Paper or plastic?
By next year, Philips Electronics and E Ink Corp. believe the answer will be plastic – a flexible sheet of “paper” that displays electronic text and can be rolled up and slipped into your pocket.
Except for the lack of ink-stained hands, “it will look and feel just like paper,” said Darren Bischoff, senior marketing manager for Cambridge, Mass.-based E Ink.
E Ink, a private company with about 60 employees, has developed an electronic ink system consisting of thousands of tiny capsules the diameter of a human hair.
Those capsules each contain small particles, some white, some black. An electric current can separate those particles.
“Like a Magic 8 Ball, one of those colors rises to the top,” Bischoff said. Based on the data fed to each capsule, the pixelated display can reproduce text or gray-scaled photographs.
This year, Philips and E Ink plan to introduce small, rigid screens made of glass that use the electronic ink technology. But by 2005, Philips announced yesterday, a flexible plastic model will be ready for commercial sales.
The device itself may be very cheap – only $10 a sheet. But consumers would pay to download the latest issue of a magazine, a newspaper or perhaps even this story, using a cell phone hook-up.