It seems that Siemens has pulled out one from the hat. Now, I've wondered what it would be like to be reading a news paper with video clips in it before, Siemens' researchers have gone and actually made it happen.

According to this story the paper thin screens are able to project any form of recorded video content as available on our modern day monitors and t.v. screens with a little bit of hazyness. Seems astounding.

The implications of this will be the slow loss of the written word. Imagine picking up a box of serials, with instructions of usage, on the back of the box playing a demonstration movie instead of having out a few paragraphs on the most enticingly mouthwatering way to eat your crunchies. Or, imagine handing out your business card with the rear face playing out a video of yourself making a presentation on your product or service. Now that really would make an impact.

Someday you may just end up staring at someone while on the rapid transport system and the person being stared at would find it 'very normal' because he/she has regular TV broadcasting being played out all over the jacket. We'll just have to wait and watch out for the innovative ways this new material will be used in the future once mass production commences.

The first thing I thought of was picking up a paper and seeing a moving wanted poster, right out of Harry Potter. Truth stranger than fiction, huh?

I do not think this will kill the written word (by itself, anyway). People are already inundated with TV and Internet video. Also, it will be quite expensive to use on food packaging for some time. The article I read said about 27 Pounds per square meter. What, $60 a sheet?

Heard about something kinda like this a while ago in Popular Mechanics...although the application was on a watch, and it was only black and white. It used magnetics to reverse these little balls. One side of them was white, the other black. And it was really thin. Not to mention that you get much higher definition than your average LCD watch.

Harry Potter style newspapers, that's what I first thought too when I read the newspapers part.

But really, how durable would these screens be? And how safe, what kind of power would they use? Surely you wouldn't need to plug your newspaper into a electric socket... I know they have very small batteries, but would that stick out kind of funny on a newspaper? And what are the exact prices of these screens, enough to not blast the price of any newspaper using them sky-high? I mean surely this would cost at least a hundred dollars, maybe 20 if it's good, but who's going to want to add that cost to a newspaper whe nyou could watch the news for the same effect, maybe buy one as a keep-sake for something as historical as such a hi-tech invention, but honestly, it has to be unreasonable to use this in a newspaper. It could even be dangerous if the current is strong enough...

Well, the article said 27 Pounds ($60?) per 1 meter sheet. If you only use them for the front page photos, you can probably get quite a few newspapers out of one sheet, so add only, say 20 cents per newspaper to the cost, which can be made up by one more advertisement. The newspapers are almost all ads these days anyway. The newsstand price is not what the paper costs; papers have sold at a loss for years. The ads pay for the production.

Durability I cannot speak to, but they are aparently very low power and I know there are paper-thin batteries in production. They should last long enough for anyone but my mother to read them (she piles up papers for weeks), but I would imagine library archiving will be difficult.

What they should do is put a small mylar solar-cell on every paper so you can recharge them .

No, you porbably wouldn't need to plug it in either...recently, someone's developed ultra-thin, organic solar cells, which could be put on clothing to maybe power an iPod, so maybe they could go on a paper too.

People start to underestimate the power of paper.

1. Paper doesn't have defective pixels
2. Paper can have a lot of damage and be still readable, try that with epaper
3. Paper doesn't need a powersource
4. Paper lasts much longer than a screen
5. Paper can be folded and put away
6. Paper is cheap and it is throwawayable.
7. Paper can be written on with about everything, you don't need a special stylus.
8. Paper can cut in about every size thinkable, and therefor has a lot of uses, tags, covers etc etc

Here ends my reasoning about why paper owns.

I dont think we really need this technology. So many kids are already "reading deficient" and replacing print with video is just a bad idea. Oh well, we'll have to see. In my opinion it also seems a bit expensive to add to a newspaper. But, I suppose there could be some cool technical uses. Maybe advertisements in a newspaper versus stories/pictures in a newspaper.

I, too, thought of Harry Potter right away! xD Could imagine hanging myself on the wall and moving around .. would be sorta cool.

You non-recycling person you.

And Kaputnik, you are full of it recently. Where do you phish for all this informatio

Cool though.

Hmm, I want to know what these screens look like. Even if they are paper-thin, they may not have the properties of paper, like being able to bend and being non-shiny (If the screen is shiny, lights can reflect off of it into your eyes and prevent you from reading parts of the screen).

I can't imagine having this kind of technology in the near future. It seems like a giant leap that is too giant. A lot of things you see only in sci-fi movies would come true with this.