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 should be included. Professor Yang and his team have taken an inclusive approach. In this book the reader will find accounts of displays which offer different combinations of desirable properties including paper‐like appearance under ambient light, long‐term image storage with zero or ultra‐low power consumption, light weight and flexibility, and the ability to accept user input with the ease of pencil on paper. It follows that a wide range of display technologies are included, with an emphasis on device modes which offer ambient light viewability. Several liquid crystal modes, both with and without polarizer, can provide image storage either intrinsic to the display or in ultra‐low power drive electronics. Meanwhile, displays based on electrophoretic or electrowetting effects can offer outstanding optical appearance under a wide range of ambient lighting. Innovative and emerging displays are also considered, with a chapter on phase‐change displays offering an early view of the potential of this new development. Of course, physics of operation, the fabrication, engineering and especially the addressing characteristics of each display mode can be very different, and these issues are comprehensively covered, with special attention to those aspects of the devices which are less well covered in earlier sources. Other, user‐related properties of the devices—the difficulty of providing high quality reflective colour, and the relation of the display performance to human perception of image quality and metrology are carefully considered.
In the 21st century, our priorities regarding electronic displays have changed. Excellent optical performance is today taken for granted while convenience, light weight and long battery life have increasingly driven user approval. Especially, the environmental impact of every activity we undertake, now demands scrutiny. Printed media are major consumers of environmental resources including energy, timber, carbon emissions and chemical residues while electronic devices have the potential to reduce or eliminate these problems—but only if they are responsibly manufactured and accepted by users sufficiently to displace print over a long period of use and wide range of use cases. Paper‐like display quality can really make a difference to the world. The present book provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the field, authored by leading experts on each aspect of the subject, and I believe it will offer a most valuable source of reference to display professionals and advanced students, for many years to come.
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