Electrophoretic "electronic paper" displays will get a speed boost next month as a result of a deal between E Ink Corp. (Cambridge, Mass.) and Seiko Epson Corp. (Tokyo). The companies have jointly developed an electronic-paper display controller that they claim breaks the speed bottleneck that has stood in the way of e-paper's use for interactive applications. The main advantage of such displays is that they use reflected light instead of a backlight, making them easy to read at any angle in normal room lighting as well as in bright sunlight. LCDs, by contrast, are hard to read in sunlight and have a limited viewing angle. With the faster Epson-manufactured controller, E Ink claims that electrophoretic displays can tackle nearly every application now served by LCDs, albeit only in black and white (or a limited number of gray scales). Applications include e-books, newspapers, -notebooks and -dictionaries; tablet PCs; and auxilliary displays for ordinary laptop computers.
Text: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207400055
