E-Ink

We're still a week away from Barnes & Noble's big e-reader announcement, but we've know they've had something cooking for a while now. And today, our pals at Gizmodo hit the mother load: leaked shots of a forthcoming dual-screen device that is three-quarters e-ink and one-quarter (wait for it) color multitouch.

Rotation of microspheres in a vertically changing external magnetic field. The color is switched between on (blue) and off states. Video courtesy Yin lab, UC Riverside

In the future, signs will be instantly rewritable and walls will change color at the flip of a switch. A research team at the University of California at Riverside has created a new magnetically activated, instantly and reversibly color-changing material with potentially groundbreaking applications. The technology is based on that used by colorful birds, beetles, and butterflies: instead of static pigments, the material employs "structural color," which depends on the interference effects of light.

E-ink displays are already common in devices like the Kindle, but HP has taken the tech a step further with thin, printable color displays called eSkins. Printed in massive rolls, eSkins can then be cut and used as a thin coating on, say, your laptop's lid, turning the surface into an active, color display.

As we mentioned in our earlier post on the Esquire E-Ink cover, we have uncovered some additional details regarding the operation of this interesting E-Ink evaluation board set. There are two eight-stage shift-and-store bus registers (HEF4094BT) that drive each of the two E-Ink panels. The PIC12F629 controls the state of the HEF4094BT outputs: positive voltage, negative voltage, high impedance off, and shift register stage.

Not since the November 3, 1948 Chicago Tribune erroneously blared “Dewey Defeats Truman” has a publication’s cover caused such a visceral stir among its readership. Attempting to make a solid technological statement, the October 2008 cover of Esquire magazine featured two embedded 2 ¼- x 5-inch E-Ink panels.