The unnamed Asian company which acquired ailing foldable e-paper startup Polymer Vision has been outed as Wistron. Polymer Vision declared bankruptcy back in July, and were acquired in early September; the deal is now known to have been worth €12m ($17.75m). Integration of the two companies actually began taking place last month, but right now it’s still unclear whether the Polymer Vision brand will be maintained.
The tech world waits with baited breath for Barnes and Noble‘s dual-display ebook reader, expected to see an announcement today, but e-paper manufacturers aren’t resting on their laurels. AUO have two new milestones today: their first 6-inch flexible e-paper display, and the world’s first 20-inch Electrophoretic Display (EPD) panel, the largest ready for mass production.
The scaling up of business partnerships in the approach to the launch of Plastic Logic's eponymous ebook reader, together with the sell-out success of the Amazon Kindle DX certainly seems to suggest that there's a market out there for large-scale e-paper devices, and that's a segment manufacturer AU Optronics seem keen to capitalize on. According to CEO LJ Chen, the company is ramping up to produce 10-inch and A4 (8 x 11 inch) sized e-paper panels.
E Ink may be the best-known (and one of the widest-used) e-paper manufacturers out there, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t rivals snapping at their heels. Bridgestone have revealed their intention to market large-page e-paper using their own “electron powder and granular material”, which allows for screen refreshes in just 0.8 seconds; that’s fast enough to work relatively smoothly with pen-input.
E Ink, the e-paper specialists behind the displays used in Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader, Sony’s Reader, the keyboard of the Samsung Alias 2 cellphone and various other devices, has been acquired by Prime View International (PVI). The deal, which valued E Ink at $215m, sees the e-paper IP and technology specialists now combined with the manufacturers of the panels themselves.
Bad news for anybody hoping for PVI’s color e-paper before the end of 2009, as the company has pushed back the launch until 2010 having encountered “barriers to achieving satisfactory results”. To make up for the disappointment, however, PVI have tipped a larger ebook reader from Sony later in 2009, to compete with the recently-announced Amazon Kindle DX.
Bridgestone revealed their brand new color electronic paper display technology earlier this week in Tokyo at a trade show and this display has something all the others don't--support for pen input!
Printed electronics may soon bear the legend “Made in UK” if PETEC (the Printable Electronics Technology Center) has its way. Formed from a group of printable and plastic electronics experts, together with manufacturing facilities, PETEC is offering companies a route to quickly bring products to market without first needing to invest in expensive infrastructure. One company already involved, PolyPhotonix, is looking to commercially produce OLED lighting.
Brother Industries in Japan has today released a 9.7-inch E-paper document viewer with 1200x825 pixel resolution display and viewing area much larger than the size of Amazon’s Kindle 2. But unlike the Kindle sequel, the Brother’s SV-100B E-paper is tailored to business class users with equivalent paper size of A5.
We could soon be seeing broad commercial availability of both flexible e-paper and color e-paper displays, if rumors regarding manufacturer Prime View International (PVI) pan out. Industry sources are suggesting that PVI are preparing to mass produce flexible electrophoretic displays (EPDs), which use a TFT backplane with an electrophoretic frontplane based on E Ink technology, and will follow that up with color displays using the same processes.
We're used to seeing e-paper in sub-10-inch squares, slapped onto the front of an Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader, but over in Japan they're experimenting with using the technology to give Tokyo residents large-scale disaster warnings and evacuation advice. Two installations were fitted, the first measuring 1 x 3.2m in a Post Office window, while the smaller second panel, at 60 x 40cm, was added to a bus-stop.
Take one E Ink AM300 prototyping kit, combine it with a build of Mozilla's new Fennec mobile browser, and this is what you get: a touchscreen demo of web surfing on an e-ink device. It's the work of Jaya Kumar, who loaded Fennec into the AM300's Linux-based Gumstix controller and, with only a little modification, has a usable browser.
Check out demo videos of the e-ink Fennec setup after the cut