Flexible displays which can be used as “pages” for digital publications could arrive as soon as this summer thanks to LG.
The Korean company has revealed that it’s been working on a bendable plastic-based e-ink display which is already winging it’s way to a number of Chinese manufacturers as we speak and has been sighted in two different sizes with a newspaper sized 50-centimetres and another around 15-cm – the same as the popular Kindle reader– but with a thickness of only 0.7mm and it weighs just 14 grams.
We don’t know who the manufacturers are yet, or what gadgets this twistable technology might be implemented on. We’ve seen concepts for smartphones from the likes of Samsung which will utilise flexible displays, but these are just that – concepts.
What LG are showing off is one of the earliest examples of this idea “in the wild”. E-Ink is nothing new, the tech has been around for over 15 years, but it lends itself perfectly to this application and it’s both exciting and a little bit unnerving to see how this might affect the future of print. This could herald the end of print-based digests with many of our newspapers and magazines already distribution digital editions of their publications. Imagine buying your chosen morning news rag and having it digitally displayed on this thin slip of plastic – Unreal!
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