In the course of AnchorDesk's search for the Next Big Thing in personal tech, I've made a major discovery: the best display ever, bar none. It's cheap. It's portable. It beats the best flat-screen LCDs for resolution and power consumption.

And, it's been proven--for no less than four millennia.

The miracle display is...paper.

DOUBT ME? OK, then why, amid the inexorable proliferation of computers and other forms of electronic information, are we printing, copying, faxing, and otherwise spewing paper at rates that increase as much as 7 percent a year? Oh, and let's consider that delusion we know as the paperless office. I took notes for this column on my PC, then printed them out to write it--this from a man who never met a digital device he didn't like.

If you need any further proof of paper's superiority, follow me to the storied Palo Alto Research Center, aka PARC, where they're proving that, sometimes, the next big thing is really the last old big thing.

In the sincerest form of flattery, PARC--the epicenter of innovation that produced the mouse, the GUI, and Ethernet networking--is making some major strides towards commercializing a new display technology that imitates the best properties of plain old paper.

PARC calls it SmartPaper, one of a rapidly growing number of new, competing display technologies hitting the news and the market, all with a similar ambition: not only to supplant paper by imitating it, but also to replace expensive LCDs--if not in PCs, laptops, and TVs, then at least in cell phones, PDAs, and e-books.

A SHEET OF SmartPaper consists of two pieces of mylar plastic sandwiching millions of tiny polymer beads encapsulated in an oily medium. Each bead is a hair-like 100 microns in diameter. Each is white on one side, black on the other. But what really makes these beads so special is that each one carries a positive charge on one side and a negative one on the other. Pass an electric current over the paper, and you can rotate each encapsulated bead to--voila!--create an image.

Early next year, a two-year-old PARC spinoff, Gyricon Media of Ann Arbor, Mich., plans to launch four beta tests using SmartPaper for signs in retail stores. The Gyricon system consists of software and a network of wirelessly connected SmartPaper signs, which together allow a retailer to change in-store displays directly from its SKU database.

As Gyricon President Dr. Iva Wilson explains, SmartPaper owns several advantages, especially for rendering relatively static content, such as signs or book pages.

One, it's reflective, like paper. You don't need a backlight, and, unlike an LCD, you can view it from an angle and in bright sunlight. Two, unlike a digital display that must be refreshed dozens of times per second, electronic paper is "bi-stable." This means that once you arrange the beads, they remain that way until you rearrange them.

If you're a math whiz, you've already figured out that one plus two equals low power consumption. Electronic paper will run on regular batteries for a long, long time.

THE PARAMOUNT PLUS, however, promises to be price. Dr. Wilson wouldn't say how much a "page" of SmartPaper costs. But logic allows us to safely assume it's a fraction of the $200 or so PC makers plunk down for TFT LCD displays, which must be manufactured under clean room conditions in billion-dollar factories.

Even as SmartPaper is being commercialized as signage for the Kmarts of the world, PARC researchers continue looking for other applications. Because you can roll it, fold it, or curve it, it opens the door to innumerable product and design possibilities previously made impractical, if only by the restrictions of rigid, glass displays.

And because size really does matter when it comes to displays and...well, let's just stick with displays...the low cost and meager power requirements presumably make banner-sized SmartPaper signs not just possible, but practical.

PARC researcher Eric Shrader, for example, showed me a prototype device that is part mouse, part scanner, part SmartPaper printer. The idea would be to swipe the device--think of it as a giant eraser--over one of those utterly brilliant "do not erase" white board deliberations you'll find in the typical office. You'd then tote the device over to another office and reswipe it over a "smart board" to make those ruminations reappear, just like that.

The possibilities don't stop there. What about downloading a map to an oversized piece of SmartPaper? Or today's edition of the New York Times, in all of its broadsheet glory?

MY TAKE on SmartPaper's prospects?

On the plus side: affirmation. The concept of cheaper, electro-mechanical displays is being validated on America's opposite coast, in the form of a similar and rival technology birthed at MIT. The New Englanders call their technology "electronic ink displays." And they, too, have already commercialized it, via a start-up called E Ink Corp. in Cambridge, Mass.

On the minus side: resolution. Right now, SmartPaper is capable of displaying at the equivalent of just 75 dpi--positively Gutenbergian compared to the 600 dpi quality offered by today's cheapest ink jet printers or the 120 dpi you get on a typical computer display. The SmartPaper signs I saw in the PARC labs were gray, grainy, and otherwise visually unimpressive.

That's only one reason SmartPaper won't replace that LCD in your laptop anytime soon. The other is that it can't refresh rapidly enough to be used for word processing, let alone video or any other kind of similarly dynamic image.

Nevertheless, with SmartPaper appearing in stores soon, it'll be interesting to see which technology wins the battle over signage and other conventional "paper" apps. For the foreseeable future anyway, I'll bet against the 20-year-old upstart--and on the 4,000-year-old champ.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Author
Patrick Houston is the Editorial Director at AnchorDesk.