Paperless Paper

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?