E Ink Demos an E-Paper Using Snowboard, Among Other Things

Even though it said it wasn't going to deliver any new e-reader screen this year, E Ink's booth at SID Display Week was, nonetheless, packed full of concepts and prototypes that some OEMs are said to be already considering.

This past week definitely saw the appearance of quite a few ambitious inventions, not the least of which was a certain Sharp screen with a resolution 16 times better than Full HD.

Still, some news may have turned out to be a bit disappointing, like E Ink saying it was not going to provide any new e-reader screen this year.

Apparently, that didn't mean that the company wouldn't be preparing products for a bunch of different other things.

In fact, the outfit has a whole bunch of things in the making, according to a press release and the folks over at Engadget, who got a close look at the many things on show.

For instance, there was a prototype sheet music reader, an E Ink-enabled snowboard, oddly enough (reports altitude, temperature direction etc.), as well as thermostats and radios.

Still, the so-called star (if one were to not count the novelty of the idea of an E-paper snowboard at least) was the 300ppi 9.7-inch panel developed by Epson.

We already covered the release of that particular solution (whose actual resolution is of 2,400 x 1,650 pixels) in an article here.

Unfortunately, while OEMs are definitely investing some of their time in examining and, perhaps, experimenting with the new inventions, they are all, still, just early models.

In other words, it will take a while, maybe months, for any commercially-available product to turn out and be constructed with either of the above, especially the Epson panel.

The Engadget team was able to shoot a video of E ink's gallery, embedded below, so that interested people can get a realistic feel of what the future could, eventually, bring.