From  PCWorld

The University of Cincinnati recently announced a new e-Display design, and it’s a huge breakthrough for electronic devices called Electrofluidic Display Technology (EFD). Created through a collaboration between U of C, Dupont, Sun Chemical and Gamma Dynamics, it’s promising excellent readability in bright sunlight, high contrast color and the ability to show high-speed content, and massively reduced power consumption.

For a really good overview of what EFD is all about, here’s a blurb from the article over at UC.edu:

"Before describing UC’s new “zero-power” design, it’s helpful to understand the basic design of existing electronic devices.

"Think of an e-reader as a bunch of micro-sized buckets (or pixels) of mixed black and white paint, where you can move the black and white pigments to the top or the bottom of the bucket. Just like mixing paint, the process is not fast. That’s somewhat close to how today’s e-readers work. The slow movement of these particles forms the text and grayscale images you see on an e-reader. These devices use practically no power unless you are switching the screen. It’s actually making use of ambient light to make the particles visible. When the user turns the device on or off or switches a page, he’s electronically “mixing the paint” (or pixels) to create the overall image or text page.

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