Samsung Makes Waves in E-paper Market

Since last October, Samsung has been making one announcement after another involving upcoming e-paper products. Most of what we’ve seen leaked to the internet and trade shows have been conceptual designs, with promises of products to come in the near future (2009-2010).

Samsung Papyrus and E Ink Technology

Gottabemobile was the first to uncover Samsung’s e-paper device, the Papyrus.  They touted their find with a quick overview, a few snapshots and an intriguing video that shows the device at work. Unlike most other tools that use e-paper technology, it plans on being more than just a toy for reading electronic novels.

From the photos and the video Papyrus appears to be a full fledged PDA, with all sorts of little applications that reminded us of the original Palm Pilots back in the day. The screen is about five inches, with a touch screen display. Writing on the screen and selecting icons have a slight lag, but no worse than most first generation Palm Pilots. It’s a ton faster than the Sony PRS-707 and the iRex Iliad when it comes to touch screen technology.

The real selling point for the Papyrus will be combining the long battery life of e-paper with the power of a PDA. A lot of people are speculating that Samsung will eventually add wireless connectivity to the Papyrus, but so far it uses USB cables for bringing information to and from a computer.

The Future of E-paper Displays

But the Papyrus isn’t the only cool and exciting technology flaunted by Samsung. They are also making some great strides in the e-paper market, competing with Microsoft and Plastic Logic to see who can bring the first true flexible, full color e-paper technology to market.

In October of 2008 they debuted a massive 14 inch full color flexible e-paper display.  It uses a carbon nanotube technology to get a sharp, crisp image. When it was originally announced in 2008 there was no one else in the market with an e-paper display of that size. Since then, both Microsoft and Plastic Logic have debuted their own flexible, high color displays with similar screen dimensions.

And if that wasn’t ground breaking enough, they recently showed off a full color transparent flexible OLED screen that can be folded completely in half. The videos for this display must be seen to be believed. They even claim to have versions of this screen that present a 3D image by overlapping multiple thin transparent displays and running multiple images between them, giving it the illusion of depth.

The Future is SyncPaper

One thing that Samsung hasn’t followed up on yet, and seems to hold a great deal of promise is their trademark for the phrase SyncPaper that they filed last January. The trademark was for use with “electronic ink display devices; computers; MP3 players; mobile telephones; DMB receivers”. It leads us to wonder what they plan on using the trademark SyncPaper for, and if we will be seeing some pretty snazzy wireless e-paper devices from them in the future.

By Paul Jessup