3 ms·

Hold on a minute. e-paper and LCD are two very different technologies. You could possibly charge them for misleading. Is it bistable?

by sigkill 13y ago

jeroen94704 13y ago
There's this big discussion about what constitutes "e-paper". Apparently, in some circles, e-paper is any display technology that is low-power and readable in daylight. The display in a pebble is a low-power transflective LCD display manufactured by Sharp. In Sharp's product brochure, they don't use the term e-paper though. They only say the display is "paper-like".
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Wait, is this "low-power LCD" stuff seems an awful lot like what I had in my quartz crystal watch in the 90s. Sure that wasn't "smart" and didn't display raster graphics, but otherwise are we talking about fundamentally different technology?
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    Yeah, it sounds a lot like my Zire 21. Thing had great readability at any light level, because it was just plain grey high-res LCD.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      Ah yeah. I was thinking more of the "preset image"/"seven-segment" style LCDs, but that is even closer to this it seems.
- sigkill 13y ago
  Hmm I find that a bit... different to my expectations. I'd always thought that e-paper absolutely required to be bistable, like paper.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
It's a weird little thing, an LCD where each pixel has a bit of memory. This means that you can simply provide enough power to the LCD to drive the pixels and because of the built in memory it will display whatever it had been displaying, there's no need to continuously refresh the display from a buffer or any of the usual tricks of driving a display. Unlike true e-ink it won't retain its state while unpowered but it does require incredibly low power for operation (tens of microwatts). They are commercially available components: http://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/ http://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/

3 ms·

Hold on a minute. e-paper and LCD are two very different technologies. You could possibly charge them for misleading. Is it bistable?

by sigkill 13y ago

Hold on a minute. e-paper and LCD are two very different technologies. You could possibly charge them for misleading. Is it bistable?

jeroen94704 13y ago
There's this big discussion about what constitutes "e-paper". Apparently, in some circles, e-paper is any display technology that is low-power and readable in daylight. The display in a pebble is a low-power transflective LCD display manufactured by Sharp. In Sharp's product brochure, they don't use the term e-paper though. They only say the display is "paper-like".
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Wait, is this "low-power LCD" stuff seems an awful lot like what I had in my quartz crystal watch in the 90s. Sure that wasn't "smart" and didn't display raster graphics, but otherwise are we talking about fundamentally different technology?
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    Yeah, it sounds a lot like my Zire 21. Thing had great readability at any light level, because it was just plain grey high-res LCD.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      Ah yeah. I was thinking more of the "preset image"/"seven-segment" style LCDs, but that is even closer to this it seems.
- sigkill 13y ago
  Hmm I find that a bit... different to my expectations. I'd always thought that e-paper absolutely required to be bistable, like paper.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
It's a weird little thing, an LCD where each pixel has a bit of memory. This means that you can simply provide enough power to the LCD to drive the pixels and because of the built in memory it will display whatever it had been displaying, there's no need to continuously refresh the display from a buffer or any of the usual tricks of driving a display. Unlike true e-ink it won't retain its state while unpowered but it does require incredibly low power for operation (tens of microwatts). They are commercially available components: http://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/ http://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/