idea on color yet.

The approaches we are taking include improving the monochrome display to have greater contrast, so that when you overlay the color layer, it will look at least as good as the current black and white screens, if not better. In other words, we need to preserve all the goodness of the monochrome layer, and put color over it without sacrificing anything.

My biggest fears is that color displays will have washed out colors and even worse contrast than monochrome displays, making them a brief novelty. Good thing they want to address this. Now the mention of color *over* the monochrome layer suggests a color filter, which is something e-ink had shown at least five years ago.



This article touches on some of the challenges of color:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/...dwhite_ebooks/

Interesting things about using a color filter with e-ink:

• Color filter layer over e-ink has four subpixel colors: red, green blue, white
• Lower contrast due to extra layer (sony touchscreen users know this pain).
• Since it now takes four pixels to produce one color pixel, an existing e-ink display will be reduced to 1/4 of its resolution (ie: 6" 600x800 display will have an effective resolution of 150x200). Fix would be to quadruple screen resolutions. Imagine a yummy 6" monochrome display at 1200x1600).
• E-ink has a potential chinese maker using their color technology in 2011.

As an aside, IREX announced, in mid-2009, a color display for mid-2011. Instead of a color filter, they propose to stack three color layers (cyan, magenta, yellow) over a white reflective layer to produce color subtractively, like ink. They say it will be 3X brighter than other color e-paper displays.. not hard if the only current color epaper is the flepia:


This would likely not be an e-ink sourced display but from another company like liquavista. I have doubts when I think about what 3+ layers will do to contrast and sharpness.

Here's IREX's press release:
http://www.slashgear.com/irex-promis...ivals-0345795/

And a color diagram from their site describing their research on color: