This Month's Spectrum Summary:

(The following is an excerpt from the April 2003 issue of Spectrum. Spectrum is a proprietary monthly briefing published exclusively for the clients of I.T. Strategies, Inc. © 2003)

Display Choices Multiply; But Do We Have Room For Still More Messages?

This month I.T. Strategies consultants debrief from recent electronic display-related field trips, and brain-storm the future as it relates to digital hardcopy.

They report that at Sign Expo in Las Vegas around six companies demonstrated electronic displays. The market is not growing rapidly. Besides demand, there are other barriers such as outdoor billboard restrictions in most states of the U.S. At the same time, technology offerings are expanding. The solvent ink jet field is already crowded. One effect may be increased competition driving down equipment and ink pricing. But electronic display in time will impact hardcopy display. Because of its many capabilities, such as motion, day-sharing of space by multiple advertisers, and remote content changing, it creates an incremental as well as a replacement market. Already electronic display has become common in stores, subway and other transit cars, and elsewhere.

To date electronic display has been implemented primarily in small format applications. Larger formats get very expensive. Information overload is seen as the downside of electronic displays pervading so many public places. This does motivate advertisers to spend more and more for a limited supply of our attention, which is good for traditional print as well as advanced display products, at least in the near term.

We discuss the display technologies, outlining the status, advantages, and disadvantages of the LED, LCD, OLED (overviewed in more depth in Spectrum, November 2001 issue). Smart paper is an intriguing newcomer. It does not necessarily compete with electronic display since it is aimed primarily at hardcopy rather than electronic display. This raises the question of whether sufficient development resources will be available to commercialize the technology. Much progress has been made, evidenced by demonstration prototypes fielded by E-Ink, Gyricon, and Magink/Mitsubishi. The latter group has demonstrated full-color outdoor e-paper billboards. The others offer portable, monochrome text that has been used in newspaper vending kiosks and outdoor display.

Cost/benefit issues are discussed, moving on to some deeper, cultural issues. Since digital display and smart paper are significant both as a business and as a communication vehicle, there are bound to be cultural value issues. This is expected to significantly slow the growth of these technologies and cushion their impact on today's digital printing markets.