One of the technologies that everyone has been raving about is Pixel Qi‘s transflexive hybrid display that gives you the benefits of a traditional fast responding and vivid LCD screen and a low power low eye strain reflective e-paper display.  The technology can be manufactured on existing LCD fabrication plants which means it can easily transition to a high volume low cost product, and it can switch from a 2.5 watt LED backlit color mode to a 0.5 watt reflective mode which has very significant implications on laptop battery life.  So a Netbook that currently gets 10 hours of battery life might expect to see 13 hours of battery life in reflective mode.  Future refinements can potentially trim reflective mode power consumption down to 0.1 watts.

Another technology that really wowed attendees at CES this year was Mirasol’s color e-paper, which might be coming to an e-book reader soon.  The technology gets several days of battery life as people expect from their e-book readers but it is a reflective color technology that is easy on the eyes.  Aside from the addition of color, the refresh rate is fast enough to support animations and even video though it’s obviously not as vivid or smooth as a conventional LCD display.  But it’s certainly leaps and bounds over the annoying 1+ second refresh times of typical black and white e-book readers.

Engadget has more details, pictures, and videos on Mirasol’s color e-paper.

Jason Hiner also interviews some interesting people here at CES, and his interviews reminded me of the Skiff e-book reader which is merely black and white, but it’s a very large display, very slim, and very high resolution which seems like the perfect replacement for a newspaper and books.  The only thing that would make it even more awesome is if it were color while maintaining that resolution and form factor.