E-Paper

When I was in high school, we had to use Palm pilots. They were cool for about five minutes but then they got to be annoying. They had that electronic hum and my eyes hurt when trying to read the tiny screen. So when I heard about possibly the coolest thing ever to happen to digital displays, I was excited.

It's called E-Paper and I'm sure you have heard of it. It mimics paper like no other digital display that came before it could. It's flexible, not backlit and doesn't need sustained electricity to display. You can even read it at an angle. What more could you want?

E-Paper is made from sheets of plastic rather than glass. Pixels are made from tiny plastic microspheres full of black oil and titanium dioxide. The microspheres are suspended in a layer of liquid polymer. Because of the titanium dioxide, which is white, the microspheres have a slight dipole which allows the diplay to change. by changing the polarity of the current in that spot, the color (black or white) changes as well. To make color paper, each pixel is divided into triads of each color magenta, cyan and yellow. It makes colors by using different combinations of those primary colors.

I think that this technology is really awesome, especially for those of us who are going blind from staring at computer screens all day while we do our homework. If it wasn't so expensive, I would go out and buy a book on e-Paper.

Thanks Wikipedia for the content and Bookeen for the picture.