The future for e-paper is away from e-readers. It’s more for multi-purpose devices, for outdoor advertisement, for netbooks and all sorts of new and interesting technology. Right now e-readers are the hot item, but in the future, once books have finally moved on from analogue to digital, e-paper will need to expand and adapt to multi-purpose devices. And Qualcomm thinks it has the key- it’s full color, low power, fast and versatile Mirasol display technology.
Qualcomm’s vice president of Mirasol, James Cathey, recently said in an interview that text and books where the last of the analogue to digital transitions. We’ve already gotten past music and video, and now we have to find a way to bring stuff like textbooks, comic books, novels and magazines into the digital realm in a way that works right and feels right. Once we’ve digitized books, we can move onto more versatile devices that really push what e-paper products are capable of.
We’re going to spotlight on Mirasol and go through the various benefits that it’s e-paper display can have for different kinds of devices.
The Tech
I’m going to do just a brief overview of the tech behind Mirasol’s displays. If you want to find out more, you can take a look at our more detailed analysis located here. Like most e-paper displays, it uses a reflective technology to get a clear, crisp easy on the eyes image in ambient lighting that does a good job replicating plain old print technology. It uses a process that works similar to butterfly wings, by changing the wavelengths of light it reflects back different colors to the human eye.
Unlike the more common E Ink style electrophoretic technology, they don’t have to worry as much about screen refresh time, or applying filters to create the illusion of color. Like electrophoretic technology, the Mirasol screen only requires power when it changes its image. Which keeps Mirasol’s electronic footprint low. About as low as the current models of e-paper.
The Products
Where most e-paper products just have an e-reader or two (or three, or twelve, or fifteen…) to showcase/sell it’s technology, Qualcomm has a far wider range of products for Mirasol. There is a stereo bluetooth headset device from Acoustic Research, an MP3 player from Freestyle audio and another from Skullcandy. So far, Mirasol is proving to be the most diverse e-paper in products so far. While most e-paper is content on either being created for use in a netbook or an e-reader, Mirasol has proven to be versatile in it’s uses.
The refresh rate might have something to do with this. James Cathey, Qualcomm QMT’s vice president of Mirasol, recently said in an interview that, “The next thing is you need to be video-rate and have color. If you can’t do video rate and color, you’re not going to be able to support a handset. Just to text, for example, that screen is refreshing at 60 Hz. If you can’t do that, let alone 30 Hz, you can’t do text messaging. You don’t want to wait a second for each letter, right? That would be a huge drawback. So video is not just running video—it’s scrolling, it’s texting, it’s a fast response from the display. ”
Which is an extremely good point. The main reason e-paper hasn’t found a lot of uses other than text-based rendering is because the refresh rate is too slow to support anything else. A lot of the companies that have added color filters to the existing technology get even slower refresh rates- and this keeps e-paper solely in the domain of e-readers and simple flashing advertisements. But Mirasol’s technology, with it’s lower power, high color, and fast refresh rate, shows that it can be used in any number of devices.
People are already getting sick of hearing about e-readers. If e-paper is to survive it needs to move past this hurdle, and Mirasol just might be the company to do it. Not that it doesn’t have an e-reader of it’s own coming out soon- they showed it off at CES 2010, and it was very impressive. They just understand that the future is in more all-purpose devices. Once audio was completely digitized, MP3 players moved over to cellphones and all-in-one devices like the iPod Touch. It’s only a matter of time before the same thing happens to book and e-readers.
color, e-paper, mirasol, qualcomm, spotlight
Other than color what would be the killer feature for a Kindle 3? Other than touch or flexibility I can’t think of one. I would not be surprised if Amazon waited until the second half of 2010 and released a color eReader…
would these displays be flexible ? as they contain a layer of glass substrate. what could be the aproximate cost of these displays ?
If they have glass then no, they would not be flexible, but as shown recently by LG, you can have a foil backed display. That is the problem with most that they have to be glass backed - the E-Ink film is flexible, but most devices are glass backed so they are not flexible.
what would be the cheapest and most widely usable color/non color epaper display module ?
This is very cool. One thing I missed about the old-school cell phone I had in days of yore was that it had a black and white LCD that displayed a clock all the time. But when all these devices went to color, back-lit LCDs, it simply wasn’t possible to do something like that given battery limitations.
The barrier for books isn’t so much the reading experience (although, for non-linear academic-type reading it definitely has a ways to go) as it is the inability for consumers to easily digitize physical books or get ANY book in digital format.
All other forms of media - comics, music, TV, DVD, photos, etc. is either captured digitally by a consumer product (digital cameras, flatbed scanners, DVRs) or converted to a digital format EASILY. Not books. Even with a perfect reader, ebooks have a ways to go as well…