The use of electronic paper, also known as e-paper, is increasing because of its green benefits and minimal energy consumption, says Gartner.
E-paper is a display medium intended to mimic the appearance of ordinary ink on paper while being rewritable. It has the potential to store and display thousands of digital pages and images in a compact and portable design.
The research firm points out that despite poor colour and refresh rate characteristics, e-paper has benefits over other display media and will positively impact the traditional paper market, retail display sector, consumer markets and the office environment in years to come.
“E-paper does have has some barriers to overcome before gaining credibility with the mainstream market,” says Jim Tully, Gartner vice-president and analyst. “However, it is generating a great deal of interest and we expect adoption to increase steadily over the next few years as the technology improves.”
Evolving technology
According to Tully, e-paper is evolving by embracing new technologies, with touch-screen, wireless connection and rewritable colour support capability being incorporated into devices using e-paper. Multiple e-book readers are also becoming popular and applications of the technology are expanding beyond e-book readers to include device displays for phones, clocks and watches.
The biggest hurdle facing e-paper adoption, notes Gartner, is the fact that e-paper content is limited and the colour displays are poor quality. E-paper is also weak in its handling of moving images and a compromise must be found between the requirements for full-motion video and low power consumption.
Gartner says the cost of e-paper displays will need to fall further if it is to act as a viable mainstream alternative to print media. This is particularly important because the falling costs and increasing quality of alternative technologies, such as organic light-emitting diodes and LCD, could moderate the growth potential of e-paper.
Some examples of e-paper technologies include electrophoretic e-paper, used in commercial devices such as the Amazon Kindle, Sony Librie reader and Plastic Logic's e-newspaper.
Another example is 'electronic liquid powder' from Bridgestone, which uses a similar electrophoretic approach but with the particles suspended in air instead of fluid. There's also Cholesteric LCD, as seen in Fujitsu's new e-book reader, FLEPia, which uses multiple layers of different colour LCD crystals to generate the image.
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