E Ink has developed Advanced Color E-paper and the first products to showcase this new technology will be digital signage. The company intends on marketing 20 inch screens that will be able to display over 32,000 colors. Sources have confirmed that e-Reader and smartphone companies will have to wait until 2018 before ACeP will be available for mass production.
The big advantage of this new color e-paper is that it is available as a single pane of glass. E-Ink Regal directly controls the position of the multiple color pigments. Once you add in a capactive touchscreen display, you will only have two layers. This is a big deal because Triton 1 and Triton 2 had three layers and were expensive to manufacture and the colors looked washed out.
Many people in the tech world are visibility excited about the new color e-paper. All of the major tech blogs have reported on the launch news, but I think developers could hit a home run with it. Yota could device a new phone with a full color screen on the back, and companies like Inkcase and Popslate can really do some interesting things.
It looks like we are going to have to wait a couple of years for this to happen, as ACeP will not be available for mass production until sometime in 2018.
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.