The New Scientist is reporting about an flexible plastic image scanner thats only a little bigger than a credit-card:

“The idea is that you will plug the scanner into a mobile phone which will both provide power for it and act as its display and storage medium. And because it is flexible, it will let you copy just about anything, even if it is on a curved surface such as an open book or the label on a wine bottle.

The lightweight device, unveiled last week at an electronics conference in San Francisco, is the latest development in the field of flexible organic electronics, which exploits the electronic properties of conducting plastics.

Light-emitting plastics are already being used in flexible computer displays, and organic LED-based TV screens are in development. But the new flexible scanner is using light-sensitive organic components instead of light-generating ones.

The new device, developed in Japan by electrical engineer Takao Someya and colleagues at the University of Tokyo, comprises a polymer matrix in which thousands of light-sensitive plastic photodiodes have been deposited 700 micrometres apart beneath a grid of plastic transistors.

[...]

Someya says it could be on the market in three years with sizes varying up to A4. A 7-centimetre-square scanner, small enough to fit in a wallet, will cost about $10, he predicts.

So far, Someya has only gotten images out of the scanner using complicated bench-top electronics. He says his next step will be to develop a custom chip that will read out the data and feed it into a mobile phone, or to a USB keyring-like storage device for viewing later on a computer”

2>

New Scientist: Flexible scanner works on curved surfaces