HP scientists come up with plastic displays

Boffins working for the maker of expensive printer ink HP, think they have come up with something that will make glass displays a thing of the past.

Carl Taussig, the head of HP Labs’ Information Surfaces Lab, has told Cnet that in a decade glass will be as much a memory for displays as cathode ray tubes (CRTs) are today. Plastic substrates are cheaper than glass which is currently used in displays.

Taussig and his team have built super-thin plastic 50 microns thick which is half the thickness of a piece of paper and 40 times lighter than glass.

Since the plastic is flexible, it can be put on spools and put into a machine and have its resistors printed onto it.

So it all ends up being faster, lighter and cheaper than anything that is on the market now.

Of course if it arranges its printing costs using the same model it has for printer ink, each screen will cost a million pounds.