CLEARink will be demoing some new technology at SID Display Week 2018 and the company is going to primarily focus on 1.32 inch displays for wearables and 9.7 inch screens for e-readers. The company has just managed to increase the resolution of their color screens from 106 DPI to 200 PPI due to a new color filter design.
Currently CLEARink is still experimenting and trying to finalize their product. The VP Marketing Sri Peruvemba told me “We have conducted a few different trials in the LCD mass production factory in Asia. They manufactured TFT arrays, helped us put together the display cells (front plane with our TIR film plus electrophoretic ink with black particles and backplane TFT layer), we built the modules, we have been testing them, tweaking some of the parameters and each trial is producing better output. I know this sounds a bit vague but we monitor lots of different parameters and have many permutations and combinations that are yielding acceptable results so we keep optimizing for the select few that we can deploy in Wearables and eSchoolbook applications.”
He went on to say “here is our thinking, we can pretty much design a display with any dpi that matches the underlying TFT but current market demand for eSchoolbooks is 157 PPI (to keep the cost low) and less than 200 PPI for Wearables, we will pretty much make the displays to suit the application/customer need (assuming of course large enough volume). We also see higher resolution applications including 300dpi or even higher and they will be more expensive and those applications would be willing to bear those costs but the applications we are targeting presently are looking for 200 PPI or less. This does not mean we won’t make higher PPI products to show capability to new customers but it will be a tradeoff between cost and resolution. This same principle as you know applies to any reflective display technology that uses TFT backplanes.”
When SID DIsplay week wraps up Clearink will announce dates for development kits for people to purchase them, they plan to start with a small set not because of hardware availability but their team is small and can’t support lots of customer trials at the same time. The first set of kits and samples will go to customers that have pre-paid.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.