Dr Paul Apen is from E Ink and he talked about the use of reflective displays in digital signage. LCD and LED are able to provide bright displays, however in some applications, a bright display is not necessarily the right solution. It can be hard to compete with the sun and energy consumption may be an issue. Environmental issues such as light pollution and carbon footprint can mean special challenges for bright displays.
Epaper has applications where power is an issue. Click for higher resolution
E Paper displays can be good for outdoor readability and unique form factors as well as ‘off-grid’ installations, where power is not available. E Paper can compliment environments – for example a meeting room door sign is an ideal application, where a ‘paper’ look might be quite appropriate.
Looking at costs, these need to be broken into installation and purchase costs and, separately, operational costs. Power, or just getting power to a particular place may cost quite a lot. E Ink believes that transportation, conference rooms, public spaces and retail. Apen then looked at unique applications that can exploit ePaper and he showed a video of non-traditional and architectural installations and displays.
Analyst Comment
The prototype E Ink colour display was one of the highlights of SID for me. The device uses no colour filters, and although it is slow and two years from production, it has dramatically better colour saturation than previous colour E Ink displays. However, Apen didn’t talk about it at the conference! (BR)
