What is Electronic Ink?
Imagine a newspaper that you never need to throw away. Instead, the ink rearranges itself each morning to form new headlines. Or maybe you’ve just finished pouring over a new best seller. No need to pass it along to a friend; the print can morph Harry Potter style into a new book. Sound unreal? Welcome to the world of electronic ink. Though the concept of electronic ink is not new, inroads to making it a reality are more recent. Many herald electronic ink, sometimes called electronic paper, as the most promising new development in publishing since the invention of paper nearly two millennia ago. There are multiple proprietary incarnations of electronic ink, with the main players being E Ink Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., and Xerox Corp. of Palo Alto, California. To the naked eye, electronic ink looks unremarkable, but within its dark, oily substance countless microcapsules flow. E Ink has likened these round microcapsules to clear, minuscule beach balls filled with dark fluid. Within the d
Electronic ink is one of the technologies being researched today to replace the paper-and-ink method of printing reading materials. As of the present, there are two companies developing this technology and they’re E-Ink and Xerox. The main components of this technology are cavities or microcapsules, the substance or ink enclosed in this capsule and the negatively charged pigmented balls or chips inside the capsules. These three components make possible the rearrangement of microcapsules on the “paper” upon command.
Imagine paper having pixels in it, like in a computer screen. Images and text can be changed electronically using the same pages in the same book using the same “ink”. Imagine downloading your newspaper every morning to the same pieces of paper. Electronic ink will be able to used on regular paper and on the special electronic paper-thin plastic pages. These special pages will have have a graph of microelectronics similar to pixels on a computer screen. The ink would cover the whole pages and would be able to changed when it is desired. What is Electronic Ink made of? Ink is made of microcapsules filled with a blue die with white negatively charged particles floating inside. THe reason images and text are able to be changed is because when a positive charge is applied to the microcapsules, the negatively charged white particles will attracted to it and only blue ink will appear and vice versa. Implications of Electronic Ink The way text and images are put on this special plastic paper
