Here's a summary of my visit to E Ink's booth at SID 2012. E Ink had a very large booth, showing dozens of E-readers and other devices that sport E Ink panels. Lot's of these used Ink-In-Motion, E Ink's segmented displays (rather then the active-matrix ones used in e-readers for example).
The largest display at the booth, and one of the most interesting ones was the hybrid EPD/LED traffic light concept. It uses a large circular e-paper panel, color filters and LEDs (in an outer ring). The hybrid traffic light provides higher visibility in direct sunlight than regular traffic lights (who need to "overpower" the sunlight). E Ink's concept uses 24 LEDs vs 200 in a regular traffic light. Great idea. Just below the traffic light E Ink built a small E Ink crosswalk - showing a nice usage of rugged shatterproof panels.
More cool displays on show were the Kayak and Bike computer displays - showing things like Distance, speed, weather info and more. Those displays are efficient and readable under direct sunlight conditions (of course not very suitable for night travels).
Our final video below shows the Neolux solar powered E Ink panel. They say it has "infinite lifetime" - which is great for some retail solutions, and obviously being environmentally friendly (or sort of) never hurts.
E Ink also showed the Rosie eMusic stand that won the 2011 good design award. That's a very nice idea that makes a lot of sense. As a hobby musician, I really think that's clever, especially if you get software that can automatically turn the pages for you. Of course this can be done with a tablet, but the E Ink display can make for a thinner, long lasting device that's very readable.
I forgot to take a picture or a video of the color displays, but E Ink did show some Triton panels. They actually say that the new panels have better color saturation and performance then before, and they call these Triton Gen 2 displays. It seems that they are still not good enough for Amazon to use in their Kindle e-readers, but hopefully that's just a matter of time.
Oh, and finally, the most exciting display: the wexler Flex One e-reader with the flexible plastic-based E Ink panel. The whole device is flexible and shatterproof, very cool. I already posted about this last week, but here's that cool video showing the Flex One in action: