Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

Fujitsu has taken a major step forward by improving the contrast ratio, the refresh speed, and the brightness of its color eReader technology.

It’s amazing that Fujitsu are able to evolve their color ePaper and bring those improvements to market faster than PVI/eInk can evolve its black and white ePaper. This latest color eReader screen from Fujitsu will be released in Japan in Fall 2010.

Fujitsu Color eReader improvements – digging deeper

Akihabara News has photos of the new, improved color eReader screen and details from the press release -

1. Contrast Ratio is improved 3 times to 7:1.  
2. Image re-write speed is twice as fast at 0.7 seconds. This is for a XGA 1,024 by 768 screen. In comparison the Kindle 2 screen is 800 by 600 and takes around 0.8 seconds to refresh. 
3. There’s a new liquid-crystal material used that has superior reflective characteristics and is 1.3 times brighter than Fujitsu’s previous color ePaper.
4. Fujitsu claims it now has the best color display quality in the world. 
5. The new ePaper will be demoed May 17th and released in Fall 2010.

Do take a look at the image – its beautiful image quality.

Technology behind Fujitsu Color eReader

Fujitsu uses cholesteric LCD displays. This is a completely different technology from the electrophoretic displays used in the Kindle, Nook, and Sony eReaders.

The Future of Things has a good write-up on ePaper including why they think Cholesteric LCD could be the future of ePaper -

ChLCD technology is based on the well-known and widespread technology of liquid crystal displays (LCDs).

… many analysts believe that ChLCD technology could become the dominant e-paper technology of the next decade.

This assessment relates to the high level of maturity exemplified by the current LCD industry …

… as well as to the fact that ChLCD technology currently offers what many analysts see as the ideal list of features for e-paper:

flexibility and even bendability; thinness, at approximately 0.8 millimeters; lightness; a bi-stable nature, requiring no power to maintain an image and very little power to change it; good brightness, contrast, and resolution; as well as vivid color and a decent refresh rate capable of displaying animation and possibly even video

Basically Cholesteric LCD technology can leverage all the work and improvements done with LCD manufacturing processes and also offer numerous advantages like flexibility, color, better refresh rate, and low power usage.

Here are some details on the new Fujitsu color ereader advances -

a panel structure that suppresses excess reflection caused by the scattering of incident light when displaying black, the new color e-paper features a 7:1 contrast ratio

a new liquid-crystal material with superior reflective characteristics that can reflect more incoming light, as well as widening the aperture ratio (the effective reflective region) of the display panel to minimize light loss, resulting in a reflectance of 33%

A newly developed driver control method results in re-write speeds that are roughly twice as fast

Particularly interesting is that they cut the time taken to refresh the screen in half by simply developing a new method to control the display driver. That’s pretty smart and hopefully eInk or whoever owns responsiblity for that on the Kindle finds a similar improvement.

Fujitsu’s Achilles Heel is Price

Fujitsu original color eReader, the FLEPia (yup, that’s they way they spell it), was over $1,000 when it was released in Japan.

If the new color eReader is anywhere near that price it’s not going to sell much. 

Given that it is color and very new technology you could make a case for a $350 to $399 color eReader – However, beyond that you just get too much competition from netbooks and laptops and tablet PCs.

Should Kindle 4 license Fujitsu ePaper technology?

For the past 1.5 years (perhaps longer) have been writing about how eInk is failing to evolve and that Amazon should consider replacing it with faster evolving technology (it’s a very liberal use of the word faster – just evolving would be improvement enough).

Amazon finally have some options for Kindle 4 -

1. Pixel Qi for multiple mode screens. Would be perfect if Amazon wanted to introduce a separate line of multi-purpose devices (under the Kindle brand). 
2. Mirasol from Qualcomm.
3. Liquavista is promising color ePaper by end 2010/early 2011. 
4. A variety of companies like Kent Displays are promising color ePaper by end 2010 or early 2011.  
5. Bridgestone QR-LPD.
6. Fujitsu’s Color ePaper.

The most promising is Fujitsu because they’ve already had an eReader (even if it was $1,000+) out in the market for over a year.

It’s understandable if Amazon have been preferring eInk over the other color options because eInk is more stable and a proven technology. However, Fujitsu is proven too and you have to think they will get prices to reasonable levels by Fall 2010.

Kindle 4 (ideally Kindle 3) needs something like Mirasol or Fujtisu color ePaper – not as much for color as for flexibility, refresh speed, and signs of progress. PVI eInk is simply refusing to evolve and becoming a liability.

Filed under: eBook Reader Devices Tagged: | color ereader, fujitsu flepia