Sony color electrophoretic display is flexible and, due to precision alignment, brighter
Kanagawa, Japan--Engineers at Sony Corporation have, through precision alignment, created a flexible color e-paper display with a color gamut that is better than similar attempts at color reflective e-paper displays. The 13.3 in. display was unveiled at the 49th SID International Symposium, Seminar & Exhibition (SID 2011).
The display is based on E Ink Corp.'s (Cambridge, MA) electrophoretic-display technology--a black-and-white type of display that is well-known as a result of its use in Amazon's Kindle e-book reader. The Sony display derives its color from a color-TFT plate containing green, red, blue, and white subpixels placed on top of the E Ink display. The Sony display has an NTSC color gamut of 13% and a reflectance of 10%; while these figures may sound mediocre, other previous attempts to create practical electrophoretic color e-reader displays have had color gamuts and reflectances that were even lower.
According to Sony, these relatively high figures were achieved by aligning the TFT plate to the E Ink display to a 0.35-micron resolution, allowing the black inter-pixel divisions to be narrowed, which in turn made the pixels and colors brighter.
The flexible display, which is fabricated on a plastic substrate, is 150 microns thick and weighs 20 g.
Source: Tech-On
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John Wallace | Senior Technical Editor (1998-2022)
John Wallace was with Laser Focus World for nearly 25 years, retiring in late June 2022. He obtained a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and physics at Rutgers University and a master's in optical engineering at the University of Rochester. Before becoming an editor, John worked as an engineer at RCA, Exxon, Eastman Kodak, and GCA Corporation.