If there’s one thing that has always been the complaint against e-book readers — it is the lack of color and also video in some cases. Of course, the counter argument was that it was a fair trade off for saving your retinas and achieving a paper like display on an electronic medium. It made the eBook readers like Kindle what they are today. But of course, we want everything!
Hence , the logical next step in display technology was to make a display with all the advantages of e-Ink screens that could also display full RGB color and may be even video. Thinking along these lines are multiple teams and they all have their own approach towards the problem. We have already seen the Qualcomm backed Mirasol project and then there was the Pixel Qi screen that made news at CES 2010. It seems like another project that is working on a different solution to the same problem got overlooked.
It started as a Philips project but then went independent. They promised a product in 2009 but went awfully quiet after that. But now they are showing off their displays and products are apparently in the pipeline. The technology that they are using is called Electrowetting, according to the website and from the way it reads, it seems like a modification and improvement on top of the LCD technology. It has the low power consumption that is expected from this class of displays and it also has video rendering capabilities.
They seem to have three versions of this display – LiquavistaBright, LiquavisaColor and LiquavistaVivid. You can read more about each variety over at their website. Over all, they say that it can be manufactured with existing procedures and it is also very scalable.
They have demos on their website from CES 2010 and they look pretty good. However, I will only believe their claims when I see the first product line and its average price tag.