E Ink
Researchers at Cambridge, MA-based E Ink have completed the first working prototype of an electronic ink display attached to a flexible, silicon-based thin-film transistor backplane, the sheet of electronics that controls display pixels.
The company’s ultimate goal is to produce RadioPaper, sheets of reusable e-paper containing radio frequency ID tags that download a new edition of, for example, the Wall Street Journal each morning into the same physical display.
Read all about it at Technology Review (via ia/)
- 23 Jan 02
- product, research, technology, technology review
Go back to the top of this entry ↑
Comments
i’m pretty sure nothing like that will ever make it into the mainstream. mostly because people, in general, are cheap and lazy. not necessarily in that order.
kevin on 24 Jan 02
Never? Ever? Strong words young one. But what could be better for a lazy person than not having to fetch the paper every morning?
Okay, so it might put a lot of delivery workers out of a job. You can’t make everyone happy all the time.
On the other hand, think of all the paper (trees) that would be saved!
Joshua on 24 Jan 02
true enough. but put it this way: recycling saves trees as well, but what percentage of consumers actually recycle? maybe about 50%, and that took what, 10 years?
it was only until there was a cheap, convenient way for people to recycle. emphasis on cheap. nowadays, it’s been combined with garbage pickup in suburbs. as they say in that infomercial ‘set it and forget it.’
kevin on 25 Jan 02
i don’t think it’s a question of *will* something like this become mainstream, but of *how long* it will take for it to penetrate the market. and this type of technology brings up other questions - who will be able to afford to own an e ink paper? what news agencies will be the first to publish? how will this affect the homogenization of the news? the quality of the news? will it encourage competition, or will our news be controlled by large corporations? who will control the dissemination of information?
and true, people are cheap and lazy. but we also like gadgets, and owning the latest technology makes us feel cool. look at the palm pilot - ten or twenty years ago, who’d have ever thought something like that would catch on?
Lyn on 5 Feb 02