E-paper use on the rise, but credibility still an issue

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 14 July 2009 08:20

IT Industry - Market

Chae says that Gartner believes that the cost of e-paper displays will need to fall further if it is to act as a viable mainstream alternative to print media, “especially as the falling costs and increasing quality of alternative technologies – such as OLED and LCD – could moderate the growth potential of e-paper.”

Gartner cites a number of examples of e-paper technologies - and explains the way they work - including:

•    Electrophoretic e-paper, where the image is generated by an array of electrically charged particles suspended in fluid. When current is applied, the particles are moved to the opposite electrode side. Switch the field, and the     particles will move to the other side, and this will change the colour and finally change the images. Electrophoretic technology from E Ink is currently used in commercial devices such as the Amazon Kindle, Sony Librie reader and Plastic Logic's e-newspaper

•    Electronic Liquid Powder (ELP) from Bridgestone, which uses a similar electrophoretic approach to E Ink's e-paper, but with the ELP particles suspended in air instead of fluid.

•    Cholesteric LCD, an LCD variant, such as the technology from Kent Displays that is used in Fujitsu’s new e-book reader FLEPia, using multiple layers of different colour LCD crystals to generate the image.