New e-readers will end black and white era - tech - 17 May 2009 - New Scientist

Description

MEDIA frenzy over the launch of Amazon's magazine-sized Kindle e-book reader last week overlooked the fact that, like its predecessors and competitors, it remains resolutely monochrome. Not for long, though. A full-colour version of electronic paper, which forms the display of these devices, is to be demonstrated later this month.

E Ink Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts, says it will be demonstrating a colour version of its e-paper at the Society for Information Display conference in San Antonio, Texas, on 31 May, and that products based on its colour e-paper will be on the market by the end of 2010.

The aim is to have a reflective display that uses very little power and is as easy on the eye as the printed word . Like E Ink's monochrome e-paper, used in Sony and Amazon readers, the colour version will be based on technology called an electrophoretic display.

In black-and-white e-paper, each pixel is made up of around 60 plastic microcapsules that contain a negatively charged black powder and a positively charged white powder. To make a pixel black, electrodes underneath the display apply a negative charge to push the black powder to the top. To reproduce shades of grey, some electrodes are positive and others negative, so some microcapsules are white while others in the same pixel are black. Once a page is set, this arrangement uses no power- critical for reading book-length content.

In the new colour display, each pixel will be split into four subpixels showing red, green, blue and white in their "on" states. That means squeezing four times as many transistors beneath each pixel to control the electrodes, which has been a challenge too far- until now. "The transistor resolution is now getting fine enough," says Sri Peruvemba of E Ink. But the proof will ...

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