E Ink Technology Adds Yellow
June 3, 2015, SID, San Jose, E Ink, noted for their monochromatic electrophoretic e-paper products has added a yellow color to its Spectra line of products. Now they can produce displays that show black, white, and either red or yellow.
The primary focus for the new technology is for retail shelf displays. The are a part of an overall system that allows retailers to dynamically price items and highlight the special pricing with color displays at the shelf. A systems integrator will package the needed hardware, software, and displays to merge analytics and the pricing database with the price displays. Most users will have a wireless interface to the shelf tags, which will be individually addressable.
Due to the extremely low power needed by the displays, just some energy to change the display and none to hold the image, a standard coin battery can power the displays and associated electronics for years. The changing market factors and dynamic pricing allow physical stores to be as agile as the e-merchants, where before the brick and mortar facilities were just showrooms for the e-tailers. There is growing interest and adoption of electronic shelf tags with color mainly in Asia and Europe, while the US is still in the proof of concept stages.
The underlying technology changes the original black and white spheres to a three-color sphere. The new materials are selected to have a different mobility than the black or white and the colored section is selected with an intermediate voltage from the black selection or white selection voltages. The company says that they can do more than 3-colors but new colors are a complex mixture of chemistry and physics to get proper actuation. The electronics for a multi-colored sphere have to be more precise to allow for partial rotation of the sphere to get the other color(s).
The e-paper technologies offer very low power operation and good angle of view, as good as real paper. The passive displays are sunlight readable, but have poor performance in the dark. Update speeds are fairly slow, but adequate for shelf displays and e-readers. On-screen resolution is equivalent to paper for accurate barcode or detailed QR identification. The company supports development with design kits for the hardware and software. Contact them at www.eink.com
Another product called Prism uses the same technologies for architectural use. The larger flexible panels can be used to make color walls and dynamic color decorations. See http://www.eink.com/prism/ for some examples. The materials can be customized for various color combinations as the pigments are determined at the time of manufacture. Other products are in wearables and digital signage. Some gasoline stations are looking into pricing signs in the technology. The signs will require active heating and cooling to handle the temperature extremes as the technology only works in a limited temperature range.
The company is expecting continued growth in all markets. Their primary market is in e-reader displays with the shelf tags following closely. Other markets include wearables and signage. For the wearable markets, they have developed a display intended for the back-side of a phone to provide a slow, second screen. The additional screens will be available to OEMs and to aftermarket developers. Another new product type is a glucose meter from Abbott called “Freestyle” that provides greater accuracy and more detailed display information.
