Gizmodo had a link to a flexible book scanner, basically a sheet of plastic filled with organic photodiodes and phototransistors that act as a scanner. Chasing down links for a meatier description, I found Semiconductor International – Organic Devices on Flexible Substrates Advance – 11/1/2004 – Semiconductor International – CA476270

In other work to be presented at IEDM, researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed a large-area, flexible and lightweight sheet image scanner integrated with organic field-effect transistors and organic photodiodes (Figure ). The scanner is made of cells that consist of an organic transistor and organic photodetector, with an effective sensing area of 50 x 50 um2. The entire imager has an effective sensing area of 2 in. and resolution of 36 dots per inch (dpi), with the potential to go up to 250 dpi. The photodetectors distinguish between black and white by sensing the difference in reflected light from black and white parts of an image. The thin-film pentacene transistors have 180 um channel lengths and electron mobilities of 0.7 cm2/Vsec.

The current 36dpi resolution isn’t very interesting, but 250dpi sounds pretty good. I wonder if it will be here before electronic paper…