by Sam E. Jones

Created on: November 11, 2010

There has been buzz recently concerning a new type of display technology that is being used mainly in e-Readers, but has also been seen in some hand-held devices; it’s called E Ink, because it renders an image that is almost indistinguishable from real ink on real paper, and the result is generally referred to as electronic or e-Paper.

The interesting thing is that even though this is a new technology, the concept is really very, very simple. Imagine if you had a glass tube in your hand that had black metal filings in it. If you placed a magnet at one end of the glass tube, all the metal filings would stick to that end of the tube. Then, if you took the magnet away, all the metal filings would fall back down to the bottom. Now suppose you have a million of these glass tubes and each one is only as thick as a human hair and all those tubes are all pressed tightly against one another in a square box, so all you see is the tips of the tubes. Then you’d see each tube tip as either a black dot, or a white dot. That’s how E Ink works, only instead of using a magnet, current is applied to the glass tube making the stuff inside rise or fall.

Of course it’s a little more complicated than that, since the e-Reader has to have a film of some sort over the top of it to provide a flat surface, and there has to be a computer to tell which tubes to apply current to and when, and of course memory to hold the document; but overall, that’s the basic concept.

The reason this technology is catching on is because the result is an image that can be seen or read in regular light, because it doesn’t have to be backlit, like flat panel displays, or have to produce its own light as is done with LED devices. Thus, e-Readers can be read both indoors and out and aren’t nearly as susceptible to glare because sunlight on the display doesn’t wash out the images that are on it. Also, because of the very high number of pixels (tubes) the images and words on the screen are much higher in resolution than are those on any other device. This is particularly noticeable when reading words on an e-Reader, such as the Kindle device. The letters on the screen are crisp and crystal clear, and the sensation is the same as if you were truly reading words off of a paper document that had been printed by a very expensive laser printer.

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