E-ink watches are the latest development in wristwatches, using the latest development in electronic displays. There have been many developments in watch design before, but this one is visually a very big change indeed, it could be the biggest. First came the LED watch display, followed closely by the LCD watch display. Now it is the turn of the e-ink display to be the catalyst for a whole new range of wristwatch designs.

Although previous digital watch displays used different technologies to display the time the size and format of the displays were similar. E-ink has changed the size and appearance considerably. Watch designers have been given possibilities to explore, this has produced some radical new watch designs.

E-ink, an abbreviation of electronic ink, is a proprietary material which is processed into a film so that it can integrated into electronic displays. This revolutionary concept, electronic ink, fuses chemistry, physics and electronics to create this new material.

Designers of watches are making use of the fact that large curved e-ink displays can be formed now. This has resulted in watches that can curve around the wrist, creating a whole new range of wristband style watches. The results are some very futuristic looking watches that will surely be seen in science fiction films shortly. But unlike the the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which prompted the production of the LED watch featured in it, these watches are available for you to buy first.

Displays have up until recently have been only in black and white or gray scales, but e-ink displays are here now and will no doubt appear in e-ink watches too. Presently the e-ink displays you are most likely to have seen are not in watches, but more likely to be found in e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle reader.

Another advantage of this latest type of digital display is its low power consumption. Displays are bi-stable, which means they use most power in the process of changing the display, once there it can stay there for weeks or months with minimal power used. This is particularly useful for e-readers, but also helps in watch displays too.

Watch design in these new wristwatches as wristbands has unisex appeal in many watches on offer at present. Probably color will determine who buys what watch at the moment, but expect to see watches designed to appeal to the men’s and women’s market separately too.

E-ink displays are aimed to look like printed pages, with a natural high contrast between black and white. It is also possible to reverse the displays, so you can either have black letters or numbers on a white background or white letters and numbers on a black background. With a high contrast between black and white, plus the fact that displays are generally bigger, they are easy to read in many conditions, however they do need an external light source to be read, so no good in dark conditions, like many other watches though.