Electronic Paper
Jason C
ITT Technical Institute

I decided to my research paper of new technology in my field on Electronic Paper. Electronic paper is one of many new technologies that are being developed in today’s new technology world. Everything is getting smaller and lighter weight and more mobile. The concept behind electronic paper is sheets of thin material that are the size of a sheet of paper, which can display a newspaper article, a book, or magazine and then be updated to new material at the click of a button. Although it sounds like a lot of the e-reader device technologies that are already on the market now, the difference in this technology is that the paper will be lightweight, flexible and require a lot less power to operate then today’s modern devices. The main concept of the electronic paper is to have billions of balls, each measuring one-tenth of a millimeter and have them sandwiched between sheets of clear flexible plastic with ultra-thin transistors to direct the balls in to the words or pictures needed. Each of the two companies involved, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center on the West Coast of California, and on the East Coast is eInk found by a professor and two students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, have their own different designs on how the balls will actually form the words or an image of what you are reading. As of now the electronic paper designs can only show black and white, although both companies are working on ides for color. As of the date of this article, March 2002, it said that this technology is about 5 years away, which would put it around the year of 2007, as of July 2013 they are still working on this technology. (Pham, 2002) The information that was found in this article was presented very well, and was easy to understand. Although the idea of this technology is new to me, I found this article very informal and was able to understand the concept behind what they were trying to do and what they were doing to try and achieve that goal. This article did a good job of explain the whole concept of the technology of the electronic paper and how it the two companies have plans to make it work, it also described their work on continuing towards the goal of having a full color.
I would think that this article is an ok informational source, I was left wondering about more information about the topic. Also when I did a search I could not find any up to date articles about this topic. It was said in the article that this technology was five years out in 2002 and we are now 11 years past that and still have not seen this technology.

References

Pham, A. (2000, Mar 02). The e-paper chase: Two companies are locked in a race to create the electronic newspaper -- clear, flexible sheets of plastic that will replace one batch of stories with another in the blink of an eye. National Post. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/329611375?accountid=2765
Search Conducted Thru Proquest using ITT Tech Virtual Library