Hans Feil, Etulipa

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT E-paper displays are, by far, best known for the little e-readers people use instead of printed books. The core technology used for those readers is what's also being used for things like meeting room displays and updated bus stop schedule signs that run off batteries and, in some cases, solar chargers. But that's all been in black and white and gray. Color displays, and particularly displays that can do full motion graphics and video playback, have largely stayed in the bucket of future technology. A small Dutch company is well along the path of changing all that - using something called electro-wetting display technology that gets its brightness from the sun, and would be used as low-energy alternatives to big LED video displays used for out of home advertising. In this podcast, I have a detailed chat with Etulipa founder Hans Feil, whose company is rapidly evolving and maturing the technology, and has a big investment and R&D partner in Daktronics, the big South Dakota-based LED manufacturer. We get into what the technology is and how it works, its differences with other kinds of e-paper, how it sets up, and its benefits. The company is still at the advanced R&D stage, but far enough along that it anticipates being in small quantity production next year, through a manufacturing partner in Taiwan. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Hans, thank you very much for joining me. Let's just get right to it. What the heck is electro wetting display technology?  Hans Feil: That's a good question. It's what they call reflective display technology. Of course, you probably know about it already, but if people don't know, the introduction that I made is that I say you probably will have an e-reader, many people have e-readers nowadays and it's black and white and a little bit slow, but you can read it outdoors. If you take your iPad outdoor in the sun, it's difficult to read. We have something like your the display on the e-reader, but then with color and it's fast, and that's the that's the difference. So it's a reflective display technology. It reflects light so there's no back light behind, it doesn't emit light. So if you take our display into the dark, you don't see anything unless you light it up with a back light or front light. So that's for newcomers. If you're a chemist or a physicist or a scientist, I’d probably say it a little bit different, in the sense that what we do is that we manipulates liquids colored oils, and we have a layer colored oils and with little cells with oils and we can make small droplets with it and the size of the droplets we can.  For instance, if you compare to print, many people have ink-jet printers and if they would take a magnifying glass and look at the paper, they're see little cyan, magenta and yellow droplets on the white paper, and what we do is we’re mimicking this printing with cyan, magenta and yellow. So we have a white paper or white reflector, we call it. And we have three layers of glass on top of it with cyan, magenta, and yellow oil and each individual layer, we can switch this oil droplets, making them small or big. And if all the layers are spread, it's black because you don't see anything, all the lights are absorb. And if there are all the droplets are small, white or nearly white and depending on which droplets you switch and can get all the colors of the rainbow, and that's all very low power.  From what I read on your website, unlike traditional, if you wanna call traditional ePaper, what we would know from E-ink displays primarily, this can do 25 frames per second motion, which is quite a bit different because when you see something change on an ePaper screen, it goes nuts for a fraction of a second as it reorganizes itself.  Hans Feil: Yes, and in our case, it doesn't really reorganize, droplets just become big or small and it goes very fast.  Was that a big step t