Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss displayed on an iPhone (left), on which a small e-paper show with the identical picture (proper) is positioned
Kingston Frameworks; Kunli Xiong et al. (2025)
A brand new form of color e-paper can current brilliant, high-resolution and full-colour photos and video whereas utilizing minimal vitality, pointing to a potential future for show gadgets.
Whereas conventional LED screens emit purple, inexperienced and blue mild to supply color, e-paper screens use tiny molecules to create photos. Till lately, these gadgets have been restricted to black and white, however color screens are actually obtainable. Nonetheless, they battle to refresh quick sufficient to show video.
To deal with this, Kunli Xiong on the College of Uppsala, Sweden, and his colleagues have developed e-paper with pixels created from tungsten oxide nanodiscs. Every pixel is round 560 nanometres, giving the paper a decision of 25,000 pixels per inch (PPI). Against this, smartphones sometimes have a PPI within the a whole bunch.
The tungsten-oxide nanodiscs are made with barely totally different sizes and spacings so every displays a selected band of sunshine. By inserting them collectively, it’s potential to current a spread of colors, and the brightness may be diversified by a short electrical pulse that locations an ion contained in the disc. As soon as a color is about, the ions keep put and the color holds with out steady energy.
The researchers created an e-paper show measuring simply 1.9 millimetres by 1.4 millimetres, which is round 1/4000th the realm of a traditional smartphone show, and used it to show a 4300-by-700 pixel crop of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss – a particularly excessive decision for such a small system. It could additionally refresh roughly each 40 milliseconds, which is quick sufficient to show video.
One other advantage of the brand new e-paper is its extremely low vitality use, says Xiong. The show makes use of round 1.7 milliwatts per sq. centimetre when displaying video, and round 0.5 milliwatts per sq. centimetre for nonetheless photos.
“What I like about this work is it’s each quick sufficient to help video, whereas retaining vitality use to a minimal. That’s as a result of as soon as parts are switched, they keep switched with out having to refresh them,” says Jeremy Baumberg on the College of Cambridge.
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