It's interesting that it seems to be capable of displaying "4 shades of gray" (so presumably black, white and 2 grays in between), and since it has 170 dpi resolution, that means it's just the ticket for handmade grayscale bitmapfonts!

hhp

Hrant --

Have you every 'been with a gril' and yelled out 'grayscale' in a moment of passion? :-)

Hildebrant.

No, but I have considered adopting "Gray Power" as my slogan, except unfortunately I'm straight.

hhp

I have a mate who gets blind drunk and
declares that he is all kerned out!


kris

There is a bit more information regarding the readability of the display technology in this PDF:

http://www.eink.com/pdf/eink_readability_02.pdf

They don't really get into any detail about the type itself.

Isn't that Tahoma?

hhp

>I want to know what the type looks like!

At 170 dpi the "4 shades of grey" may be only some form of "halftoning" -- it's my understanding that digital paper is strictly "on/off pixel" at the moment.

It's interesting that they are coming in at the high end, rather than with a low-res device and primitive pixel type. But perhaps Sony didn't want to have Japanese bringing up the rear. Or else they realize that cellphone/blackberry technology is, to most intents and purposes, pretty similar in functionality with this generation of e-paper, until e-paper actually becomes bendable and constrained only at the spine.

Digital ink works by flipping little cells that are black on one side and white on the other. The flipping is done by applying a momentary current to each cell. Maybe they can apply a partial current and get the cell to flip 1/3 and 2/3-rds of the way, getting two shades of gray? That would mean they can also apply smaller increments and get more shades. Hey, maybe they can even orient the cells and get them to fill corners! :-) I can see a new bitmap font format, where pixels have DIRECTION. :->

By "halftoning" I guess you mean the effective dpi for 4 shades goes down to 85? That would suck, and might be false advertising too.

Bendability: I think the paper itself is, but maybe they decided to make this product not? Maybe they think people will need to get used to the idea, and/or they're leaving room for improvement - a common tactic these days especially.

hhp

I can see a new bitmap font format, where pixels have DIRECTION. :->

Now that would be neat. I can imagine spinning pixels in a grid to assign their final orientation. You could even make ruleset that pixel would have to re-orient under certain conditions for certain purposes redefining the anti-aliasing according to context and use.

Concerning grayscale: from reading some stuff it seems that there are separate "models" for b&w and grayscale rendering - which is encouraging.

BTW, Grant, that PDF contains some interesting insight into why reflective media is more conducive to readability than emissive. Although it's possible they've ignored the probable relevance of the type-fidelity difference typical of reflective-versus-emissive displays.

hhp