No single technological component has had more of an impact on computing than LCD displays.
You can argue that advanced processor designs have moved computing along, or that increased hard drive capacities have made it more practical, or even that the dude in the Dell commercial has helped in the extreme to popularize computers. However, think about this: Because of LCD displays, computers have been cut free of their anchors and can roam the world in your briefcase. As well, LCD flat panels are single-handedly pushing CRTs into oblivion--a welcome situation for environmentalists and ophthalmologists. And now E Ink is demonstrating a new product that may help make many current LCD applications obsolete over the course of the next decade.
E Ink's product is not an LCD, or Liquid Crystal Display. The product is made from a proprietary material that's actually quite simple on a conceptual level. Take a tiny microcapsule, about the diameter of a human hair, and add a positively charged white particle and a negatively charged black particle to it. Now comes the easy part: Because like charges repel each other and opposites attract, if you apply a positive charge to the microcapsule the black particle is attracted to it; apply a negative charge and up comes the white particle.
Sure that's only one dot--or might we call it a pixel--but imagine putting a whole bunch of these microcapsules (pixels) together into a grid, and suddenly you have a display panel. That's what E Ink has done with its first iteration: A 1.6-inch diagonal panel with a 100x80 pixel resolution. Phase II calls for a larger, 240x160, display with 96 pixels per inch that is destined for use in PDAs among other things.
The astute among you will have a question at this point: "PDA's already have LCD screens so why bother?" The average LCD display ranges from 2mm to 4mm in thickness. E Ink puts its microcapsules on a steel foil backplane to produce a display that's only 0.3mm thick. That's thinner than a credit card and, according to E Ink, about 90 percent lighter than an equivalent conventional LCD panel.
On the small end of the spectrum, E Ink's product could make a Dick Tracy-style wristwatch PDA a practicality. Why is that a big deal? One of the biggest problems with PDAs is that they're easy to lose. It's difficult to lose your PDA if it's strapped to your wrist. The screen is also flexible, meaning that it will be more difficult to break. (Just ask the folk at gethightech.com. They're doing a booming business in replacement PDA LCD displays.)
Go one step further: Make a larger display panel with this technology and it will dovetail nicely with portable computers as well. And because the panel works at what E Ink describes as "ultra low-power" levels, battery makers can breathe a sigh of relief and wrest even longer run-times for batteries.
Of course, it's still just a black and white display. Two things come to mind immediately: With games and entertainment software rapidly becoming the predominant life form on PDAs, perhaps the lack of color is not a bad thing for corporations. It should also occur to you that televisions were once black and white and all it took was the development of a red-green-blue pixel trio for Uncle Milty to jump into the world of color. That's not really such a difficult transition for E Ink to make.
Will any of this come to pass? E Ink has an impressive list of international investors and strategic partners, each of which maintains a lust for new technology, and none of them is averse to making money. The first E Ink consumer product will come alive in 2004 or 2005. If I were a betting man, I'd give things another 3 years to get really practical. Mark it down in your Crimestoppers' textbook. Over and out.
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