Fujitsu Color Digital Paper Demonstrated

Being the purveyor of various display solutions that it is, Fujitsu has been quite active lately, one of its activities involving the demonstration of what is called digital paper, based on cholesteric liquid crystals.

There are many things that fulfill the task of displaying images nowadays, but there are just a few technologies that stand out through how widespread they are.

The LCD (liquid crystal display) technology is the one that has the greatest pool of adopters among both consumers and IT companies.

Still, even this solution has sub sections, so to speak, even though few of them have taken off so far.

Fujitsu is one of the companies that has been experimenting with a certain strain of liquid crystals, though its efforts haven't yielded anything more than prototypes so far.

Dubbed cholesteric liquid crystals, they are appealing in that they do not require a backlight, they do not need color filters and neither do they rely on polarizing or reflecting plates.

Apparently, Fujitsu demonstrated an 8-inch color digital paper module not too long ago, one that had a pixel density of 157 dpi and the ability to cover 20% of the NTSC color space.

In other words, it can display 4,096 colors, and while this is not that great a performance compared to monitors and HDTVs, it is quite the feat for the sort of panels utilized in e-readers and other small gadgets.

Fujitsu's prototype relied on a version of the Linux OS and supported PDF, JPEG and ePub file formats.

“This is the newest module, and the brightness, contrast and color replication range are better than anything yet,” the company reportedly stated.

“Actually there is a trade-off between writing speed and display colors, and while it is 4,096 colors and 0.7 seconds right now, if we reduce the writing speed we can make a full color display.”