Posted on 12/28/2004 7:01:23 AM PST by bedolido
An image scanner built into a piece of flexible plastic little bigger than a credit card has been developed in Japan.
The idea is that you will plug the scanner into a mobile phone which will both provide power for it and act as its display and storage medium. And because it is flexible, it will let you copy just about anything, even if it is on a curved surface such as an open book or the label on a wine bottle.
The lightweight device, unveiled last week at an electronics conference in San Francisco, is the latest development in the field of flexible organic electronics, which exploits the electronic properties of conducting plastics.
Light-emitting plastics are already being used in flexible computer displays, and organic LED-based TV screens are in development. But the new flexible scanner is using light-sensitive organic components instead of light-generating ones.
The new device, developed in Japan by electrical engineer Takao Someya and colleagues at the University of Tokyo, comprises a polymer matrix in which thousands of light-sensitive plastic photodiodes have been deposited 700 micrometres apart beneath a grid of plastic transistors.
No swiping allowed Each photodiode produces a current in response to light input, which its accompanying transistor stores as a charge. This can then be read into the memory of a mobile phone and converted into an image.
To use the sheet image scanner, it has to be placed on the area of interest, such as a bottle or an open book. It can only capture the image it covers; it cannot be swiped across it like an office hand scanner.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Now they need to build a printer that can duplicate whatever they scan.
I think the technology is cool, but I wonder what application there is to scan small scraps of a document?
The excerpt mentions wine labels...I have never been on a cell in a restaurant and wished I could send a pic of part of the label.
Business cards, maybe.
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