Advertisement

Sony's 13-inch 'Digital Paper' is just like paper, except it costs $1,100

Despite years of development, E Ink's displays haven't yet replaced traditional paper everywhere. Sony's trying to change that with this 13.3-inch Digital Paper device intended for legal, educational and business environments and after we got a brief demo last year it's finally ready to go on sale in May. The only downside? Its pricetag, currently set at a cool $1,100. To answer the question of who could possibly afford or want such an expensive piece of paper that displays PDFs and accepts handwriting input, Sony is introducing Digital Paper at the American Bar Association Tech Show (which is apparently a thing) in Chicago.

The draw for Digital Paper is that it's very light at 12.6 oz and has a high resolution (1,200 x 1,600) / 16-level grayscale display with touch controls, stylus input and no backlight. That helps out easy reading in the daytime and no need to scroll or zoom around documents like on smaller tablets. Sony also claims a three week battery life with recharging via AC or USB, while documents can be loaded over WiFi and stored on its 4GB of internal memory or an SD card. It's still way out of our price range for note taking, but if Mark Zuckerberg comes knocking with a billion dollar deal in hand, it might be good to have around.