What Is Electronic Ink (E Ink)?

Electronic ink is the future of paper. It's a new technology that will change how we read, write and store information forever. Electronic ink has been around for a while but has yet to be widely used you might have seen it in e-readers like Kindles or Nooks—those devices use electronic ink displays to show you what's on their pages. E Ink Corporation has developed a proprietary electronic ink (E Ink) and electronic paper display (EPD) technology. Electronic ink technology is employed in mobile devices such as e-readers, smartphones, smart cards, and watches. Because digital e-readers don't require color, E Ink is utilized extensively. Grayscale is used in the majority of digital books, with rare exceptions. E Ink is like a big, black-and-white party with a bunch of white and black balloons. When you say "party," we think of people dancing, drinking, and having delight. But what if we told you that E Ink is a party? It's true! E Ink is a big, black-and-white party with a bunch of white and black balloons. It's an optical element of billions of tiny microcapsules containing negatively charged black particles and positively charged white particles suspended in a clear fluid. The combined particles are subject to electrical impulses that cause them to move up or down when they receive a positive/negative charge pattern. And when those particles move up or down, they display text and images for users! This kind of technology has been around since 1997, when two MIT scientists were looking for a way to make displays that didn't require backlighting or power-hungry electronics. They found their answer in electrophoretic ink—a substance that moves through an electric field applied across its surface. The first product using this technology was released in 2004: an ebook reader called Iris (which sounds like something out of Harry Potter)