True color E Ink displays with multiple colors in each pixel were thought physically impossible, but first prototypes were shown last year. I suspect we're relatively close to a production version.
1 I'm a cofounder of a company that develops and helps develop e paper products and we sell color E Ink development kits. https://www.visionect.com
Do you have a feeling what it takes to push down color e-ink prices down to affordable (sub 1k for 32") levels? An order auf 10 Million? 100 Million? At what scale does this work?
I wonder what's so innovative about this. E-ink displays consist of 2 parts. The actual display is essentially a bunch of bubbles with liquid in them. Below them is an electrical grid that can create small localized magnetic fields.
When developing these things they are often made separately for testing. The display is a card, I saw a laminated card approach, and you simply put it on top of the electrical grid. Add some tape, and the display works. This is simply someone realizing, hey, use that test process and we have a "printer" and has long been foreseen as a potential application. Issue is that the chemicals are expensive.
Also, the printer knowing the mapping between badge# and image to show might be more convenient. For example, consider a case where a badge shows what areas personnel is allowed to enter, with that changing per day (cleaning personnel in high security buildings, or visitors from competing companies who have meetings at multiple locations across several days for example)
In either case, you could give them a badge and let them check out and check in without human intervention.
I would expect HP will try and lease out the printers, though, charging $X per month plus $y per print.
Maybe you have different classes of cards, like VIP, regular visitor, employee lost badge, etc. They all have different looking "shells".
So this setup makes sure the right data is printed to the right shell. Allows two different people to do the data entry and "printing" with less coordination too. No worries about FIFO, just print everything in the in bucket.
> When a card is placed in this imager, a simple bar code on the back of the card uniquely identifies it to the HP IonTouch system, allowing the imaging device to retrieve whatever new information needs to be placed on the card.
(also seems a little backward that I wouldn't just send the info to the printer and then put on/in the card I wanted to print/re-print.)
Maybe I'm reading too much into that, but I'd be surprised if it's totally innocuous. But, then again the research and capital investment needed to make this happen deserves to be rewarded, imo.
Hard to imagine how much they'll charge for a printer. Especially if it has no toner to run out... and each card can be printed 10,000 times.
Each card costs "several tens of cent" -- that struck me a marketing person trying a little too hard to downplay the cost. But, the die sublimation printers needed to print color on plastic badges are $10k+.
Side note, whatever happened to color e-ink displays?