By
Paul Biba
Here’s a really excellent article by Priya Ganapati from Wired’s Gadget Lab. It covers all the current displays and tell you the challenges in making a color one. It includes an good comparison chart at the end. Highly reccomended. I learned some stuff, myself.
… With the exception of the Flepia, though, almost all e-readers are monochromatic. So what’s the technological holdup? To understand that, you first have to understand how E Ink’s black-and-white displays work. Electronic ink, pioneered by the company, is composed of millions of microcapsules. Each microcapsule has positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a positive electric field is applied, the black particles are attracted to the top and become visible to the user. That makes that area appear black. The reverse is also true: A negative electric field draws white particles to the top, making the area appear lighter. For an electronic display, the ink is printed on a sheet of plastic film, and a layer of circuitry is laminated to it to drive the ink.
For a color display, E Ink needs to put a color filter on top of its black-and-white display. A color filter usually has four sub-pixels — red, green, blue and white — that are combined to create each full-color pixel. That also means reduced brightness of display. …
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