Fuji Xerox Exhibits Color Electronic Paper w/ Optical Writing System

I've had some issues with porting over a few posts from before, so excuse these late additions of older posts. This should be the last one, and is from an original post from December 14th 2007.

TechOn blog in Japan reports: Fuji Xerox have unveiled a prototype of a color electronic paper using an optical writing system [Editor: Is that an external "printer" to form the image, without using a backplane on the device?] at the International Display Workshops (IDW) in Japan (Dec 5 to 7, 2007).

See high-res image here

Its high brightness, high contrast, color strength and rewriting speed met with a positive public response. And a large crowd of people were incessantly flooding in to take a look at the prototype.

[Editor: This photo is interesting as it shows the ePaper beside a laptop LCD display at roughly the same illumination and viewing angle...]

See high-res image here

The electronic paper is made with reflective color liquid crystals that were developed by utilizing the selective reflection effect of cholesteric liquid crystals [Editor: Further use of the Kent technology by Fuji and subsidiaries maybe?]. Three layers (red, green and blue) are laminated to enable full-color display.

The display layers have a PDLC (polymer-dispersed liquid crystal) structure that disperses and retains cholesteric liquid crystals in a matrix of gelatin. Each of the three display layers is controlled by the optical writing system with organic photoreceptors [Editor: what does that mean?].

The integrating sphere reflectance (white) of the electronic paper is 27.4% [Editor: Not great, with eInk currently around 43% with VizPlez I think], and the contrast ratio (the ratio of white color reflectance to black color reflectance) is 6.4. The display is A6 size (105 × 148mm). It is as thin as 0.4mm and can be bent. It weighs 10.4g. For the future, the company plans to develop an A4 size display.

Fuji Xerox also prototyped an A5 size optical writing device that can write on two A6 size electronic papers. The device is equipped with an LCD panel for laptop computers and green and red LED arrays.

In a video shown of the electronic paper being written, it looked like that the rewriting time is very short and less than one second. The display has a memory function [Editor: i.e. it's bi-stable and doesn;t require power to maintain an image] and can be handled like paper [Editor: OK, plastic!] after being removed from the writing device.