A bright new page in portable displays

Wouldn´t it be a lot easier to read a laptop´s screen if the words looked as if they were printed on paper, as in a newspaper or magazine? Well, that is the case for a trio of unique displays about to hit the market. Of the three new displays, the closest to hitting the market is a liquid-crystal display (LCD) from Kent Displays Inc., Kent, Ohio. Called cholesteric because the liquid-crystal material it uses was originally derived from animal cholesterol, this LCD will be a full-color screen. The other two displays are based on entirely new concepts of how an electronic screen should work. One is the Gyricon from Xerox Corp.´s Pale Alto Research Center (PARC) in California, which can be rolled up into long sheets and cut by designers to fit the application. E Ink, the third type of display, is being developed by the eponymous E Ink Inc., a Cambridge-based spin-off of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Even thinner than the Gyricon, it uses small transparent spheres filled with a liquid blue dye in which white chips float