July 3, 2009

Bridestone decides to put the rubber on the road in eReaders

Tech-On, one of my favourite Asian Tech Blog brings us the news that

Bridgestone Makes Full-scale Entry Into E-paper Business

and is to release a new updated version of it's QRLP (Quick Response Liquid Powder) ePaper displays to the world, with at least one of them being an A4 sized display.

The screen refresh time of 0.8 seconds is down from their previous times, but that's still a bit on the slow side.

They don't specify this in the article but that is I suspect the time specified is that needed to refresh the entire display. That distinction is relevent here as (at least previously) Bridgestone uses a passive addressing method that requires a certain amoutn of time to switch each pixel/line into a new bi-stable state and then move on.

So, switching every pixel into a (potentially) new state on a reasonable resolution A4 device in 0.8s is not bad going....but needs more.....keep working on it guys.

But, parts of the display (a pixel minimum?) can be incrementally updated or changed, enabling update rates (for a few pixels each time) to be pretty fast - hence enabling the pen input functionality the article describes.

So, don't think that you will have a 0.8second lag of the display pixels behind your "digital ink" that you draw with your stylus! That would be totally unusable.

Despite the possibilities that their passive addressing scheme should open up for them it's still on glass, so heavier and fragile than a plastic substrate would be.

Last, but not least they mention color. But, alas, this will be with an RGBW filter on top of the reflective Black&White display, so expect dull, washed-out, color.... :-(

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