E-Ink-Info has a detailed interview with Johan Feenstra, Liquavista’s CTO. The display can operate in transmissive, reflective or transflective modes and is extremely power efficient. Here is one of the questions:
Q: Why do you offer both color and monochrome displays? Isn’t it better to focus on color at this stage?
Clearly being able to offer full-color is a big differentiator w.r.t existing technologies. The transition from monochrome to color is relatively easy for our technology. We feel, however, that the monochrome version already has significant user benefits in the much faster UI and the improved optical performance. Our expectation is that the market for people that want to simply have a monochrome reader for reading books will stay for quite some time still. Main trend in this area will be price pressure, driving the price of such readers down pretty rapidly. Given the fact that electrowetting displays have the same cost structure as LCDs and can be made in the same fabs means that we are ideally positioned to follow this expected price erosion, or even drive it.
There are several videos on the site you’ll want to look at as well.
So these guys are in pre-production with black and white and prototype with colour. How does their tech differ from the Pixel Qi screen, 3Qi, that is already in production and due in devices this year? What are the pros and cons of the Liquavista tech versus the Pixel Qi tech? Which applications are each better suited for based on the information currently available?