Steak and sizzle: the price of investing in B&W e-paper volume production is to delay development of color

Here are Jacques Noels of Nemoptic and Andrew Lloyd signing in again after the earliest Easter since 1913 with abundant cold weather to match - at least in most of Europe. It was a black-and-white Easter with snow, gray skies and bare, black tree trunks with few burgeoning green leaves. Black-and-white has been the name of the game for Nemoptic as we build our manufacturing and customer base. While our BiNem® (Bistable nematic) technology is excellent for black and white e-paper displays, however, one of our positioning challenges has been to satisfy end-user (consumer) taste for color brightness. (You can learn more about our journey building the e-paper market by reading our case study.)

Operationally, we are working on improving this and last year we achieved a big increase in brightness by switching from a three color filter (red-green-blue – RGB) to a four color filter (RGBW). Adding white brought about a 30 percent enhancement in brightness. We use similar manufacturing processes for both black and white and color BiNem LCDs, and we use industrial color filters, thus making manufacturing very cost-effective. But we also had to give consideration to the performance lag behind transmissive TFT LCD. Even though our color performance is the best in the bistable nematic field, it is true that no reflective bistable display technology can match transmissive TFT LCD. Out there in the market, consumers and professionals have been getting used to the high level of quality and brilliance through looking at their PC or CTV. Reflective color displays are making constant progress but it will still take a few years to match those of TFT-LCD. It’s worth noting however that, a contrario, if you look at your digital camera screen and try to take some pictures on a sunny day, you would definitely be very grateful if your screen was color reflective as your TFT LCD screen will be totally impossible to use.

Given that scaling up to mass-manufacturing for the color BiNem e-paper displays would currently incur significant costs, and given our drive to bring in short term revenues, we have chosen to position ourselves more aggressively as volume suppliers of B&W displays and are achieving success in the electronic shelf label field.