E Ink on Paper

The startling idea here is that it becomes possible to produce the content on a piece of paper and to continuously refresh it.  The promise of course is that we can transition to a reading product not unlike an actual paper product produced conventionally and to which we are all accustomed.

It will take a while to make happen, but it can certainly put the device market on its head.  The customer wants the feel.

In the meantime, one wonders how comfortable one would feel about contracts put in front of you for signature if it is sitting in such a device.  Not really a problem but it could have it’s moments.

E-ink evolves: full color, video-capable, easy on the eye and cheap enough to be disposable

By Loz Blain

03:16 November 24, 2010

http://www.gizmag.com/video-capable-full-colour-e-ink-paper-electrowetting/17041/

E-ink's benefits over other forms of display are obvious: you don't have to backlight it if you don't want to, so it's very easy on the eye and also on a device's battery. You can effectively use it to produce an electronic screen that's as pleasant to look at as a printed piece of paper. And the technology seems set to take another leap forward with the announcement that University of Cincinnati researchers have developed an e-ink technology that's quick enough to competently display full color video – but so cheap that it can be completely disposable. How? Well, instead of using glass or flexible plastic as the basic substrate layer, they're using paper – and getting excellent results. So you could end up with single-page disposable electronic newspapers and magazines that use a tiny fraction of the paper their printed counterparts require. Clever stuff!

The paper-based e-ink technology uses the electrowetting method, in which an electric field is applied to colored droplets in a display unit to effectively turn on and off pixels in an array. Unlike an electrophoretic display like the one used in Amazon's Kindle e-reader, an electrowetting screen is able to deliver full color, and it can refresh quickly enough to display video.

It uses very little power, it's low-voltage, but delivers high contrast and can be used to deliver exceptional brightness, up to four times brighter than a reflective LCD screen - not to mention that electrowetting screens can be made flat and very thin.

Previously, the technique has required complex circuitry printed onto rigid glass or flexible plastic, but Electrical Engineering professor Andrew Steckl and doctoral student Duk Young Kim from the University of Cincinnati have discovered that you can get glass-like performance using a simple piece of paper as the substrate.

The end result will be a flexible, very cheap paper screen that can be sold as a disposable item like a newspaper or magazine. You could even print books on it, given a longer-lasting power source. It would be more convenient than a newspaper to read in just about any situation (but particularly on the train), and since it's cheap and disposable there'd be none of that paranoid feeling you get using an expensive iPad or Kindle in public.

“Nothing looks better than paper for reading,” said Steckl, an Ohio Eminent Scholar. “We hope to have something that would actually look like paper but behave like a computer monitor in terms of its ability to store information. We would have something that is very cheap, very fast, full-color and at the end of the day or the end of the week, you could pitch it into the trash.”

Whether or not the commercial applications of this technology end up being as cheap and effective as its inventors hope, paper-based electrowetting looks like a worthwhile and exciting addition to the portable display market. We look forward to seeing it in action.

Full press release at the University of Cincinnati website.

UC Breakthrough May Lead to Disposable e-Readers

http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.aspx?id=12779

A discovery by University of Cincinnati engineering researcher Andrew Steckl could revolutionize display technology with e-paper that’s fast enough for video yet cheap enough to be disposable.

Date: 11/22/2010 12:00:00 AM

By: John Bach

Phone: (513) 556-5224

Photos By: Dottie Stover; ACS Cover Illustration by Angela Klocke

A breakthrough in a University of Cincinnati engineering lab that could clear the way for a low-cost, even disposable, e-reader is gaining considerable attention.

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Andrew Steckl is an Ohio Eminent Scholar at UC's College of Engineering and Applied Science. His latest research involves advances in display technology that achieves electrowetting on paper as opposed to glass.

Electrical Engineering Professor Andrew Steckl’s research into an affordable, yet high-performance, paper-based display technology is being featured this week as the November cover story of ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, one of the scientific journals for the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.

In the research, Steckl and UC doctoral student Duk Young Kim demonstrated that paper could be used as a flexible host material for an electrowetting device. Electrowetting (EW) involves applying an electric field to colored droplets within a display in order to reveal content such as type, photographs and video. Steckl’s discovery that paper could be used as the host material has far-reaching implications considering other popular e-readers on the market such as the Kindle and iPad rely on complex circuitry printed over a rigid glass substrate.

“One of the main goals of e-paper is to replicate the look and feel of actual ink on paper,” the researchers stated in the ACS article. “We have, therefore, investigated the use of paper as the perfect substrate for EW devices to accomplish e-paper on paper.”

Importantly, they found that the performance of the electrowetting device on paper is equivalent to that of glass, which is the gold standard in the field.

“It is pretty exciting," said Steckl. “With the right paper, the right process and the right device fabrication technique, you can get results that are as good as you would get on glass, and our results are good enough for a video-style e-reader.”

Steckl imagines a future device that is rollable, feels like paper yet delivers books, news and even high-resolution color video in bright-light conditions.

“Nothing looks better than paper for reading,” said Steckl, an Ohio Eminent Scholar. “We hope to have something that would actually look like paper but behave like a computer monitor in terms of its ability to store information. We would have something that is very cheap, very fast, full-color and at the end of the day or the end of the week, you could pitch it into the trash.”

Disposing of a paper-based e-reader, Steckl points out, is also far simpler in terms of the environmental impact. 

“In general, this is an elegant method for reducing device complexity and cost, resulting in one-time-use devices that can be totally disposed after use,” the researchers pointed out.

Steckl’s goal is attract commercial interest in the technology for next-stage development, which he expects will take three to five years to get to market.

The work was supported, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation and was conducted at the Nanoelectronics Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati College of Engineering and Applied Science.

Read the published ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces article Find details of Steckl’s other recent work at the Nanoelectronics lab Contact info and additional details about Andrew Steckl