Video: Ripping open Esquire’s digital ink cover

September 16th, 2008, 6:35 am · Post a Comment · posted by Tamara Chuang, a.k.a. The Gadgetress

Over the weekend, I walked into a Border’s and spotted the Esquire magazine with the ‘worlds first e-ink cover.” Of course I had to buy it because 1) I’m a tech head and 2) I collect magazines.

I’m a week late but I decided to blog it anyway — just to save everyone else the effort of ripping open the cover. Besides, there were only 100,000 special covers produced so you may have trouble finding one.

Esquire’s effort, sponsored by Ford, uses two small panels of digital paper, one for the cover and one for the Ford ad inside the cover. It uses the same e-ink technology as Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader.

If you separate the electronics from the magazine, you end up with two blinking panels connected to a circuit board with six batteries, a microchip and lots of technical stuff. According to Make, the do-it-yourself magazine, e-ink package included:

A Microchip PIC 12f629 which is flash programmable, 8 pin.
6 lithium coin cell CR2016s, 3 volts each.
2 e-ink screens with flex connections.
The PCB was made by Forewin
Half thickness, 2 layer board (FR4).
More details at Make’s blog.

Opening up the cover, the panels, circuit board and electronics were held in place with plain-old Scotch tape. It looked like an employee physically taped everything into place.

After taking all the tape off, I was able to separate the digital ink and paper and take a closer look. The panels are like blinking LED screens. It was actually a bit disappointing because the images you see from the cover are pre-printed on a transparent paper or are printed on the panel.

I took about 10 minutes of video but have edited it down to around 3minutes. Commentary is myself and my curious DH, a techie himself: Click here if below link isn’t working.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

Related stories:

Marketing ploy of the year: Esquire’s digital ink cover (CNET)
Esquire’s eInk cover a 21st Century Flop (Wired)
Esquire eInk Abuse Exposed (TreeHugger)
Esquire magazine unveils cover with electronic ink (AP)
How the eInk cover was made (Esquire)

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