Product Freeze
It’s been a while since we updated.
We have been feverishly working on designing our first screen product We will be sampling our 10″ screens this spring and plan to be in high volume mass production this summer. These screens have an epaper state that rivals the best epaper on the market today. What’s different: unlike the other epaper products where one must wait a second or so to change the screen - we provide video rate refresh. Also, while we have a high resolution paper-white black and white, we also provide, in the same screen fully saturated color fidelity - the same as a standard laptop screen - same color, contrast resolution, field of view etc. Our screens consumer 25%-50% of the power of a regular notebook screen in their power savings modes and will be in available at comparable price points and volumes to standard LCD screens this summer. In addition, by integrating the screen with the electronics driving the screen a 5-fold increase in battery life between charges can be achieved.
This sounds great.
Is this the screen that OLPC are planning to use for there XO2? Are you just a component supplier for them or is there a closer link?
Have you any idea if anybody else will be producing an XO1 clone?
Yours
Joe R
This is great news. I’m really looking forward to the products this tech will make possible. You’ve helped change the world with the XO and now you are pushing the boundaries of the display industry!
I’ve got a Sony PRS-500 myself, and I’m rather disappointed by the slow refresh rate and paltry screen size.
I thought Plastic Logic’s product was going to be revolutionary but I think you’ve given them run for their money and I can’t wait!
If you’ve got a paper white screen as white/bright as a Mac screen, then I will have died and gone to heaven. I can’t read ordinary books because the white-really-its-cream colored paper puts me to sleep after three pages. I can read a screen for 22 hours no problem.
I dont whether it’s a factor of my weird astigmatism (11PM-5 PM angle) or something else that causes this, but it’s been a problem since childhood and why I find the Kindle/iRex/Sony grey-scale readers unsatisfactory: they’re not bright enough, and therefore the contrast suffers and so do my eyes.
I trust that my signing up for this site produces an email notice of your first product release.
Janie:
I want to comment on your reply as you and I are 100000% in agreement about our experiences using current eink displays. I too have a huge issue reading on them under normal lighting conditions (as opposed to outside in direct sunlight where they are actually excellent.) I find on current day eink I quickly lose concentration. I find my mind wandering and don’t remember what I just read. I have held a suspicion it could very well be because my brain spends more time trying to differentiate the text from the background than it does with absorbing the content.
I also was hoping the upcoming Plastic Logic display “might” offer a brighter white background. Now after looking into the Pixel Qi display a bit more, I am very hopeful that it might be possible to find a device that does more than let me read books and has a “book mode” which does give me the ability for recreational reading that I love so much. A netbook-convertible (converts into a tablet) type device would be the ideal middle ground between the over priced ebook readers we have today and the very affordable netbooks out there. In addition the netbook with this display would be far more feature rich and less restrictive in terms of software/drm protected books that could be used for reading.
I could even envision adding a smaller 6″ reading device for outside that uses the Plastic Logic display to complement a device using the Pixel Qi display.
I am so looking forward to the product’s unveiling in a the next few months. Maybe a new device, with my name on it, will end up under the tree this year…
It’s pretty cool what you’ve developed here. I’m starting med school pretty soon and really don’t like the idea of lugging around huge books and binders everywhere. I’ve been glancing over a number of e-readers for a while now, but all of them seem to have two glaring issues that turn my tongue sour.
First off, all of them are monochrome weak-contrast low-res low-speed small size e-readers that make me go, ‘bleh’. I’m not crazy about WiFi, nor limited extension compatibility, but when I read my favorite (yet heavy) book (Biology 5th edition, by Campbell Reece), I love looking at the colorful, yet detailed pictures that I can keep photographically in my head for weeks on end.
Second off, (with the limited exception of the iRex iLiad) most of these e-readers lack touch functionality, meaning… I’m a note taker, all students are note takers, and if I can take notes in class on a single device (rather than killing a lifetime amount of trees), it would make me (as well as a lot of others) really happy. And, I don’t mean the half hearted iRex attempted kind either, I mean, a touch e-reader that can do OCR. That would truly be amazing, and would complete the e-reader (or dare I say e-writer
experience. You could really have something that could demolish a lot of wasteful industries and take over entire markets.
Hopefully, you’ll have a product that can let these issues lay to rest, and to say a bit more, you’dd probably have me standing first in line for one of these revolutionary new devices.
Best of Luck to you and your team.
-RRA
Hi Mary Lou, will there be a “screen update” for the XO? … it would be nice if we could purchase an “upgrade” for our XO’s, maybe a G1G1 for screens?