Bridgestone Shows Off Ultra-Thin, Full-Color e-Paper

Bridgestone, the company which debuted the "world's thinnest" sheet of two-color e-paper last year, has turned around and delivered a new version which is capable of displaying over four thousand colors. "In case that wasn't enough, the company is also touting what it calls the "world's largest full color e-paper that is A3 size, which is equivalent to a 21.4-inch screen." As you'd expect, the latter is expected to be used solely for advertising and could hit the market as early as next year, while the former technology is set to be commercially available in 2009."

Don't make them too thin...

It could lead to Bridgestone being forced to have ANOTHER Recall due to blowouts! http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&safe=off&q=Bridgestone+recall&btnG=Search [google.com]

Now is everyone ready for 'digital paper' "DRM" ???

Re:Don't make them too thin...

"Now is everyone ready for 'digital paper' "DRM" ???"

"This message will self erase in 5 seconds"

Re:Plugging the analog hole

I thought you were going to say: Poke out people's eyes and make them install DRMed optic sensors. The Microsoft version would be ViziOrbs - Human Light Interface. And the Apple ones would be iBalls.

Re:Plugging the analog hole

REAL geeks use BSD (Bispherical Seeing Device).

Two Words: Refresh Rates

As in, the fact that they aren't revealing them means that they aren't anything to write home about. Refresh rates are going to keep this technology confined to ebook readers and advertising posters. I want stuff like this [blogspot.com].

Re:Two Words: Refresh Rates

I would love to have an A3-sized e-reader for schematics. Having the ability to search my documents (where is R217?) without having to deal with the cumbersome laptops with small displays, would be great. I imagine a scroll with the batteries and processor in the center, or a folding book. Either way you would have the option of using it in A3 or A4 size depending on what you need to do. It wouldn't need a huge amount of memory, especially if it had WiFi. It wouldn't need a high a refresh rate or many colors - I could get by with monochrome, 16 colors would be nice, 256 would be exorbitant. Just high resolution PDF view and file browser and I'd be happy. Bonus points for excel documents.

Re:Two Words: Refresh Rates

Yeah, but just watch out for the older engineer with his red pencil.

Slightly better picture

Wow, the e-paper he is holding in that picture has a full 4,096 shades of brown. Perfect for Doom!

Seriously, Here is an article with a better picture [i4u.com]. Still not much contrast, but getting better.

Now about distortion...

...can you bend the critter (or at least build it as a wrap-around type screen), without optical distortion (or at least some sort of compensation against it by a GPU)? It would add one hell of a dimension to gaming, simulators, immersion-type entertainment, things like that.

I realize it's probably possible to do when building it, but it takes a pretty (relatively) hefty chunk of time to do anisotropic conversions of flat images (e.g. when creating image-based lighting maps for CG artwork raytracing and such), but if that could be fixed, a semi-spherical screen with the focal point being a person's head would be hella nice.

(of course, they'd still have to add about 15.9-something million colors in capability and perhaps a tighter resolution to it as well, but still... looks like it could go to some interesting places if they actually get it working).

/P

Wow - Amiga

which is capable of displaying over four thousand colors.

Wow, now we're up to Amiga range from 22 years ago.

How many colors are we talking about?

It's over four THOOOO0OOOOOOUSAND!!!

Bridgestone, huh?

Not meaning to tread on their parade, but won't these people ever get tyred of re-inventing the wheel?

*rimshot*

Full-Color?

4k colors -- 12-bit color -- is "Full-color"? Really?

I'm Lovin It! (TM)

Can't wait til these babies start rolling out as it'll seriously push the display market with some nice competition to increase pixel density and so on. Once people figure out how to hack these things it's going to seriously affect LCD prices. Wheee. Sadly that'll lead to DRM usage on them so people don't hijack their ads. Eh.

Flexible? Color?

What I need is a rather thin (.5 mm is enough), black and white e-paper screen with high res and low power use, in an A4/letter format. This would save me hundreds of copies of paper. I'm willing to pay up to a grand for that. Why are these idiots always focusing on full color, bendable screens? I would consider them nice extras, nothing more.

if it's A3 in size...

it's colour! ;)

Advertising Only?

Screw that, I'd want one hanging on my wall! Although I'd hate to see what it sets you back for a dynamic poster :) So far, the regular e-ink paper hasn't been too bad.

Colors

4,096 colors is 1024 * 4.

The "1024" is predictable, but I wonder why 4-times that figure?

For what?

Maybe I'm missing something, but don't we already have a means of displaying digital documents? Can someone explain to me the point of distributing an "e-subscription" on "e-paper" when most people are spending more and more of their time on computers?

Novel, yes. Useful, I don't know...but I can buy more paper than I'll need in an entire year for $30 at Staples.

Etch a Sketch

I'm glad to hear that they're coming along nicely with eBook readers. The real question agony that I'm facing is a lack of eBook readers out in the public. I haven't seen much out there other than Sony with a $300 eBook reader that I may consider purchasing once it's released. I literally have hundreds of notes and eBooks in PDF format. I would love to carry it all with me and have the crispness of paper and not worry about battery life as compared to a laptop.

Now, only if I could only somehow rig my Etch-A-Sketch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etch_A_Sketch) to read SD Flash memory I'll be set.

That would be nice to have.

I already read newspaper in electronic form on my Palm V PDA using AvantGo. I would like something a little lighter and easier to handle compared to the Palm. Also I like to have color rather than the black and white screen of the Palm V.

programmable clothes are coming!

Make clothing from this material and see what it does to fashion! I'm a tech guy and shouldn't be allowing my brain to go here, but imagine: as with your dumb-ass you-paid-$2.99-for-what? ringtones, you'll be able to download patterns for your shirts, slacks and skirts! Hooked up to your cameraphone, hell, you could even be invisible!

I want affordable

The only readers out currently are way over priced. $300 is a bit too much for the feature set that the sony reader provides. This new tech is great but if the price is the same, or worse, the market is just going to take forever to develop and these things are just not gonna sell. I have craved epaper for over a decade now and I still can't quite justify spending $300. I have never seen anyone with one and i live in the valley.

I hope at some point drops into the reasonable range and I can enjoy the future i have been promised for a while.

Price and resolution?

Because the last time I checked, color e-paper had a resolution of about 70dpi, and an A4-paper sized ebook reader using color epaper was about 2500 bucks. Since the article does not address either of these details, I have no reason to assume that their state of affairs is any different than what I've already known about. Both price and resolution need to be favorably improved by about a factor of 5 before I expect that they will be seriously considered as popular consumer-level devices.

Pine & Oats... Good for You!!!

The first thing that comes to my mind when talking about e-paper, and its advertising uses, is the scene from "Minority Report". Tom Cruise is supremely annoyed with a cereal box made of e-paper playing a silly commercial, and pitches it across the room.

Easily the best highlight of the movie!!

Anxiously Waiting for E-Paper!!!

I would like to be able to purchase some book-length (ie. 200-300+ page) e-paper "blanks" that I could then have some e-book thingies (USB sticks, whatever, I don't care) that I could energize them with at any time so that I could invest in 6-10 book "chassis" and then plug in the set of reading materials I'm currently working with. I like the idea of saving trees, but I'm old-fashioned in that I much prefer working with a "book" style object to read, flip through, bookmark and come back to, etc. My fear is that the people who make this stuff and go to market it are going to take the idiot route and price it very high in hopes of getting a lot of money per sheet, rather than to price it very low and make an astounding pile of money when the whole world starts converting books to this new format. Think libraries, schools, businesses, book publishers, etc-- all will have a serious need for book-length "blanks" to stock their shelves with. And you could get Newspaper and Magazine length blanks too. So your subscription could come electronically and then just be loaded into the blank. You could go back however many issues you like and have it as clear and crisp as the day you first saw it. And think of all the microfiche that's out there with archival information-- that could be transferred to e-book (newspaper) format as well to make it more easily disseminated and used. Lots and lots and lots of possibilities exist for this new e-paper. I am *totally* stoked and waiting for this stuff to hit the consumer market for real. And I've got my fingers totally crossed hoping they price it cheap instead of expensive (even though I know that's complete wishful thinking)

Billg

4000 colors ought to be enough for everybody.

Funky tire

What about applying this tech to tires? Then the riceboys could have funky neon colors on their tires, rims, and paint:)

Clunky

Does anyone else think e-Paper loses a lot of its cool factor when you see the gigantic boxes always attached to them?

Tire Salesman: "Yes, here's my sexy svelte e-Paper"
Englishman: "Oy! What's the gigantic black box attached to it?"
Tire Salesman: "Oh that, that's the... umm... e-Paper-Printer it is!"

Traction

Well I can only hope this catches on.. the pavement. I really need to know what kind of traction this technology will provide. I don't know how I feel about 4,000 colors spinning around the corner as I speed down the pike, but, I'll accept it as long as it keeps me on the road.

Seriously. Bridgestone? I thought they made tires.

Your whitewalls will advertise for Coca-Cola.

Car paint?

Am i the only one who wants to use this stuff as car paint? That way i can change its color, add a "carpaper", or just add go-faster-stripes till it gives me a headache, all from the comforts of my own photoshop.

e-toiletpaper

I hope they come up with e-toiletpaper, too. I'm bored with the little bears.

Singing birthday cards ...

can now come with a little animation on the front. I guess that "in the wild" the paper will come with a little battery/PCB that tells it what to show and powers it. Be a while before its useful i would guess.

Flexible?

That's nice, but is it flexible? I'll be happy when I can start rolling a 4" x 5" screen out of a PDA/Cellphone a-la the movie Red Planet. Make it a touch screen too, then I'll really be psyched.

hell of a lot of colors

Well this makes me happy. You know, I just wasn't satisfied with the only 2000 colors available in the last version. This one really makes me enjoy color differences that my eye cannot even differentiate between.

Speed

A lot of the comments focus on LCD replacement. In my experience, unless they fix the speed of rewriting the screen, it won't happen. I own an iLiad Rex ebook reader (http://www.irextechnologies.com/ [irextechnologies.com]) which uses B&W epaper and although the visual is excellent, you can tell it is not easy to do something as simple as turning a page. The whole page needs to be re-written every time, which takes about a second. For an e-reader that is relatively acceptable, but for any kind of regular LCD-type usage, that won't fly.

That said, I agree with a previous poster. I would pay up to 1K for an A4-size ebook reader. The iLiad screen is too small for most PDFs out there.

Wow! Just imagine...

A beowulf cluster of these...

No, seriously, getting like 60 sheets of this stuff together would be the perfect way to peruse your pr0n collection.

Is it water-proof?

Diamond Age?

didn't Neal "predict" this in the "Diamond Age"? Thump the paper to turn the page...

Never mind the refresh rates

There are plenty of sweet applications for this. - electronic posters - digital picture frames - e-books - e-MUSIC-books - wall calendars I could go on. Personally, I want a music book made out of e-paper. I cart around a 50lb backpack everywhere because of the amount of sheet music I have to carry. I want a two page binder where touching a button "turns the page", with a memory of thousands of pages.

copyright???

A quick pass through the scanner would open a huge analog hole to the normal user for e-book copyright infringment.

why use eIn only for ePaper - how about ePaint

Why not use this kind of eInk tech as 'paint' on objects? This would play to it's main advantages (reflective => use in full sun, no power draw except to change color) and it main problem (refresh rates) would not be a problem. Pimp your ride at the touch of a button. A doll you can put eraseable makeup on. 'Wallpaper' for the outside of your phone. ...

Re:Finally...

Someone thought of the trees!

...and replaced them with horrible, toxic, non-renewable phosphorescent chemicals and heavy metals!

So... Dither

So many comments about the small color range, but really this isn't a problem if the dot pitch is small enough. Printed paper only has 8 colors (16 if you include black in CMYB). Back in the day with only 4-16 colors we dithered to get a better range of colors, the look was similar to old comic books and for much the same reason. With 4096 colors to choose from dithering is very subtle and hard to notice. My 1998 laptop monitor only had 4096 colors, but dithering made it look fine. It's unclear to me whether most LCDs even today have full true 24 bit color.