E-Ink introduction

E-Ink - a short history

E-Ink is a registered trademark of the E-Ink corporation, a company formed in order to commercially exploit research carried out at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology the late 1990s.
Electronic paper and electronic ink would have seemed like science fiction ten or fifteen years ago, but now the technology is not only a reality, it is a developing technology which is now viable for commercial mass-production.

What is E-Ink?

Electronic paper has been something of a holy grail in technology - a display that can show a digital image and in doing so resemble ink on paper - a dynamic hard copy, if you like! E-Ink is some way ahead of the pack with this technology, which they have already licensed to a large range of devices on the market, best-known of which is probably Amazon's wildly successful Kindle ebook reader and, of course, E-paper watches.
E-Ink in many respects could replace the liquid crystal display on any digital device with a crystal clear on-screen display, that has a similar contrast to paper and is therefore much easier on the eyes. It also provides a more accessible form of digital readout, especially for those people who would previously not have considered reading ebooks due to the unfamiliarity of reading from an electronic display. Oh, and it looks extremely cool too!

Scheme of an electrophoretic display

How does E-Ink work?

E-Ink displays contains millions of tiny microcapsules which float in a fluid on your E-Ink screen. Some of these are white and have a positive charge, others are black and have a negative charge. When a negative electrical charge is applied, the white capsules rise to the top of the fluid. Of course, the opposite is true - applying a positive electrical field brings the black microcapsules floating to the top. So each of the thousands of pixels on your E Ink watch can be made either black or white (or actually a shade of gray in newer models) and in this way form a picture of anything the manufacturer wants!
It should be noted that E-Ink displays have at least one disadvantage - the change in states of the pixels can take at least a second to happen, so pages refresh quite slowly. Currently the technology certainly could not be used to display animation for instance. However this downside is not really important for devices such as E-Ink watches or ebook readers. After all, the time only has to refresh once a second, and as for ebooks, well, how long does it take to turn the page of a real book.
So that's E-Ink in a nutshell. Or on the face of a watch! No doubt the technology will be progressing further - colour displays are likely to be the next major development, and perhaps faster refresh times. In the meantime, E-paper watches are now an affordable item - the perfect gift for the geek who has everything!