Engineers create rewritable, cheap e-papers

Engineers from China and Hong Kong have created a special kind of paper-thin LCD that although is flexible and light but is in fact quite tough as well.

With this device, created by optoelectronic engineers, a daily newspaper could be published on a flexible paper-like display and could also be uploaded as quick as news cycles. According to scientists, the device is also cheap to produce, likely to cost only $5 for a 5-inch screen, as the report published in the journal Applied Physics Letters inform.

Just like usual LCDs, the new display is designed like a sandwich with liquid crystal filling between the two plates. What’s different is that instead of electrical connections on the plates, the plates in these optically re-writable LCDs are coated with special molecules that realign the presence of polarized light and switch the pixels. Because of this, the need of normal electrodes is removed along with decreasing the design’s bulk.

Engineers create a paper-thin camera with no lens

Thus, these LCDs are thinner and can be constructed from flexible plastic, weighing only a few grams, reported Science Daily. The co-author Jiatong Sun said, “It’s only a little thicker than paper.”

Also, these re-writable LCDs are long lasting and cheap to produce. The energy for the LCD is only needed to switch display images or text, just like e-papers in an e-book. Then there were spacers included to separate the glass and plastic plates, “We put spacers between glass layers to keep the liquid crystal layer uniform,” said Sun. These spacers were what made the optical re-writable LCD flexible.

Moreover, before these new LCDs, there used to be only two display colors, however, now the LCDs can display three primary colors simultaneously. Through this, the resolution of the LCD was increased, “Now we have three colors but for full color we need to make the pixels too small for human eyes to see,” exclaimed Sun.