E-Ink Corp, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has embarked on the first commercial demonstration of its electronic ink technology at US retailer JC Penny Co. E-Ink’s Immedia display technology is intended to enable electronic displays to be based on electronic ink that can be printed on paper or other flexible surfaces, combining the look of ink on paper with the ability to change images instantly.
JC Penny will use it for a point-of-purchase sign in the Simply for Sports Department at its Marlborough, Massachusetts-based store. Additional signs will be installed in Dallas and Chicago stores over the course of the summer. The signs are four feet wide by six feet long, but only 3 millimeters thick and with a weight of 8.7 pounds. IT can update a message every ten seconds while consuming less energy than a household light bulb. The Immedia products include a wireless pager and internet software so that the retailer can remotely change messages, either at a single store or across a whole chain.
Jim Iuliano, president and CEO of E-Ink, said that the company had taken the technology from the labs to the commercial market in less than a year. E-Ink, still a development stage company, received its first round of $15.8m in equity funding in May last year. Motorola Inc and the Hearst Corporation were among the investors. The first generation of Immedia products is targeted at large area displays, but the company says it has plans in future for handheld devices, outdoor billboards, and electronic books and newspapers.
There are various types of electronic ink, but most share a common characteristic – they consist of microscopic particles that physically shift under the influence of an electric charge, with a corresponding change in color. E-Ink’s technology comes from work done at MIT’s Media Lab, funded by the Things That Think and News in the Future research consortia. Electronic ink typically comprises of millions of hair-diameter balls, each one free to spin within its own oil-filled bubble. Each ball is bichromal – half white, half black – and, depending on the polarity of charge surrounding it, rotates to show a different face and therefore a different color. To build up an image, corresponding patterns of charge are arranged across the viewing surface.
It presently offers 100 dots per inch resolution, switching rates of 10Hz. Images, once created, persist for extended periods and they draw power only when they are altered. This property means that a tiny battery might last for months. In conjunction with substrates potentially as thin as a few thousandths of an inch, this would make multi-page e-books feasible – once loaded with content, their battery could be removed and they could be treated just like a book. The technology has wide viewing angles, good contrast and no flicker. Although laser-printer resolution (400 to 600dpi) is some way off, color displays are within reach. Xerox Corp has a similar technology, Gyricon, which it hopes to bring to the commercial market some time next year. Numerous other organizations, including IBM Corp, oil giant Exxon, and Bell Labs are also involved in research on electronic inks.
But electronic inks may not be the only way of making e-books practical. Even LCDs may hurdle glass-substrate technology to become viable displays. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is working with groups at Princeton University and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to develop AM-TFT LCDs with alternative substrates. The Princeton effort is focusing on stainless-steel foil while Lawrence Livermore’s project is investigating plastic substrates. In both cases the resulting displays are thin, very rugged, and capable of curvature radii so tight that foldable pages may be possible. And significantly, they can be manufactured using relatively straightforward processes.
