Hot on the heels of Royal Dutch Philips announcement last month of a flexible LCD screen, comes another announcement of similar technology – this time from Siemens. The announcement, reported in the Guardian, quotes Siemens spokesman Norbert Aschenbrenner as saying that one square metre of the material costs around £30, and scientists working on the screens said they should be available by 2007!
According to the Guardian article, Mr Aschenbrenner went on to say:
the new screens, which are literally paper thin, can do everything a regular TV screen or computer monitor can do, but cost a fraction of the price. The technology makes it possible to put moving images directly onto paper … at a cost that would make it economical to use on everything from magazines to cigarette packets … where the moving images would give more detailed instructions than any photo could ever do,” he said.
He said that the technology will be used for Harry Potter-style dynamic pictures in newspapers but will probably take a little while to get cheap enough…
The company believes there will also be a market for using them for simple computer games which could be printed on the side of a package or given away free in magazines.
I can see the warnings on cigarette packets suddenly becoming a lot more graphic!
Two comments were left on this post earlier today – I have removed them.
I rarely remove comments on this site unless they are spam or abusive. These were the first abusive posts on this site which I have removed.
The comments were left by someone purporting to be both David Jones and Alex Bunten – however the fact that both posts came within one minute of one another and from the same ip address leads me to believe that both comments came from the same person.
The ip address used was 84.92.124.116 – this is the ip address of a UK ISP (Plus.com). That ip has now been banned on this site.
We may one day have uses like disposable computers or at least settop boxes with such screens, interactive medical monitor etc. The possibilities are endless.
PS. I am surprised someone would write nasty comments on this article. It said nothing controversial.
Likewise Angsuman, I think it was simply someone trying to get to me – the choice of post was random.
These screens are getting closer to public launch. Imagine newspapers and magazines with moving adverts….Harry Potter no longer seems so far fetched! Watch this space for paper thin TV screens hitting the shops in 2007!
The Harry Potter screens haven’t materialized as folks thought they might – but touch screens are certainly getting some press.
Whilst Apple owns this hot medium now, it’ll be interesting to see how Windows machines pile on.
I’m totally a PC guy, but I marvel at Apple’s tech.
I get spammed as well. No abusive comments though – yet!
Sad to see nothing came of the paper thin monitors. Has the idea been canned or delayed?