Electronic Newspaper Still Years Away

Posted on November 8, 2005

What has been going on with the development of electronic paper. A company named E-ink has been working on a technology that prints electronic ink onto a sheet of plastic film that is laminated to a layer of circuitry.

Electronic ink is a proprietary material that is processed into a film for integration into electronic displays. Although revolutionary in concept, electronic ink is a straightforward fusion of chemistry, physics and electronics to create this new material. The principal components of electronic ink are millions of tiny microcapsules, about the diameter of a human hair. In one incarnation, each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a negative electric field is applied, the white particles move to the top of the microcapsule where they become visible to the user. This makes the surface appear white at that spot. At the same time, an opposite electric field pulls the black particles to the bottom of the microcapsules where they are hidden. By reversing this process, the black particles appear at the top of the capsule, which now makes the surface appear dark at that spot.

Some digital watches and rollable displays are here but newspapers that update automatically are still years away. The E-Ink website has a few prototypes of watches and signs that automatically update themselves. But what we would really like to see come to reality is the automatically updating newspaper.

TECH