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Hanlin Now Working With LG’s New Flexible E-ink Screen

Charbax has gotten another scoop this week on his trip to Shenzhen, China. That flexible E-ink screen than LG Display has been working on has turned up in the booth of Hanlin (aka Tianjin Jinke), a Chinese ereader maker. They weren’t showing off the production unit, but they did have a prototype.

Hanlin mounted the new screen in one of their standard 6″ ereader shells. Now, they could end up selling this design, but it’s important to note that this is the same hardware that they’ve used with the 6″ Sipix screen and the older E-ink screen.

The Hanlin rep doesn’t offer any details on when we might see a commercial model, but he does say that they’re waiting for the screen to go into production.You can see the prototype at about 4:16.

As cool as this is, it’s not the first flexible E-ink screen. Polymer Vision had been working on this screen tech back in 2008, though I must admit that I don’t know what they’ve been doing recently. And E-ink has also been toying with the idea; one of their screens showed up at CES 2010 on one of Pocketbook’s reference designs.

Bridgestone has also been working on a flexible epaper screen based on their QR-LPD screen tech, but aside from a couple sightings in 2010 it doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere. Sony has also worked on a flexible E-ink screen, and I think they are still working on it in secret. And of course PlasticLogic has an ereader with a flexible epaper screen in production, with an ongoing beta test in Russian schools.

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Comments


reichsputin April 14, 2012 um 10:42 am

Well, there’s the Russian WEXLER.Flex ONE using LG’s flexible screen. It was originally targeted for launch in October 2011, but several times postponed. Now the first batch already produced and available for preorder here:
http://www.wexler.ru/home/products/books/380

Discussions with answers from Wexler’s CEO here:
habrahabr.ru/post/141108/
http://www.the-ebook.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23332&start=all
http://www.the-ebook.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21420&start=all
http://www.the-ebook.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23353&start=all

In this design it’s not just the screen that is flexible, but also the housing of the reader itself. It cannot be rolled in a tube, though, just bent to an angle of about 40 deg. Only the part with the screen is flexible, the thick part on the side where the motherboard and battery lie is not. As known from the discussions, the delays were the fault of LG that could not start mass production of the screens in time. As Wexler claims, all future production of flexible screens by LG for 2012 has been bought out by Wexler, so no other eReader manufacturer will get them until the next year.

As for the tech specs, the screen will be 6″ HD 768×1024, no touchscreen. The software on all Wexler’s previous ereader models was always traditionally shitty, as users report.

Retails for 8990 rubles, which is about US$300.


Onyx’s Flexible Screen eReaders Delayed – The Digital Reader May 22, 2012 um 1:23 pm

[…] entire first production run. One reader left a comment a month or so back with the prediction that no other device maker would get the screen. Now that Onyx’s new device is delayed and Hanlin’s device has no set release date, […]


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