https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-e-ink-developed-full-color-epaper
"From the very beginning, e-paper seemed magical. It was easy on the eyes, even
outdoors and in bright sunlight, where other portable displays became
unreadable. It could go weeks between charges while mobiles equipped with other
displays barely made it through a day (some of them still barely make it
through a day). Yet its limitation was obvious—images could appear only in
black and white. In a world that hadn’t seen a monochrome display in a very
long time—TVs made the switch in the 1960s, computer monitors in the late
’80s—a monochrome display was definitely quaintly old school.
So, since the initial development of electronic ink, as the basic technology
behind e-paper is known, and even more with the release of the Kindle, a big
question hung over e-paper: When would we see this magical display in
brilliant, blazing color?It’s not that people hadn’t been trying.
Electronic-ink researchers had been pursuing color e-paper for years, as had
other researchers around the world, in universities, corporate research labs,
and startups. They came up with some early products that targeted shelf labels
for brick-and-mortar retail stores and also for signage. But these added just
one color to a black-and-white screen—red or yellow—and that wasn’t anybody’s
idea of a full-color display. Indeed, more than a decade after that first
Kindle, and more than two decades after its invention, full-color e-paper had
still not reached the consumer market.
Why did it take so long for e-paper to make that Wizard-of-Oz transition from
black and white to color? Over the years, researchers tried several approaches,
some taking technologies from more traditional displays, others evolving from
the original e-paper’s unique design. Qualcomm, for example, spent billions
pursuing an approach inspired by butterfly wings. Overall, the path to
successful color e-paper is a classic, if tortuous, tale of tech triumph. Read
on to find out why this seemingly straightforward challenge was only realized
just two years ago at E Ink, where we are chief technical officers."
Via Esther Schindler.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
