While most of us think of eink displays as being suitable for reading or simple uses, display company Pixel Qi had different ideas with a recent demonstration at Computex.

The “3qi” display technology is an eInk laptop screen offering  three displays, a low power black and white one for reading documents, and two colour modes, indoor and out, which allows for some interesting applications.

Pixel Qi was founded by former OLPC (one laptop per child) CTO Mary Lou Jepsen.  “What you’re looking at is a screen that’s entirely reflective,” said John Ryan, chief operating officer. “It’s just running like e-paper so that it’s running on the ambient light. It’s not fighting the office light , it’s not fighting the sunlight. That makes it better for reading but it also cuts the power consumption. The backlight in the screen is typically the largest power drain in any notebook computer.”

A video demo of the technology is here: