This was the last hardware they would ever develop themselves and instead pivoted to make panels for other companies. They closed down US operations in Mountain View in In Plastic Logic split into two companies, the main Plastic Logic brand was relocated to their production facility in Dresden Germany and the other company, FlexEnable focuses on research and is based in Cambridge.
So what are Plastic Logic screens all about? This means that a flexible backplane can now be coupled with a flexible display medium, such as flexible OLED or flexible EPD , to create a fully flexible display. One of the downsides of the Plastic Logic brand is that they do not have any flagship products that employ their technology that can be used for marketing material, or to generate media buzz.
Likely their most successful venture was from L! It only raised a paltry k US over the a period of about a year and missed almost all of their shipping dates. Some of the other little things they have done is make reusable delegate badges and a screen for the LandRover team for a boat UK boat race. Another use case benefiting from the improved display density would be applications where accurate lines and measurements are critical, such as ePaper rulers, portable mapping or CAD drawings.
LG first entered the flexible e-paper arena in and developed a screen that was crafted from a flexible plastic substrate, the display measuring 0. LG also has made it fairly durable with it being able to easily withstand dropping it from up to six feet.
The battery life is also fairly amazing with two or three months of usage. Russian based e-reader company Wexler was the only company to adopt the LG technology into their Flex One. The screen was six inches and bended in 40 degree angles. The e-Paper was a bit different from traditional e-Ink, but provided the same overall experience. It was very easy on the eyes and did not reflect direct sunlight. The screen is crafted from a flexible plastic substrate, the display measuring 0.
They realized the e-reader market was quickly becoming dominated by E-Ink and decided to enter the smartphone market using a flexible OLED design, since they had years of experience on it. They are now one of the biggest players in this market segment. Mirasol spent almost four years developing its screen technology, which was an alternative to Pixel QI and Color e-Paper. What went wrong with the screens? Mirasol screen technology was developed to draw less power and be viewable in direct sunlight.
Qualcomm had grand ambitions to usher in a new era of smartphone, tablet, and e-reader screens. The company spent almost 1 billion dollars on a dedicated factory in Taiwan to produce the screens. All of these devices ran on the Google Android operating system and were very unique in the marketplace. Qualcomm was estimated to have lost close to million dollars in due to the Mirasol fiasco.
The company announced a few months ago that it was abandoning the technology in its current form. So what went wrong? Mirasol screens were only able to produce 60 Hz video, which quickly drained the battery. When we reviewed the Kyobo e-reader, we noticed that colors looked washed out.
Liquavista was founded in as a spin-off from Philips. It was purchased by Samsung in and then sold to Amazon a few years later. Liquavista is based on Electrowetting, which modifies the surface tension of liquids on a solid surface by using a voltage.
When a voltage is applied, the wetting properties of a hydrophobic surface can be modified and the surface becomes increasingly more hydrophilic more wettable. With Electrowetting displays, the modification of the surface tension is used to obtain a simple optical switch by contracting a colored oil film through applying a voltage.
Without a voltage, the colored oil forms a continuous layer and the color is visible to the consumer. When a voltage applied, the oil is displaced and pixel becomes transparent. When various pixels are independently activated, the display can show any kind of content including text, images and video. Thanks to the high switching speed of electrowetting and its applicability to small pixel dimensions, electrowetting displays support a fluent user interface and are ideally suited for information displays showing animated and video content.
The essence of Electrowetting technology is that it is highly scalable. From a manufacturing point of view, it is easy for existing LCD plants to incorporate Electrowetting into its process. It is basically the same entire procedure to create the screen, except instead of using Liquid Crystals they use a different fill. One of the huge benefits of Liquavista technology is that it is flexible, which means it is much more robust.
If you have ever dropped an iPad or an iPhone, you know the LCD glass breaks rather easily because it is extremely inflexible. She hashed out ideas over the dinner table with her husband, John Ryan, a telecom consultant, and when he became more interested in her project than his own job, she hired him as chief operating officer.
After securing venture-capital funding, she rented offices across the street from YouTube in San Bruno, California, set up a lab for playing with liquid crystals in the office kitchen, and began experimenting with ways to get more light through the screen. By the time she and her growing team finished, they had changed nearly every layer inside the LCD, so that all that remains from the original OLPC screen, Jepsen says, is the basic idea of the black-and-white mode. She logs nearly , air miles a year in service of these missions.
Which one? Which one has even shipped 1, products within a year of mass production? OK, ? This is when Jepsen is most content. Those days are actually some of my happiest. The speed is fast, and the insights gained are tremendous. Part of her ability to sustain that nonstop rhythm may come from the quiet force—the qi? But part of it, serendipitously, comes from her illness. The frantic pace is necessary because, as young as the e-reader industry may be, trying to break into it is like trying to launch a new operating system after Microsoft.
A zap of current sends oppositely charged black or white particles to the surface, forming images that stay put until zapped again. That means the screen draws power only when changing pages—ideal for a book, with which you can stare at a sheet for minutes. But again: no color, and no video. Soon Jepsen and her competitors will take E Ink and one another on.
At least one other manufacturer says that it will ship an e-reader screen this year with color and video and that, unlike 3Qi, the screen will remain full-color in low-power mode. Made by Qualcomm, the Mirasol display creates pixels with tiny moving metal pieces, just a few micro-meters across, that move up and down to reflect light of different wavelengths and colors. There are more contenders in the pipeline, too, all boasting some variation of color, video or both.
A Philips spin-off called Liquavista plans to produce low-power, video-playing black-and-white screens at the end of this year, and full-color versions by the end of next. They rely on a technique called electrowetting, which replaces the liquid crystals inside an LCD with drops of oil in water that require less electricity to move. The old guard E Ink plans to release a color version late this year, and the company has displays running videos in its labs that it hopes to produce in a few years.
The 3Qi screen, as a tweak on existing LCDs, is manufactured on the same machinery and from most of the same materials as the 1. As a result, a netbook with a inch Pixel Qi screen should cost little more than one with an ordinary LCD. Whether 3Qi succeeds will ultimately depend on the subjective experience of millions of sets of eyes. The circumstances in which people feel comfortable reading turn out to be somewhat unpredictable.
Its pigments sit at the surface and scatter light in many directions, just as paper does. But it may not have to. So the Kindle-style e-reader may be a transitory gadget, a step toward super-thin tablets that support modern computing just as well as old-fashioned reading.
Pixel Qi has partnered with a German company to offer its inch displays that can be hooked up to another device using USB. The secondary display could come in handy for extra real estate or to show someone else screen information, says Pixel Qi.
Since March, Pixel Qi has been offering a But the displays were compatible with only two models of netbooks--the Samsung N and Lenovo S
0コメント