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!