Fujitsu Next-Gen FLEPia Color Ereader Revealed [Video]

Fujitsu has been churning away at its FLEPia color e-paper technology for years now, and the company brought the latest fruits of that hard work to the e-Book Expo Tokyo in the form of a prototype ereader. The new 8-inch cholesteric FLEPia panel, DigInfo reports, boosts brightness, contrast and color accuracy over its predecessor, as well as offering speedier screen refresh rates.

In comparison to the Fujitsu FLEPia Lite, which the company put on sale last year, the new prototype is lighter at 220g and considerably thinner, too. That's aided by the fact that cholesteric displays don't require backlighting or any polarizing, filtering or reflecting layers. Meanwhile, the OS has been changed, from Windows CE to an unspecified Linux build.

According to Fujitsu's engineers, the color range that the FLEPia panel can display is a conscious decision, balancing performance and breadth. "There is a trade-off between writing speed and display colors," the company says, "and while it is 4,096 colors and 0.7 seconds right now, if we reduce the writing speed we can make a full color display."

Currently, the display runs at 157 dpi, with over a 34-percent reflection ratio, 8:1 contrast ratio and 20-percent NTSC color coverage. The prototype can display JPEG, PDF and EPUB documents, though obviously that's a limit of the software rather than the FLEPia panel itself. No word on when Fujitsu might slot it into a commercial ereader, at this stage.

[via The Digital Reader]