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Pixel Qi sounds really exciting and here’s a summary of all the information I could find.

The Context

Mary Lou Jepsen has achieved quite a lot – she was the first employee and CTO at One Laptop Per Child (founded by Nicholas Negroponte), and helped create the XO laptop. One of the key features of the XO was the screen -

can be read in bright sunlight, costs a third that of traditional LCD screens and uses about a tenth of the power.

Her work earned her a place on the Time 2008 Top 100 List. Here’s what an XO Laptop screen looks like, courtesy Adulau at Flickr (we’ll come to why that is important later) -

Unfortunately the XO project is currently going through some tough times – sales fell 93% during the 2008 holiday season – probably because they haven’t kept up with the advent of netbooks, not to mention that charity is tough in the middle of a recession.

Pixel Qi

Jepsen started her own company, Pixel Qi, to commercialize some of the technologies she had invented during her time developing the XO. Its worth noting that Jepsen not only invented the XO laptop’s sunlight-readable display technology, she also co-invented its ultra-low power management system.

Pixel Qi is working on creating screens for netbooks and eReaders. This interesting snippet from Wikipedia explains some of the founding philosophy -

premise: the CPU is no longer important, nor is the operating system. Portables are all about the screen. Typical laptop screens run for about $100 (compared to the CPU which at the low end has hit $10), cause the largest drain on the battery, are difficult to read for hours on end, don’t have integrated touch screens and electronics, and aren’t sunlight readable.  Pixel Qi … using the existing LCD factories as is, but with clever conceptual design changes that allow … move from idea to high volume mass production in less than a year.

What it means for ePaper

This is Pixel Qi’s rather bold claim -

Our first screens will be 10″ diagonal screens for netbooks and eBook readers that will sample in Spring 2009 and ship in high volume in Summer 2009.  These screens … have video refresh and fully saturated color.  The ePaper mode has 3 times the resolution of the color HDTV mode … can be used in sunlight.  Look for them in the market in the second half of 2009.

If they can really pull this off, they’ll revolutionize the entire eBook and eReader industry. They are designing screens with two modes -

1. An ePaper mode with very high resolution.
2. A colour mode with video refresh and fully saturated colour.

What it Means for the Kindle

If Pixel Qi really can deliver screens with these technologies, then unless Amazon incorporates them, the Kindle will be left behind. Whisper Net is a huge advantage – however, a screen capable of dual ePaper and colour modes, with video refresh and longer battery life will be hard to beat.

The claim that devices with these screens will be out in the second half of 2009 is the really ambitious one. If true it creates the possibility that either -

1. Pixel Qi’s technology replaces eInk as the standard technology for eReaders –we’ll probably see it in Kindle 3.0 if that happens. 
2. A competitor uses Pixel Qi technology to create a very compelling Kindle competitor.  

The latter is a distinct possibility because Mary Lou Jepsen has already said in an interview -

“We are working with a number of notebook and e-book makers on a number of different form factors,”

Filed under: evolution, Pixel Qi 3qi Tagged: | Mary Lou Jepsen, pixel qi