Recent developments of optical rewritable (ORW) LC photoaligning display and progress in LC photoalignment have made it possible to separate e-paper display-unit and driving optoelectronics part. It has no electrodes, possesses grey scale capability, truly stable, and no power consumption of showing the image with wide viewing angles and high contrast. Our ORW e-paper structure can not only significantly decrease the complexity of device, but also have the similar properties and cost with pulp paper. The high durability and low consumable cost are the high competitive advantages of the ORW e-paper in the market. The most likely but not limited applications are price labels, light printable rewritable paper, labels and plastic card displays, E-albums, E-advertisements....[ Read more ]

Recent developments of optical rewritable (ORW) LC photoaligning display and progress in LC photoalignment have made it possible to separate e-paper display-unit and driving optoelectronics part. It has no electrodes, possesses grey scale capability, truly stable, and no power consumption of showing the image with wide viewing angles and high contrast. Our ORW e-paper structure can not only significantly decrease the complexity of device, but also have the similar properties and cost with pulp paper. The high durability and low consumable cost are the high competitive advantages of the ORW e-paper in the market. The most likely but not limited applications are price labels, light printable rewritable paper, labels and plastic card displays, E-albums, E-advertisements.

To make it easier to “print” the image on Optical Rewritable (ORW) Electronic paper (E-paper), the light printer for ORW electronic paper was successfully implemented in the experimental prototype. It consists of three subsystems: software application subsystem, electronics subsystem, and optics subsystem.

The software application subsystem is special for our light printer. This subsystem has been developed to control the function of image editing, data transmission, and print control.

The electronics subsystem is composed by LED control unit and LCD module unit. Besides powerful circuits for LED control, a firmware unit has been correspondingly set inside light printer to play the role of buffering the data from computer and direct controlling the print image.

The optics subsystem is constituted by a light source, an optical transmitter unit and a light print head. We use cheap, low power consuming and high efficient blue LED instead of expensive and high power consuming mercury lamps or lasers as an alternative exposure light source. An optimized design of optical transmitter is implemented to utilize up to 90 percent of the output light from light source. By using a transmissive super-twisted-nematic(STN) liquid crystal display (LCD) optimized for our light source as the light print head, it is very easy to hold and change the image, which is unimaginable when we use lithographic pattern mask.

All the main architecture and principles of sub-systems are illustrated in this work together with experiments and results.