Future displays: your flexible friend or the death of print?

Every year or so we are promised the next generation of ‘paper-like’ flexible displays, also known as e-paper, that are going to revolutionise portable computing and wipe out those boring old printed books. Finally it’s time to suspend disbelief, because it looks like something’s actually on the way.

Polymer Vision in Eindhoven, says is about to ship a real commercial product in 2008, though it originally said it would be during 2007. Polymer Vision and a Cambridge company, Plastic Logic, are both setting up factories for mass production. Things are looking quite promising. The next question is whether anyone will buy the things, because we’ve been this way before, with electronic book readers that have never really taken off, while the predicted e-paper point-of-sale displays haven’t come true so far.

“Our displays will enable electronic reader products that are as comfortable and natural to read as paper whether you’re on a beach, in a train or relaxing on the sofa at home,” predicts John Mills, chief operating officer at Plastic Logic. “Wireless connectivity will allow you to purchase and download a book or pick up the latest edition of your newspaper wherever you are and whenever you need it. The battery will last for thousands of pages so you can leave your charger at home.”

Both Polymer Vision and Plastic Logic use E Ink’s display technology (www.eink.com). This is a ‘bi-stable’ process that only needs power when the image is being changed; switch the power off and the image is fixed permanently until the next time you power up. This allows very long battery life.

The display is made up of tiny rotating spheres that are black on one side, white on the other. By changing the electrical polarity for each pixel, the spheres rotate to show black or white. They are high contrast, which makes them good for reading text, but greyscales on the commercially available products are very limited (16 levels). Unlike conventional LCD displays, E Ink works very well in bright sunlight and is also fine in normal roomlight, but can’t be backlit for use in poor light.

LG.Philips LCD, a Korean maker of flat panel displays, showed a 14.3 inch format colour flexible display incorporating E Ink technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2008. It’s the largest, highest resolution flexible colour display to date. It’s based on a new metal foil and plastic flexible substrate developed by LG.Philips LCD. This is not yet integrated into a product you can buy, but it’s certainly interesting. The format is the same as an average-sized laptop computer display. Its resolution of 1,280 x 800 pixels in 4,096 colours is quite respectable, even though it’s not up to current laptop standards.

We may not see such flexible displays on laptops and TVs for some time, because the refresh rate is far too slow for moving pictures. It’s better suited to reading documents and images that don’t need to change in real time.

A more promising ‘live image’ display technology is the LEP (light emitting polymer) type, which is basically a class of plastics that glow when you put an electric current through them. They’re just starting to be used for small thin displays for in-car entertainment and small keyring digital photo display gadgets, but TV and laptop sizes displays have been demonstrated. Unlike bi-stable displays, they need constant power for the image, so it disappears when you switch off.

ROLL-UP DISPLAY

Polymer Vision (www.polymervision.com) was originally set up by Philips and was spun off as an independent company. In 2005 it showed Readius, a working concept for a small portable data reader, with a flexible 5 inch E Ink display that rolled up into its housing when not in use. In February 2007 at the 3GSM show in Barcelona, Polymer Vision announced a joint venture with Telecom Italia to co-develop the first commercial unit to use its flexible display. Telecom Italia will sell it in Italy and Polymer Vision will handle marketing in the rest of the world.

Their ‘Cellular-Book’ is a double-clamshell device that starts out the size of a mobile phone, with covers that open left and right. The 5 inch monochrome display is inside the covers and opens out flat. It can show 320 x 240 pixels in 16 grey levels. Motion and colour are under development, says Polymer Vision.

You can’t buy Cellular-Book yet, but in December 2007 Polymer Vision said it had achieved ‘production level’ manufacture of the rollable displays in its Southampton factory.

Fancy display apart, Cellular-Book is a similar idea to current PDAs and mobiles that can download and display data. It will be able to display newspapers downloaded through Telecom Italia’s mobile phone network, as well as books loaded onto SIM cards or from PCs via a USB port. Ten days’ use between battery charges is claimed.

Plastic Logic (www.plasticlogic.com) is a British company based in Cambridge. Its flexible display is bigger than Polymer Vision’s, with 10 inches diagonal (ie about A4 page size) and 150 ppi resolution. It’s good enough for book-style text and rather high contrast images. It will be much lighter than the screens used on today’s laptops or PDAs, which use glass and need a rigid casing to protect it. “This will enable a digital reading experience that is much closer to paper than any other technology,” claims Plastic Logic.

The company has built demonstration flexible displays in low volumes over the past year or two, but last year it received financing to set up a volume production in Dresden, Germany. This will start production in 2008 with an annual capacity of one million units.

Plastic Logic predicts that demand for portable reader electronics from all manufacturers will grow to 41.6 million units by 2010. Displaybank, a Korea-based research firm specialising in the display industry, predicts that the flexible display market will grow into a £3 billion market by 2010, rising to £6 billion by 2015.

Underlying the flexible displays is the new technology of plastic electronics, printed by specialised inkjets, which are tipped to be big in future. Researcher IDTechEx forecasts that plastic electronics in general (not just displays) will be a £15 billion industry by 2015, rising to a possible £130 billion by 2025. By comparison sales of ‘conventional’ silicon chips in 2006 were already £130 m, so we’re not going to see the end of silicon for a good few decades.

evertheless people are willing to put up with far less convenient devices if they want the information enough – look at the use of mobile phones to send SMS text messages or to receive instant sports or even soap opera updates. Phonecams are widely used to capture still and movie sequences, and quality is starting to catch up with ‘proper’ consumer-level digital cameras.

The secret here is that many people carry their mobile with them constantly, and they regard the messaging and camera functions as ‘free’ or low-cost additional benefits. Polymer Vision’s joint venture with Telecom Italia and its mobile-style device makes sense.

“Even in this age of pervasive digital content, our research shows that consumers are very reluctant to read on laptops, phones and PDAs,” admits Simon Jones, vp of product development at Plastic Logic. “We still carry around enormous amounts of paper. However, people are making less room in their lives for the weight and bulk of paper and are becoming more sensitive to the environmental impact of printing to read. We believe there is a substantial unfulfilled need that Plastic Logic can meet by making digital reading a comfortable and pleasurable experience.”

BOOK READERS

All the same there’s been a bit of a backlash from software buyers who prefer a printed manual on their desk to flick through when needed. Some developers are starting to include printed manuals again – for instance Quark put one into XPress 7 in 2006, after dropping them in the previous few versions.

It will be interesting to see if that is reversed again with the introduction of the more convenient reader devices that flexible screens may allow. Amazon’s Kindle book reader, introduced late last year, is only the latest in a long line.

The first really serious attempt to get electronic readers into the mass market came in the late 1990s with the Rocket eBook, a paperback-sized device with a backlit LCD screen that you could read in bed. Rocket went through a couple of takeovers and ended up with RCA, which introduced new models called REB 1100 and 1200 (using CompactFlash memory cards), but production stopped in 2003.

Although only a marginal commercial success in the USA and scarcely seen in Europe, the Rocket and its PDA rivals did wake up book publishers to the prospect of selling their titles electronically. Less usefully, a confusing number of competing formats emerged, though PDF seems to be winning. Ironically this has benefited the printing sector more than its original target market – the same digital data can easily be adapted for on-demand digital book printing.

Sony had another go in 2006. Its Portable Reader System (PRS-500) is broadly similar to the Rocket eBook but with a rigid 6 inch E Ink bistable display and a really long battery life (www.sony.com/. It’s about the size of an A5 paperback book but only 14 mm thick and weighs 250 g. It was launched at $349 (about £170) and last year was updated slightly and renamed E-reader PRS-505.

Sony reached agreements with several major publishers to release their entire electronic catalogues for the Reader (it reads PDF and other formats), and set up an online store where users can find, purchase and download titles. The Reader stores up to 80 books internally or hundreds more using Sony Memory Stick or standard SD memory cards. So you can carry a small library around with you – handy for travellers as well as students who have to lug several textbooks with them. On the other hand business travellers and students often need laptop computers anyway, and these can do vastly more than any PDA or book reader so far.

Amazon’s Kindle is a bit more versatile than the Sony device in that books and newspapers can be purchased and downloaded from Amazon via USB from a computer or even from wireless nodes such as cafés and airports. Amazon is offering about 90,000 downloadable books already, with best-sellers priced at about £5.00. On the other hand, Kindle uses semi-proprietary file formats and is not fully compatible with PDFs.

Kindle can hold about 200 electronic books (text-only) in its standard memory (which can be expanded by SD flash cards). Amazon reckons that this means Kindle is a ‘green’ technology – you don’t need to cut down trees for all those books. However, the environmental impact of plastics and electronics is highly suspect so this argument is open to challenge.

Paper is a carbon-based renewable raw material that is biodegradable and can be recycled. Paper can also retain data in readable condition over periods of many centuries if stored in low moisture environments – it’s unlikely that digital files would survive that long unless they’re constantly copied over to new storage technologies.

A lot will depend on price – Kindle isn’t cheap, at $399 (about £200), and the Sony Book Reader is $345 (about £170) That’s a lot when ordinary printed books can be bought and read with no special equipment other than the standard eyeball. You can nip into a shop on a railway station, spend £7.50 and have a perfectly legible paperback that you can read on the train home with no gadgetry at all. Nobody is going to mug you for your paperback, but they may for a £200 reader.

Sony only sells Book Reader in the USA and Japan and apparently has no plans to bring it to Europe. Amazon’s Kindle is likewise only available in the USA at present – as initial stocks sold out on the first day, it’s unlikely to make its way across the Atlantic for some time.

So, will this be end of books as we know them, yet again? Time will tell, but I wouldn’t cancel any orders for book printing lines just yet.

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