The medium has the ability to retain images in its memory with minimal power consumption, the company says.At the start of its two-day Fujitsu Forum 2005 in Tokyo on Thursday, Fujitsu Ltd. in conjunction with two of its subsidiaries, Fujitsu Frontech Ltd. and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., showcased its latest invention: a film substrate-based, flexible color e-paper that has the ability to retain images in its memory.
Fujitsu spokesperson Scott Ikeda said this prototype was the result of about five years of research and development.
Fujitsu expects to have the new paper available in commercial products sometime within the company's 2006 fiscal year, which runs from April 2006 to March 2007, he added.
According to Fujitsu, this new e-paper shares characteristics with regular paper, such as being lightweight, thin and bendable.
Unlike conventional paper, however, it can retain an image or a series of images with minimal power consumption, and uses only one-hundredth to one-ten-thousandth of the energy required by conventional display technologies to change a screen image.
The e-paper does not require any power to maintain a given color image.
In addition, the RGB displaying layers used in the paper are not only more vibrant than traditional LCD displays, bending the paper or pressing on it with fingers, for example, neither alters nor distorts the technology embedded within the paper.
Moreover, the paper does not require either color filters or polarizing layers to work.
To showcase these qualities, Ikeda said that the e-paper's functionality is being demonstrated at the Fujitsu Forum in two exhibitions.
One presentation shows sample e-papers, none of which are connected to any means of power, with various color images.
The second is what Ikeda called a cylindrical "mock bus stop" with a changing information panel.
For his part, Richard Romano, a writer and analyst for TrendWatch Graphic Arts, said he was quite jazzed to read the Fujitsu press release about its e-paper prototype.
"I had read an article in Scientific American a year or so ago about thin, flexible displays, but didn't think they were this far along," he said.
Romano sees a number of immediate uses for the new technology, including e-forms and in-store displays, but he said he thinks the e-paper will have the most immediate impact on outdoor advertising.
"It [would] allow outdoor advertisers to change their messages dynamically to take advantage of the old advertising slogan, 'If it's raining, sell them an umbrella.' If the weather turns inclement, it becomes easy to have an electronic sign advertise a sale on umbrellas," Romano noted.
Romano said that the concept of using digital displays in lieu of static or printed signage is an increasingly popular one, primarily because it provides the ability to change content dynamically.
"This means that signage, outdoor displays, and other such applications can be sold in 'dayparts,' charging a higher rate to display an ad during rush hour than at other times of day. This isn't a new concept—we've all seen those billboards with the rotating panels that have several different ads on the same billboard—but the idea of doing it electronically and potentially with rich media ramps up the 'coolness' factor."
At the same time, Romano said that the incorporation of rich media that could be leveraged with Fujitsu's new e-paper will depend on the refresh rate of the e-paper film substrate, which may be too slow, at least at this point, to allow for video or animation.
