Japan Display Outs Paper-Like Reflective Colour LCD

Japan Display is a consortium of Japanese screen manufacturers with members including Sharp, Sony and Panasonic. The consortium's latest joint effort is a paper-like reflective LCD with no backlighting and SRAM memory in each pixel.

Light from the surrounding environment is reflected back to display colours onscreen. As a result, no backlighting is required. And, in theory, this new screen should be responsive enough to display moving pictures.

As well as being very slim, this new paper-like screen also consumes very little power. As well as the fact that there's no backlighting, each pixel saves power by using its integrated memory to remember the last colour displayed. The amount of power required to display each new image is therefore minimised. Plus, the colour of a given pixel doesn't need to be changed unnecessarily.

This reflective colour screen is reminiscent of the Mirasol colour e-reader screens that proved to be something of a flop. These also worked by reflecting light in the surrounding environment. Japan Display has even used a test image very similar to the one used in the Mirasol demos to show off the features of its new screen.


Japan Display's 7" screen is available in two versions:

• 1024 x 768 pixels, 30:1 contrast, NTSC ratio of just 5 %
• 1024 x 576 pixels, 30:1 contrast, NTSC ratio of 36 %

Japan Display hasn't given any pricing information yet and there's no word of what devices will use the new screens. Colour e-readers anyone?