I thought it might be fun to speculate about future technological trends. I mean, obviously it sounds fun; let’s see if I’m any good at it. I’ll share a few technologies that I think are interesting but are still in the early stages of development. Presumably, if I’m right, you’ll see these technologies hit the mainstream in a few years. I suggest that you bookmark this post and set a reminder to check the page in about five years to see if I was even close.
[Originally I was going to try and highlight three technologies in this post…but I find that I blab too much and don’t feel that I can share my excitement in such a concise manner. This may be a multi-part series of blogs.]
E-ink. Ok, this is a safe bet. “E-ink” may not yet be a household term, but this technology is already starting to be incorporated into gadgets. Have you heard of the new Amazon Kindle, the electronic reader? That uses E-ink (Sony also has an Ebook based on the technology). So what I’m speculating here is that E-ink will aggressively expand and replace a significant portion of the non-TV/non-primary computer screen LCD market in the future.
Why, what is it? For those of you not hip to E-ink (which probably means you’re just hip in general) here’s a quick rundown. E-ink is a displaying technology sort of like an LCD screen with a couple of big differences. One of the main advantages of E-ink is that looking at an E-ink display is almost exactly like reading a paper document. Part of the reason for that is the crazy high contrast ratio E-ink provides and part of the reason is that E-ink displays aren’t constantly refreshing like an LCD or CRT display. Normally computer displays refresh very very quickly so that the human eye cannot perceive it (remember the flicker on old monitors and TVs….that was the refreshes happening), even if the contents of the screen aren’t changing those displays have to refresh. E-ink displays only update when they have to change the contents of the screen. You know how some people will complain that reading a lot of text off a computer screen is “hard on the eyes?” That complaint should go away with E-ink.
Why is it going to be big? A couple of reasons. Besides being easier to look at than current displays, an E-ink display uses absolutely no energy unless it is refreshing the screen. That means after your ebook reader refreshes the screen with a page of text….the device basically turns off and that page is displayed forever until you tell it to refresh the screen with new text. Imagine the power savings! Most of the time E-ink displays are off but you can still read from them. Another interesting property of E-ink displays is they seem to be particularly well suited to making flexible display screens. Think about a screen that could retract like a projector screen when you’re not using it, or displays that can hug curved surfaces….that pretty cool stuff.
Where are we now? Right now most E-ink displays are just black and white. There are some color models out there but that’s still an area of development. The actual display refresh is also still kind of slow and poky at the moment, with time they hope to speed that up. Currently they are also very expensive, but in time that too should come down. Obviously E-ink isn’t going to replace any screen that needs constant fast refreshes (like your computer screen), but any screen where constant refreshes aren’t a priority E-ink offers a very attractive, easy to read, low power consumption, option.
1 comment:
Interesting.
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