E Ink Flaunts Color E-Paper That’s Nearly As Vivid As LCDs
Image via E Ink
Imagine walking by a restaurant, when the blinking messaging on its menu stand catches your eye. As you lower your gaze, you notice a small line of text reading, “This is a low-power sign.”
These are some of the capabilities boasted in E Ink’s newest color e-paper, ‘Spectra 6’, designed to make in-store advertising, indoor signs, or alternatives for paper signage stand out in a way that’s unprecedented for electronic paper. As described by Gizmodo, the new standard has a level of saturation and vividness that comes close to LCD screens.
To be clear, Spectra 6 won’t be built into handheld devices like e-book readers anytime soon, and is more for commercial applications. What it’s great for is static advertising that needs updating from time to time, without the need to reprint anything.
Spectra 6 touts resolution of up to 200 pixels per inch, depending on the size of the display, and a typical contrast ratio of 30:1.
Notably, customers who use Spectra 6 can also opt to give their posters a “partial image flashing effect,” called ‘E Ink Sparkle’, to integrate motion into graphics without sapping too much energy.
Johnson Lee, E Ink’s CEO, says the new technology “will bring the power of full, vivid color to advertising installations, while maintaining E Ink’s signature low-power features that allow our customers to meet their sustainability goals.”
According to the company, 10-inch E Ink paper displays have shown to be about 12,000 times more efficient than LCD screens and 60,000 times more efficient than regular paper in terms of kilograms of CO2 emissions, allowing retailers and advertisers to inch closer to their sustainability goals without compromise.
The E Ink Spectra 6 panels, arriving in a variety of sizes to offer creative control, will first be demonstrated at trade shows in Taiwan and Los Angeles in the next couple of months, ahead of their official launch next year.
[via Gizmodo and Display Daily, images via E Ink]
