2008.05.23
It seems everyone is getting on this paperless band wagon these days. Only yesterday I wrote about the new A4 sized E-paper developed by Epson.
Well today folks its Wacom (made famous by their drawing tablets) in partnership with E Ink announcing they have made a pen input e-paper.
They are describing it as “the ultimate version of an interactive piece of paper” and I agree, its all very well to be able to read books or newspapers on e-paper but its the scribbles that make paper what it is. The ability to take a pen and paper and create anything you like is why we love it so much. Paper is one of the most versatile piece of kit that we have and so can’t be easily replaced.
I can’t help feeling that while we have the illusion of moving forward with this technology we are in fact taking two steps back. Is it not the goal of technology to make improvements on the past, to make more things do… well more things? At the moment it seems that when we finally hit the paperless society, instead of having one piece of e-paper that can do everything actual paper can do, we’ll have a huge range of e-papers for specific tasks.
2008.05.22
I was reading through my RSS feeds as I so often do and I came across this article which made me realise just how far we have come and how little we need to go to become a completely paperless society.
Epson have been developing electronic paper for a while now, previously producing a 7″ display, and have now shown off their A4 size piece of paperless paper at SID 2008. If just oogling the papery goodness of this isn’t enough for you then the specs are as follows: Resolution is 3104 × 4128 and has a contrast ratio of 10:1 which is supposed to replicate the look of actual paper. “The…electronic paper was developed by combining electrophoretic electronic ink of E Ink Corp and a low-temperature polycrystal Si-TFT of Seiko Epson”.
The company say they are in their “final stages” of developing the technology and are getting ready to start user-testing to develop the product for commercial use.
I can’t help wondering how long it will be before we see a Minority Report style newspaper which updates with breaking newsand display animations while still having the consistency of actual paper.
My best guess to make that work in a practicle sense would be to buy only one paper and pay a subscription to update it each day. That way you only buy one paper and people won’t litter they’re cool, new, high-tech e-paper.
It does beg the question though… with paperless paper… who needs an Epson printer anymore?