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Thread: Paper Thin Electronic screens

  1. #1
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    Paper Thin Electronic screens

    Paper Thin Electronic Screens

    OVER the years, the screens on laptops, televisions, mobile phones and so on have got sharper, wider and thinner. They are about to get thinner still, but with a new twist. By using flexible components, these screens will also become bendy. Some could even be rolled up and slipped into your pocket like a piece of electronic paper. These thin sheets of plastic will be able to display words and images; a book, perhaps, or a newspaper or a magazine. And now it looks as if they might be mass produced in much the same way as the printed paper they are emulating. The crucial technological development happened recently at the Flexible Display Centre at Arizona State University. Using a novel lithographic process invented by HP Labs, the research arm of Hewlett-Packard, and an electronic ink produced by E Ink, a company spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the centre’s researchers succeeded in printing flexible displays onto long rolls of a special plastic film made by DuPont. To make individual screens, the printed film is sliced up into sections rather as folios for magazines or newspapers would be cut from a printed web of paper.

  2. #2
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    Re: Paper Thin Electronic screens

    The resulting “electrophoretic” screens are lightweight and consume only a fraction of the power of a typical liquid-crystal display (LCD). Their first use is likely to be by the American army, which helped pay for the project. It hopes its soldiers will be able to use the screens as electronic maps and to receive information. The idea is that the flexible screens will replace some of the bulky devices that soldiers now have to lug around. If that works, the retail market beckons. The first trials of consumer versions could begin within a few years.


    Although printing flexible screens in this way will help to make them affordable, they still have a long way to go to catch LCDs. For that, two things need to happen. One is that the displays must turn from black-and-white to colour. The other is that they must be able to refresh their images at a rate fast enough to show moving pictures. Researchers at the Flexible Display Centre and elsewhere are working on ways to do that, and there seems little doubt it will happen. Yet even with their present limitations, flexible screens have some important advantages over LCDs.

  3. #3
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    Re: Paper Thin Electronic screens

    For a start, LCDs are difficult and costly to make. Most are produced in huge, ultra-clean factories using batch processes similar to those for making silicon chips. Layers of material which work as filters, electrodes, transistors and the liquid crystal itself are deposited onto a thin glass plate to form a sandwich that is covered with another pane of glass. At each stage the layers are etched to make electrical connections. This is a fractious, finicky process and tiny defects in the materials, or failures in the alignment of the different layers, can result in 20% or more of a batch being scrapped. Moreover, the glass means LCDs are heavy and easily broken, as anyone who has dropped a laptop knows to his cost. Another drawback is that LCDs consume a lot of power because they are lit from behind. An LCD works because, when an electrical field is applied to the transparent liquid crystals that form each picture element, or “pixel”, within the screen, the crystals become opaque. Red, green and blue filters then allow different colours to show within each pixel, but light has to be shone through them for this to happen. That, plus the fact that the liquid crystals will revert to transparency if the power goes off, mean an LCD eats batteries. It also means that the image can be hard to see in bright sunlight.

  4. #4
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    Re: Paper Thin Electronic screens

    Electrophoretic displays work in a different way, using a form of electronic ink that has been under development since the 1970s. E Ink’s version employs tiny capsules filled with a clear fluid containing positively charged white particles and negatively charged black ones. The capsules are arranged as pixels and electric charges applied to each pixel pull either the black or the white particles towards the top of the capsule (and the opposite colour to the bottom). Unlike an LCD’s, this image does not require backlighting. Instead, the user relies on reflected light, as he would if he were reading a sheet of printed paper. Moreover, once the particles in the capsules have settled down they stay put. That means the image remains on the screen without drawing power. A further dose of electricity is required only when the image changes; when a user “turns” to the next page, for example. Not only does this mean that electrophoretic displays are cheaper to run, the lack of constant refreshment makes them more comfortable to read—as comfortable, it is claimed, as printed paper.

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