E-Paper Displays

Series Editor's Foreword

Paper is the medium which has dominated the presentation of both the written word and graphics for two thousand years. The happy partnership of paper with printing was first developed in China before being adopted in the Western world in the Middle Ages and it initiated the first information explosion. Perhaps no other invention has had such a fundamental influence on the development of human society and way of life. Printed books and periodicals are attractive, affordable, and so familiar that we can truly pay attention to the contents alone, and overlook the qualities of the physical page. With this cultural and technical background, it is not surprising that printed paper is widely regarded as a reference point for electronic display technologies and since the introduction of the first flat panel displays, achieving paper‐like performance has been a common dream and aspiration of engineers. At the same time, users have bemoaned the shortcomings of electronic displays and the poor reading experience offered by early generations of displays.

In the present volume, Professor Bo‐Ru Yang has brought together an outstanding selection of authors to examine the technologies which aspire to mimic the properties of printed paper. It is fair to say that no electronic display can yet rival all the desirable characteristics of paper, and a basic question which arose at an early point in the planning of the volume, was which technologies or aspects of performance ...