14 DAY TRIAL // After the acclaimed i-ink display developed by Hitachi and Bridgestone, LG Phillips rolled out another breakthrough product for the e-book segment, the 14.1-inch WXGA flexible E-book, at the International Meeting on Information Display 2006, informs Gizmodo.
The great thing about this big display is that it is totally flexible, and the developers can bend it however they wish, without breaking it or destroying the colors. LG's E-paper also comes with an unbelievable response time of no less than 300ms, but is not able to showcase any video footage.
Hitachi and Bridgestone's development, though, the first i-ink display named Albirey features 4,096 colors, a 13.1-inches diagonal and a great resolution of 512 x 384 pixels. However, because it is only a prototype, the Albirey could benefit from other enhanced features when it will hit the market or when it will be adopted by the e-reader devices manufacturers.
But the two companies are not the only ones to focus on how they could impress the e-reader market fans, as also Seiko Epson Corp. (Epson) recently launched an A6-size (7.1 inches diagonal) electronic paper using a plastic substrate. The development was officially announced on June 9 at the Society for Information Display (SID) international symposium held in San Francisco.
As it comes embedded with Epson's original SUFTLA1 technology, the new electronic paper reaches the world's highest Quad-XGA resolution of 1536 x 2048 pixels, higher than Hitachi's Albirey, and its sizes can also be increased without any problem.
In order to create this prototype, Epson has amassed a range of proprietary technologies including low temperature polysilicon thin film transistors (LTPS-TFT) and SUFTLA (Surface Free Technology by Laser Ablation /Annealing), which enables the transfer of TFT circuits to flexible substrates.