Kent Displays: Beauty Skin Deep
Our cell phones and MP3 players will soon have personalized display skins, thanks to innovative technology by Kent Displays in Ohio. These electronic skins allow users to change the color of their electronic device to match an individual's mood or clothing choice without using battery life.
Kent Displays develops and manufactures Reflex™ displays that are sunlight readable, reflective displays that offer a display viewing experience without the typical distracting LCD scan rate and bright backlight. Instead, Reflex displays use ambient light to reflect an image from the display, thus allowing a more comfortable reading experience similar to paper.
Recently, Kent Displays was named a finalist in the NorTech Innovation Awards in the category for Advanced Materials, with the winners to be announced in an upcoming issue of Crain's Cleveland Business.
The NorTech Innovation Awards define innovation as transformation of technical and scientific knowledge into novel products, services and processes which result in a positive economic impact to the organization, the community, the country along with our regional and global technology economies. Innovation embodies the union of creativity, expressed in the discovery of new scientific and technological knowledge, with commercialization, which includes all of the efforts necessary to successfully bring the novel product, service or process to the marketplace to achieve economic impact.
But beauty is more than skin deep at Kent Displays, whose patented technology was licensed by Fujitsu for its new color e-book reader Flepia that is available now in Japan.
Founded in 1993 as the result of a joint venture between Kent State University and Manning Ventures (also a shareholder of IP.com Inc.), Kent Displays, Inc. is a world leader in the research, development, and manufacture of Reflex™ liquid crystal displays for unique, sustainable applications. Its revolutionary Reflex LCDs retain an image without power and offer superior optical characteristics including sunlight-readability and wide viewing angles. In October 2008, Kent Displays installed a new roll-to-roll production line at corporate headquarters in Kent, Ohio, to mass produce Reflex LCDs from rolls of plastic. The line is the first of its kind in the world and produces no waste water/chemicals and less solvent emissions than sheet-based processes. The flexibility, durability and exceptional thinness of the resulting plastic displays, combined with no power image retention and superior optical characteristics, result in a versatile, environmentally-friendly alternative to traditional paper and backlit LCDs – with nearly endless applications. The company is committed to sustainability through technology innovation.
