The E-book Reader Display

 One complaint some people had about early e-book readers was that they found it difficult to read words on an LCD display. Some users complained that longer reading sessions put too much strain on their eyes. Amazon's solution to this problem was to use electronic ink technology. The Kindle's electronic ink screen looks more like paper than an LCD screen. It reflects light in much the same way that paper does.

A company called E Ink in Cambridge, Massachusetts, developed the technology the Kindle relies upon to display text and images. Rather than use the liquid crystals you'd find in an LCD or the ionized gas you'd find in a plasma display, electronic ink actually uses millions of microcapsules, only a few microns wide. Each microcapsule contains a clear fluid and thousands of white and black particles. The white particles carry a positive magnetic charge, and the black particles have a negative charge.

It's these positively and negatively charged particles inside the microcapsules that make electronic ink displays possible. An array of thousands of tiny electrodes lies beneath the electronic ink display. When an electrode emits a negative charge, it repels the negatively charged black balls, pushing them to the top of the microcapsule. At the same time, the negative charge attracts the positively charged white particles to the bottom of the microcapsule. When the electrode emits a positive charge, the white and black particles switch places and the screen appears to be blank.

Working together, thousands of electrodes and millions of microcapsules generate the text and images you can see on an electronic ink display. Through precise charges the Kindle can display a range of grays to provide shading in images. You can even adjust the Kindle's font settings to display text in a larger or smaller font size. The Kindles' electronic ink screens can also render images but having only 16 shades of gray limits the detail of any pictures. E Ink now makes color versions of its displays, but as of 2021 none of Amazon's readers use it.

The Kindle uses less energy to generate a page view than a comparable LCD or plasma screen, because it pulls power from its battery only during the initial page generation. Once the image is on the page it can stay there without requiring electricity. It doesn't require more power until the user changes the page view. This feature is what lets the Kindle's battery provide power for weeks at a time on a single charge.

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