As written by others, probably due to eink the company itself.
I love eink. I have several readers, a remarkable which I adore.
I wouldn't mind using a slow-refresh display for coding. The price just makes it impossible. Having color for this task, even if washed out, would be an absolute boon.
As for all eink announcements, they may have the tech, but they might make it so so expensive that nobody is going to translate it into mass production product. Without volume, we'll never get better prices.
Been watching eink for a lifetime now. I read each announcement as a red herring at this point..
> Been watching eink for a lifetime now. I read each announcement as a red herring at this point..
I didn't even want to read the announcement, because I already know it's showcasing exactly the tech that I want but will never be made available. I've had half a dozen E-ink devices and I love them. But it seems like the company behind the tech has an active incentive to keep it out of consumers' hands.
I can confirm (take it with a grain of salt, I can't give you written sources but it matches the experience of many people). I previously worked in the display and industrial PC industry, and we tried to buy e-ink panels. The reseller would only sell them to us after giving them a detailed business plan. The sample we got had labels scratched from the chips (OK this is actually more common than you might think). And I had a strong suspicion that it was artificially limited to a lower color depth than possible [1].
Even further, a Chinese colleague hinted that they will never sell to you if you are doing anything in the consumer space (except you are one of the big e-reader makers of course). And that the traditional display companies could retool pretty quickly to make e-ink instead, but won't. It's all very very odd to me. I would suspect a cartel, but it doesn't make any sense - e-ink is too slow and to ugly to really cannibalize laptop and monitor sales. We had good use cases: industrial PCs, outdoors informational displays, and so on. But apparantly not good enough for e-ink.
----
[1] There is a look-up-table in the microcontroller that tells the display how much current to use to switch a pixel to a given color. It depends on the previous color of the pixel and the temperature. These "waveforms" or "wavetables" are proprietary and secret. It looks like they are just "good enough" and small enough to fit into the cheap MCU. I suspect you could get better results by using larger and better tuned tables, and I've seen a hobbyist actually get higher color depth by using their own waveforms.
> And that the traditional display companies could retool pretty quickly to make e-ink instead, but won't. [...] e-ink is too slow and to ugly to really cannibalize laptop and monitor sales.
I don't think it would cannibalize these sales, but I do think that if e-ink was cheaper and competitive with LCD, it would be everywhere.
As it stands though, LCD and probably OLED will overtake any use cases that e-ink would have had. The company behind e-ink dropped the ball there, thinking too highly and too exclusively of their own product. It's not that fancy, like, bruh.
You might be surprised at how many companies get comfortable servicing a commercial niche and just choose not to pursue consumer growth. Without pursuing it, the potential value is hypothetical and internally it can be hard to build a compelling case for mass marketization.
There is a lot of effort required to scale up technologies to the point that it is affordable for consumers. In the software space I see it with solutions (think $500+/year/seat licensing) that could be broadly useful, but the company doesn’t want to make intuitive or bug free (enterprise software users will tolerate a lot of abuse). In the hardware space, there is a risk of building a million units of something that doesn’t sell (think Surface RT).
They are either impossibly incompetent or there is something about the technology that makes mass availability in different form factors not viable and our laymen understanding doesn't see it.
> They are either impossibly incompetent or there is something about the technology that makes mass availability in different form factors not viable and our laymen understanding doesn't see it.
You are correct, it is the equivalent of me as a display engineer coming here and saying "Cray computers has an active incentive to keep it out of consumer's hands" or alleging "Microsoft is blocking progress in the operating system industry using their patent". If you examine my comment history, you'll see I've tried repeatedly before on HN to explain why the physics of electrophoresis is the dominant limitation in the industry but that is apparently harder to understand and harder to accept, whereas people saying things like "the company behind the tech has an active incentive to keep it out of consumers' hands." or "the technology is locked by a company that doesn't innovate nor mass produce their tech. " without citations or any evidence is accepted as the gospel truth. :-)
Why does my 12 year old kindle-keyboard refresh so much faster and better than any eink hobby display that I can buy? Do you think there is any hope of this changing?
The panels are very similar. Amazon made their own driver board, and they put a lot of work into tuning it. The ones you can buy for hobbyists have very cheap driver boards that are merely "good enough".
Why they can't be a dollar or two more expensive and have better components, or why they can't just release the firmware source so people can improve it, I have no idea. I would almost say they are intentionally limiting it, but I've seen the same behavior from single-board-computer vendors, for example. It's really short sighted.
The operating system (based on Linux) is open source. For some reason, people call the OS image firmware when it is on an "embedded" device. I rather mean the firmware of the e-ink driver board, which is a trade secret. I don't know, maybe it is not even firmware in an MCU, but they have a dedicated driver chip and it just has the look-up-tables. Anyway, the secret sauce that tells you how to drive the display cells.
> I rather mean the firmware of the e-ink driver board, which is a trade secret. I don't know, maybe it is not even firmware in an MCU, but they have a dedicated driver chip and it just has the look-up-tables. Anyway, the secret sauce that tells you how to drive the display cells.
"Secret sauce that tells you how to drive the display cells"? You mean like a voltage table that is also present inside every LCD or OLED? The difference would be that the electrophoretic display would need a much bigger table so it would have to be kept on the SoC since it can't possibly fit into a single voltage driver circuit. That's not software, that's just a big table of voltages that's hardcoded for each unique panel. Is that what you think is "secret sauce"? Do you also want to extract that table inside each LCD drive circuit as well? I guess you could use it to make your LCD or OLED panel show brighter colors but at the risk of burning and damaging the crystals. I imagine the same risk would also be true for electrophoretic panels or anything where you can change the physical voltage that is being applied to the material.
It's actually simpler than a table of voltages. It's a series of trinary values that indicate whether to use positive, negative or zero voltage. The actual voltage used is static (even the specialized EPDC PMIC (which _is_ a separate chip) doesn't allow changing it on the devices I've seen). The waveform (as they call the lookup table) is sometimes actually stored on a separate flash chip soldered on to the display's built-in cable. Years ago I wrote a tool to decode and convert the proprietary formats used by the E Ink corporation for these: https://github.com/fread-ink/inkwave
Just curious, I previously saw claims on HN that E-Ink is a very brutal cruel company that is evil and attacks everybody. That didn't line up with how their staff, at least the materials science guys, seemed to be when I encountered them at SID. I've been asking for evidence for this on HN. Did they try to take down your tool or anything like that?
Yes, but at the same time I think it is more complicated than a table of voltages. I don't know about the OG kindle, but more recent e-ink displays have a multi-parameter look up table. The applied voltage and duration also depends on this history of the cell (the current color you think it is showing) and the temperature. Depending on how many color and temperature steps you use, the tables can become very big.
In hobbyist displays, the tables are very simple, and I'm pretty sure this is one source of quality differences.
> Why does my 12 year old kindle-keyboard refresh so much faster and better than any eink hobby display that I can buy? Do you think there is any hope of this changing?
I have no idea what you mean by "refresh so much faster and better" or what an "eink hobby display" is. To me, you can buy the same panel Kindle uses on the market and you can drive it with various different controllers and the "update latency" (electrophoretic panels don't refresh) will be different.
Conspiracy theory: it's because e-ink technology has military (stealth / penaid) applications. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=499TkWOl4PM; then picture a "chameleon jet-fighter" that syncs its color to the surrounding sky; or better yet, a chameleon missile. Without losing range due to needing to power active panels.)
I don't necessarily mean to imply that the military is restricting the tech for competitive reasons; but rather just that E Ink Corporation might be price-anchoring relative to what their biggest customer is willing to pay.
(See also: why "holographic glitter" is so expensive, compared to other metallic glitters. Holo-glitter paint is an effective radar diffuser; and, more obviously, the glitter itself is literally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure) !)
Another conspiracy theory: the LCD cartel has been paying them not to compete. Given any actual difficulties yet to be worked out for mass production of eink (and there's always something), they may just be making more money by threatening to compete with LCD displays than they could by actually doing so.
Holo glitter works in the radar domain. So, its passive tech which has an effect.
EInk has a refresh time. Which is a significant mismatch to the flight speed of devices which seek to mask themselves against changing background. More to the point, optical detection is the least worry in this space. by the time it's visible in motion, its already a problem. '
For on-the-ground, its easier to put it under a canopy.
EInk does nothing for radar, or thermal imaging. So your proposed conspiracy is to defeat human eyes, which rarely if ever are the first-spotters. The circumstances where using radar breaches your own privacy are understood. I would expect an ML vision system could defeat this anyway. (and I say that as a bit of a long-term non-believer in AI)
I love a good conspiracy, but alas, I think this isn't it. The grassy knoll is just, after all, a patch of grass, and not an EInk facsimile, in my personal opinion.
Not from below. From above. IMINT countermeasure, to make countries with imaging satellites take longer to notice you flying silent over water into their airspace (presuming you've already got MASINT stealth covered, and are moving onto higher-hanging fruit.) Gives aircraft the same long-distance stealth advantage a sub has: they don't see you coming until you're there.
(Admittedly, I was being a bit silly with the missile use-case.)
Being able to retint your visible spectrum view from 10,000ft and above would be useful, I agree.
I occasionally see referrals in flow text to a Chinese claim they invented "holographic quantum" radar and can see all current stealth low echo aircraft and subs. I suspect it's bullshit but in war, if stealth was a purturbation, and deep water subs a more historical perturbation toward MAD and now, this is another perturbation much as drones have altered the symmetry for tank and mechanised ground warfare.. "shrug"
My thought: market segmentation, and/or the inability to do so meaningfully.
The principle characteristics of e-ink displays are size, resolution, refresh rate, and colour gamut.
(Even B&W displays have a range of greyscale gamuts.)
Small displays are now reasonably cheap, with displays of ~6--8" available for $20--50.
Larger displays, suitable for advertising, marketing, or other commercial/industrial applications are much more expensive, as noted here. Some of that is likely cost-driven, but another element is that if a larger supply were offered, the price would fall. Absent some way of bracketing specific applications, there's little to keep, say, advertising or commercial users from making do with cheaper consumer-grade displays.
There's a somewhat similar rationale that was arrived at in the 19th century by French engineer / economist / polymath Jules Dupuit, in describing the rationale by which 3rd class rail carriages were so much poorly fitted than 2nd class --- if the 3rd class accommodations were merely sufficient then they would cannibalise 2nd class ticket sales. Instead, 3rd class was made intentionally bad.
That's a dynamic which is replicated today in both transporation (e.g., airline coach class seating) and free-tier Internet and information services.
I don't know that this is what's driving EInk's business strategy. But I have my suspicions.
I would not assume any malicious intent. e-Ink is a wonderful solution looking for a problem.
Anything with a mouse pointer can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates.
Anything looking at a web page can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates.
Anything playing video can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates.
This leaves us with e-readers, but that market is very limited in size. Not everyone wants a dedicated book-reading device when a multipurpose device can, besides everything else, also read books.
Even smaller markets are information kiosks and "smart" price tags in supermarkets.
The problem simply is: working with natural light with energy efficient systems on a mainly document-based flow.
Of those notes: I have used mouse pointers with E-Ink and had little issue - only, I also had touchscreen so the mouse was in general unnecessary. That statement about hypertext is absurd: hypertext consumption is fine on E-Ink - provided your purpose is to read those hypertexts, instead of using the web in some "different" way, by the way alien from what it was intended. And video is usable, though suboptimal, if needed - the technology was not born for that, but just in case it can cope.
The practical verification is given: there are people who have been using large E-Ink devices, coupled with keyboards, for a long time, to work on documents.
And again let us suggest an important thing: if you actually have to work intellectually on a document, the same contents will remain in front of you for a relatively long time. This makes a technology "cheap on state retention, costly on state switch" the sensible solution.
A huge part of the web is Facebook, and it has videos. Lots of them. Even if we confine ourselves to “hypertext” (HN for example), it needs scrolling, and that’s not smooth enough on e-Ink, because slow refresh rates again. Documents are sometimes long, and that again needs scrolling. Which is again, bad.
The fact that it could be done in practice doesn’t mean that it should.
Makes no sense. What is your point? "A huge part of woodwork deals with nails, and one cannot easily use a screwdriver for that". Well, if you are into woodwork, use a hammer! Evidently, we are not talking about woodwork here. Clarify your assumptions. It may seem you wanted to state "EPD is not the best solution for [some website] users", which brings nowhere unless you contextualize the statement with some idea (very preferably a plausible one) that makes it logically productive.
> Even if we confine
Confine? A screwdriver is optimal for driving screws. To """confine""" a screwdriver to that is "proper use". Hypertext (the World Wide Web, as intended, none the less) is something meant to be /read/ and at the same time explored non sequentially: it is properly consumed with reading friendly technologies. EPD is meant to be that.
> needs scrolling
Absolutely false, and also irrelevant: scrolls have in fact disappeared as standard practice centuries ago, and we invented tablets and paging in 3300BC, in Sumer (not to mention sheep and cattle raising eight further centuries earlier, from which the folio comes): paging has been the standard for over five millennia. And when we used scrolling, it was because some technology had that as the most appropriate use. Clay? Paging then. Papyrus? Scrolling then. Paper? Flipping then. What has changed?
Hypertext and sequential text do not need scrolling - we have paged since forever. And when the user wants, scrolling is available and perfectly usable with EPD. Slower than LCD? Well LCD has a number of properties inferior to those of EPD: if you have no use for these, why should you use EPD? Clearly the balance determined by all properties changes according to use case. This is really basic.
> The fact that it could be done in practice doesn’t mean that it should
Very trivial principle, contextualize it - it can be applied to CRTs and brass plaques: there exist a number of properties for two or more technologies; some use cases will turn the balance in favour of A, others in favour of B etc. You will use a hammer when it is appropriate to use a hammer, and a screwdriver when it is appropriate to use a screwdriver, and you will do just like Ben Franklin recommended and "saw with a file and file with a saw when pressed". Again, all of this is as trivial as reasoning comes; to make the reasoning productive (and debatable), you have to add the uncommon assumptions, not the foundationals. You have confirmed the opposite point: just refer your statement to LCD!
It seems, outside analysis and towards immediacy, that you just do not see use cases for EPD: - it's you. We have tried to tell you: you do not have the need, others do. Just trust it, you will see it when you will want to see it. Some people do appreciate «working with natural light with energy efficient systems on a mainly document-based flow».
"Ah, and all the compromises then are overcome by the benefits"? Yes, that!
> Not everyone wants a dedicated book-reading device when a multipurpose device can, besides everything else, also read books.
Someone definitely flunked the messaging on this one, and I find it very disappointing :( The key advantage to an e-ink style of display is less eye strain, because you aren't staring into a bright light source that refreshes 60 times a second. (And battery life, of course; you can put your book down and forget about it until later). And that this limits the device is fine: a lot of people do a lot of reading! People like reading! Alas, as more and more people grow up reading all sorts of things on LCDs, so the inconvenience and the discomfort is just a normal part of reading for them, that becomes a much harder sell.
> because you aren't staring into a bright light source that refreshes 60 times a second
LCDs update 60 times per second (or more… 120 Hz displays are becoming more common) but they don't flicker the way CRTs used to, so there's no reason to think this would contribute to eye strain. Brightness could be an issue but you can just lower the brightness of the screen to match the surroundings.
As I see it the advantages of e-ink displays lie mainly in their visibility in direct sunlight and minimal idle power consumption.
This isn't entirely true. It's not the same intensity of flicker, but LCDs do have a small amount of flicker at about half their refresh rate to flip voltage and reduce the chance of burn-in. Also, the backlight itself may flicker depending on what kind of light source is used (especially if it's not an LED backlight, but cheap LED lights do flicker -- see christmas lights -- so it's possible some cheaper LED panels might have this effect too?).
Cheap LED christmas lights flicker because they don't have a bridge rectifier, so half of the input waveform is zero, at 60Hz. You're not going to see that kind of flicker in anything that requires real DC power (PWM frequencies for brightness control are generally way higher than 60Hz).
Some displays do this as a feature though (known as backlight strobing, motion blur reduction, etc.): LCDs take time to transition, so if you keep the backlight on at all times, you'll potentially see blurring from persistence of vision while the display is mid-transition. Instead, you can turn the backlight off until the screen has transitioned and then turn it back on so that you never show a partially transitioned image.
You don’t have to convince me (I bought the first commercially available reader, Sony PRS-500, for $350 the day it went on sale, and several others since), but for great many people their laptop does the job just fine, while many others enjoy the dead tree variety.
I comfortably watch videos, browse the web, and do work every single day on my eink external monitor, my eink cell phone, and eink tablet. it is absolutely magical how fast the refresh rate is on modern eink android devices. you wouldn't want to watch your favorite nature documentary, but it is very useful for getting pertinent information from a video., watching lectures or stand up comedy works perfectly fine, and eink is vastly superior in my opinion for browsing the web if you primarily read when you are on your computer.
There's a whole range of applications where it makes sense.
Since it is very well readable in full sunlight, e-ink is very suitable for low refresh aircraft displays. I suspect the same could apply for all kinds of HMIs which are used outdoors.
My experience is from gliders, which are only operated in VFR conditions (not more than 30 minutes before sunrise and not more than 30 minutes after sundown).
VFR is nothing glider-specific though, so I can see them being useful in other VFR-operated aircraft too.
In my experience e-ink displays reduce eye strain and attract less attention. This results in more attention being drawn to the outside world, which in turn is a good thing for safety.
I am not at all in agreement with your statement. In some contexts price is not a big issue and the qualities that e-ink brings are worth the money.
>Even smaller markets are information kiosks and "smart" price tags in supermarkets.
That's not true. Electronic shelf labels sold to supermarket chains and retailers, far outnumber the number of e-book readers sold to consumers. Especially that electronic price tags usually have a fixed shelf-life (~3 years or even shorter if they get damaged), so they need to be replaced often, while consumers generally keep their e-book readers for many more years.
I haven’t seen any chain that went fully eink, but I’m not from the US and the labor is not so expensive here, so the alternative (paying people to print labels and attach them) looks cheaper here.
I've seen them at many retailers in the EU, from Sweden, Norway, Germany, France all the way to Romania, so I'm curious where you're from that you haven't seen any. Ironically, I've never seen them in the US at all during my trips there.
I doubt it. Those electronic shelf labels (ESLs) are PIN protected for the pairing process. If you steal them from another store you can't pair them to your ESL network if they've already been paired before.
You'd need the PUK from the manufacturer based on the device S/N to unlock them first, but the S/N of each device is tied to the store that bought it so the manufacturer will know it doesn't belong to you and not give you the unlock PUK.
Plus, at the kinds of volumes retailers are buying ESLs, I doubt they'd go through all this trouble to pair a few stolen units.
It's like 3D printers back in the 90s and 2000s. There's a huge potential industry just waiting for the patents to finally run out because the early innovator only cares about tiny niche uses of the product and not undercutting those niches with affordable consumer goods.
One modus operandi of such companies is to amass a lot of patentable ideas as trade secrets, which subsequently can be rolled out as sequential patents. This effectively extends their monopoly on the products as a whole, despite patents expiring that protect the initial innovations. They can always roll something out sooner if a competitor might be approaching their IP moat.
One of my friends works on an e-ink product. My understanding is that one of the major trade secrets are the e-ink waveforms (the sequence of voltages used to print and erase content on the display). They are shared under NDA and baked into product firmware. Apparently the open-source versions are significantly worse.
Hearsay, but I've read in the past that these were tailored specifically to the display, so difficult to actually collaborate since each display is a little different.
They only go out in devices after they've been patented.
Think of 3 years of research. Rather than it leading to three years of progressively better consumer devices, you instead patent the first idea and use it to go to market, then sit on the rest. After X amount of time (where X < 20 years), you patent the next winning idea, and go to market with it. Etc.
This presents a challenge to would be competitors; to go to market, you have to leapfrog the existing technology and patent (with as broad a language as patents tend to have), hope the incumbent doesn't have something that would immediately deprecate your product (or at least, relies itself on something you patented along the way), and then overcome the incumbent's existing advantage in in the market. And also be prepared for a legal fight, since almost assuredly one of you is going to accuse the other of infringing a patent.
If you want an e-ink device using 20 year old technology you can get a used one for cheaper than any would be competitor can produce one.
If you want one using anything developed in the past 5 years...oh, look, that's why eink still has a research division; they've been slowly improving things (not as fast as actual competition would cause, but enough to make it hard for someone to just leapfrog them using seed capital) and so would-be competitors are now running up against patents with 15+ years left.
> I wouldn't mind using a slow-refresh display for coding
I've seen this sentiment a lot when eink displays are discussed here. But, I'm not quite sure I get it.
I've typed in platforms with significant lag between a keystroke and the character showing. It's horrible! So often, you think maybe you made a typo, but have to wait to see it and fix it, instead of a quick few backspaces and ONWARD! I find it really disruptive to my train of thought and it breaks the brain-interface link.
Maybe the eink displays refresh fast enough to make this be a minimal issue, but my few years old Kindle Paperwhite doesn't have me confident that's true.
Or, maybe I just type way worse than those of you that want an eink dev environment.
An eink display doesn't handle the same as a regular framebuffer, and the speed of the update depends a lot of what operation you want to do on it and how you want it to look like.
With partial updates the latency can be pretty low. There are many ways to control ghosting in a way that doesn't affect the latency too much (essentially, refresh asynchronously - and again - only where needed)
For regular typing, I have no doubts it can work without disruption. What is harder is modifying blocks of text. Scrolling quickly. It can be done, but would eventually require a full screen refresh to get good quality due to ghosting again.
(Ironically eink demonstrated high refresh rate video playback what.. one year ago on their screens? - another vaporware demo)
In a sense, it's like working remotely with a slow modem. The latency is not high, but you need to be smart on what you display (the original vi editor would actually be a _perfect_ fit for this ;))
The question is why I would put up with all this effort and limitations with eink. For me, it's because eink is MUCH easier on the eyes. It's pretty much the only display which is truly readable outdoors. So far I wasn't able to use any single tablet/phone/laptop outside, despite owning devices with pretty bright 500nit screens.
> With partial updates the latency can be pretty low. There are many ways to control ghosting in a way that doesn't affect the latency too much (essentially, refresh asynchronously - and again - only where needed)
I would be interested to see some proof of above, I haven't myself seen a usable implementation that successfully controls all those behaviors and latency. People will often point to Dasung but I've used it and I feel it is unusable.
> (Ironically eink demonstrated high refresh rate video playback what.. one year ago on their screens? - another vaporware demo)
When you say "high refresh rate video playback", you're referring to A2 mode at 8fps right? Because that's the only demonstration ever seen, and I wouldn't call it vapourware because that's what you're using when you use a Dasung panel.
Displaying a character on an e-ink display can be low latency, it's deleting a character that takes time (or vice versa, depending on the chemistry and fore/background inversion).
> Eink displays no longer have that problem. Look at Boox and Dasung displays.
Just curious, have you actually sat down and used and looked at a Boox or a Dasung display? I think you'll find that A2 mode is not really what the marketing videos make it out to be, at least in my usage of it.
i use two daily and they are wonderful. definitely not as fast as an l c d but you can watch video and read and scroll and write very well in my opinion. well worth the trade off for the view ability and eases on the eyes
Wondering if either they just fundamentally aren't capable of scaling up their business, so they are getting as much as they can out of what little they can make.
Or maybe there's some confusing IP situation and they just want to create a minimal number of devices to keep some sort of... copyrights or patents alive or something (as far as I know they don't work that way in the US, but maybe other countries?)
Or maybe this is, like, just the CEO's hobby project and and they don't realize that people want these things?
Or maybe, actually, only a couple nerds like us want these E-ink screens. Assuming tech nerds are generally pretty well off overall, but a fairly small-ish group, maybe E-ink screens just end up being fairly price insensitive as a result?
> Or maybe this is, like, just the CEO's hobby project and and they don't realize that people want these things?
There was definitely a time when I really wanted a color e-ink screen. But now, with iPads having 10 hour battery life, I can get all day performance and better colors and refresh rates from that device, so my desire for color e-ink has greatly declined.
I do love my b&w e-reader though and use it every day.
I mean, is 10 hours really that long? My SuperNote notebook lasts for days, my Kobo for weeks. I certainly have had flights longer than 10 hours. At least nowadays you sometimes have a USB-A charging port if you needed, or a 120V if you're lucky.
I think it's the last one, the two proven applications are book readers and price labels (and a few niche applications like readable displays for long-life battery-operated devices, Remarkable).
There's not many potential users clamouring for a dumb terminal "laptop" (the battery life advantage would disappear real quick if you tried to compile large code projects) with E-Ink screen. Not that many people would buy a laptop that can't play YouTube videos or go on Facebook.
Even I wouldn't want to write code on a laptop with the display latency of e-ink...
Forget about latency. Boox and Dasung displays for desktop show that it's entirely possible. They only lack color and to be in a laptop to be 95% solved problem.
Do they even manufacture the screens themselves? I though they mostly just did r&d and licensed things, in which case scale shouldn't really be an issue, at least on manufacturing the things.
It's possible they don't see much elasticity in the market, e.g. that a 50% decrease in cost would net them >= 50% increase in sales.
In the very short term they're probably right, but I think they'd be wrong in the long term: once the price drops it might take time but I think people would come up with a variety of novel products and use cases. Amazon for example has made a big bet on digital comics w/comixology. I'm sure they'd love to offer an affordable color comic reader. Or cheap 8.5x11 tablets could become the default note taking devices for a lot of students, especially for many STEM classes.
I just wish it was possible to build a version of the Frame TV that didn't still use 30% power while in "picture mode" but instead used a color e-ink display like this to cover the screen with art/photos when not in TV mode.
It is a cool idea, but creating that would require you to put a color e-ink display over the normal display panel, which may cause it to look washed out/lose crispness.
I think it is technically possible, I'm just not sure many would accept the cost/functionality trade-offs. But I may be wrong.
The volumes are different because the technology is locked by a company that doesn't innovate nor mass produce their tech.
There are tons of applications of low power screen. It could even outweighs the OLED in term of volume.
Some companies in China, that ignore the patents, manage to produce 20 fps 23" eink screen.
Add color to it and it's the perfect screen for a lot of computer work.
That comment doesn't really have any evidence beyond the fact that it's the opinion of the founder of Visionect, it just makes assertions, so I wouldn't say "refuted".
Color e-ink has a killer app: Changeable photo display in homes. This is much harder to achieve with alternative technologies (any display emitting light is an immediate no-go for just hanging on your wall). In contrast, e-readers have a significantly smaller advantage over the alternative of just reading on your phone or tablet, yet that seems to have been enough of a market for them to become cheap. And unlike e-readers, where you only really need one per person, there is hardly any limit to the number of displays people would put in their home if they do not emit light, have nice UI, and are cheap.
People have tried changeable photo displays before, with LCD or whatever. Of course, these require more power, but they are plugged in devices and I'm not convinced non-technical people think about the power consumption of their devices outside of really niche situation where everyone knows they supposed to care (large appliances like washing machines). And, even the best e-ink screen looks kind of washed out when displaying color, right?
Like I'm all in for an E-ink terminal, latency be damned, if someone make a no-fuss one for less than a couple hundred dollars. But I can't imagine wanting an E-ink picture frame over (say) an OLED one (although I guess burn in would be a problem there).
Think bigger. Not photo display like "pictures on the end table"... photo display like "teenager has band posters on the wall" or even like "changing the wallpaper on my actual wall to match the new pintrest trend"
Having used one, I can say that changeable photo displays with LCDs, OLED, or anything emitting light is a non-starter. It lights up the whole room (think about what happens when you turn off the lights!) and just doesn't feel at all like you're looking at a printed out photo.
I haven't seen a color e-ink display in person so I can't speak confidently, but the demo videos don't look washed out to me.
"Why aren't prices of large eink panels cheaper?" is a question that can only be answered with opinions until someone actually does it.
Seems like the opinion of someone actually in the business of selling large eink panels should count for a lot more than speculation by an outsider.
Visionect sells some eInk signs for showing the status of meeting and conference rooms. I thought that was a clever application -- saves companies from having to run wires and mount a bunch of hardware.
Color photo displays could be cool, but I suspect it'd be hard to compete with the incredibly cheap Google Home and Alexa devices with screens.
> Not really. That particular person’s entire business depends on eink being a high margin business product.
That claim doesn't seem to be very reasonable to me. Why would Visionect want eink to be a "high margin business product"? A Visionect panel is not a Veblen good as far as I can understand. Could you share your evidence for why you would think that?
High cost isn't the same as high margin. If patent fees were a significant expense it'd be in their interest to say so even if the margins were already high (which I very much doubt)
But I can’t really find any other large format e-ink displays with the driving hardware (which can be even pricier than the display), so I’m inclined to believe him.
> Seems like the opinion of someone actually in the business of selling large eink panels should count for a lot more than speculation by an outsider.
I agree it's certainly more authoritative than a random person (that's why I said "beyond"), but it's still just one man and we still don't know his incentives well.
Dasung panels are properly licensed from eInk Corp. They (Dasung) actually have a couple patents of their own on their e-ink driver board tech, which drives the panels. If you're searching a patent database, search for "Beijing Dasung".
> The volumes are different because the technology is locked by a company that doesn't innovate nor mass produce their tech.
Citation needed. I'd love to see some evidence backing up your incredibly confident claim.
> Some companies in China, that ignore the patents, manage to produce 20 fps 23" eink screen. Add color to it and it's the perfect screen for a lot of computer work.
I've never heard of that. Please share some evidence for this please. 20 fps electrophoresis? In my opinion, that's physically impossible unless the screen is 0.1mm thick. How did they escape Q = vA ?
> It's fine to be dubious of a claim, and it's fine to ask politely for sources or rationales. Just be nice.
I was not aware that "citation needed" is considered impolite. It is something I use at work a lot when interacting with colleagues. My apologies, I'll refrain from that in future.
Perhaps it is a difference in 'climate' between working in a science based industry where we often get challenged on our data versus software development industry. Maybe I've spent too long in academia where 'citation needed' is an indicator of interest in my topic and considered a good thing.
I disagree, it is in fact a very polite and fair minded way to respond to claim you find dubious. If anything they were being more polite than later in the comment when they suggested the claimed results should be impossible (though that's still a reasonable claim to make if they beleive it to be true).
Rather than saying the equivalent to "I think this cannot be true", a request for citation merely means "I am interested in this claim and would like to know the source" (even if phrased more tersely). The content is more indicative of the intent than the phrasing, and requesting a citation is not an accusation at all, it is a request for a source for further research.
I assume they're referring to Onyx and Dasung[1]. Not sure if it's actually 20fps (videos I've found look to be more in the low teens by my eye), and I believe they're making a lot of trade-offs around ghosting and stuff to achieve those frame rates. Also no idea what their licensing situation is.
Yes, that's a Dasung Paperlite. That's a regular E-Ink screen from the same manufacturer, not as you wrote "Some companies in China, that ignore the patents, manage to produce 20 fps 23" eink screen. ".
That's not 20 fps. That's A2 mode which is a 1 bit mode and is a non-stable state so it will decay. I'd recommend you read the user manual about how that works.
How does the 'Q = vA' law you mention apply, to reason on an example, to the case of A2, as a limiter to the rate?
> A2 mode which is a 1 bit mode and is a non-stable state so it will decay
It makes little sense to use A2 on a long-lasting render - nonetheless, I suppose the decay time will be relatively long (I have never notice an A2 dot change state...).
There has been no evidence presented whatsoever for the assertion that e-Ink has been abusing their IP other than one post from a throwaway account on HN a couple of years ago. No corroborating news articles about lawsuits, which the post alleged; no filings about acquisitions, which the post alleged; nothing. But somehow HN posters have adopted that as the truth?
No one here has said they were abusing their IP . The common theme on HN and other sites is that e-ink are pricing their hardware at such a high level that it makes anything other than small tablets unaffordable .
We will have to just wait until the patent runs out in order to see great advancements in this tech like what we have seen from the aftermath of the expiration of certain 3D printer patents
> Did I hurt you personally for you to be so toxic with me ? Chill.
I'm sorry you feel that way, however challenging your incredible claims and asking that you provide some evidence before we believe you is not the same "be so toxic with me".
> It's the condescending tone you display in every of your response, exactly like this one.
It is unfortunate that you continue to persist in not providing data but instead redirecting the energy of the conversation into allegations of condescenion which I can't defend. All I said was. I'm sorry you feel that way, however challenging your incredible claims and asking that you provide some evidence before we believe you is not the same "be so toxic with me".
I can't address your feelings since that's something you're generating internally. What is clear to me is you're not willing (or more likely in my opinion, able) to provide any data or evidence for your claim.
If the tech becomes attractice enough (high visibility in direct sunlight, lower power consumption, etc), maybe we'll see more public advertisers switch to them for digital signage, significantly increasing the demand and volume.
The transit stop use case really does seem to be ramping up, including the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority currently adding them to most surface Green Line stops: https://www.mbta.com/projects/solar-powered-e-ink-signs
Interesting. Now I'm curious about the tech used behind it to transmit the info accross the network. I'm wondering if a LoRa/LoRaWAN-based mesh network could do the trick to avoid using some kind of cell data or wired infrastructure, but also be energy-efficient enough to work using only solar power.
I mean there's other ways than refresh rate where there can be improvement, especially on color eInk displays. They managed to increase the DPI on this version after all :)
«Reasonably priced» very probably just meant "a price closer to their individual potential buyers' attributed value". That «LCD/OLED» will be cheaper does not affect that.
> Surely if it’s much cheaper volumes also go up massively…
No, that's not true. If you're making a black and white screen, and you sell it at the same price as a color screen, nobody will buy it. Volumes won't change if your product isn't better than something equivalently priced.
Either this makes little sense, or it is (or may be) unclear. «Your product [must be] better than something equivalently priced» /and that performs the same function/. Now we are talking about large bistable colour displays - which have no competition.
1) Product has to exist - and now it does tick
2) Has to be useful tick
3) Has to have possibility of being make cheaper by mass production no idea
4) Has to be put into mass production depends on 3
So we're currently stuck on 3.
Not sure there's much demand for a colour e-ink tablet - but maybe could be layered with a transparent OLED. I'd cough up an extra £100 for that.
Normal tablet - with reading mode. Spend a while looking at static image, OLED turns off, e-ink layer fires up. Scroll down and the OLED takes over.
I am so disappointed that Amazon doesn't invest more in the Kindle. They have deep pockets and a guaranteed market. Currently, I am still holding out for an upgrade of the Oasis, but would be willing to spend quite some money for upgraded Kindles and I think I am not alone (even if they just go to 8" and USB-C/Qi charging, it would be worth it). Of course a 10" Kindle would be nice and a true A4 Kindle just a dream.
I too think about this project all the time. I wish I could have a wall-mounted raw display to use with a Pi or Arduino as a picture frame that didn't cost thousands of dollars for the panel.
E Ink (the company) keeps improving their electrophoresis display technology. Unfortunately the technology necessarily has very low refresh rates since it it is based on moving around solid particles submerged in a liquid.
There were other passive e-paper display technologies like the one by Liquavista (based on moving colored oil droplets) or Mirasol by Qualcomm (mechanical micro-shutters create colored light via interference). These were capable of achieving high refresh rates, but unfortunately they have long been abandoned.
I believe the monochromatic electrophoresis displays by E Ink had higher reflectivity and lower price, which is what mattered for e-readers, so all the others went out of business.
In a notification-heavy, video-ad intensive world, maybe slow refresh will someday turn out to be a feature rather than a bug. Confining one's portable device to applications that preserve mindfulness, focus & attention...
every now and again i read hackernews and reddit stuff on my boox ereader and having a slow refresh rate is definitely a good "feature" since it makes it a lot more tedious to read things compared to my phone, which helps me spend less time scrolling aimlessly
This reminds me of the time when I bought my first smartphone, which was quite late. I delayed it as long as possible, but as soon as I had it, I stopped reading books on the train. The Web is just too addictive. At least with snappy refresh rates.
You should read Stolen Focus by Johann Hari[0]. People all over the world today are struggling with focus and attention, not because they're not virtuous enough but because tech companies have been intentionally hacking our brains and stealing it away from us. If you don't have time to read the book he did an outstanding interview[1] with Bari Weiss on her podcast Honestly which I urge you to listen to.
I used to think of attention in the same way you do, blaming and hating myself because I felt like I wasn't disciplined enough. It's so important to understand that this is something billionaire tech giants have done to us, on purpose.
And I will also add: suppose that somebody claimed "they cannot help it" (that somebody lures them into it is a different matter) - that when presented with a situation that requires control they lose it: then, you understand, they should treat that as an issue to be overcome with some degree of priority.
...Just like the snipers here that leave a cheap track of their disapproval on the basicmost behavioural "standards".
Dear mdoms, first of all allow me to grant you that I will check the material you kindly indicated, when time will allow.
But let me confirm my point: if «tech companies have been intentionally [etc.]», this must involve their users, who have been using those services (I can guess which ones they may be) willingly, though innocently. Many of them should also have experiences the other side in life - I hope they received a decent scholarization - and could and should have seen the difference from that side to the other side, and act accordingly taking measures and distances. Many of us have tried experiences in our life, and noticed that they were leading them into something undesirable, and consequently relegated those experiences to appropriate spaces (if any) - this is perfectly normal.
In short: if visiting intoxicant.com makes you intoxicated¹, you should probably avoid it, or greatly reduce it, or manage it differently (actively)¹.
¹and note that while they may try hard, it's not an overpowering "injection" - I suppose it must be some bad habit they attempt to instill in users, and which the said users may dodge instead of adopt. You do have a will.
To the original point: "crutches" are not a feature, they are a device. They are not universally useful - the same way that prescription glasses are not. A low refresh display may help some people: it is not helpful in general; some people find featureless text editors less distracting, normalcy greets happily the availability of features and options and hides the GUI with a keyboard shortcut.
To your statement: I do not see how «modern devices», on literal terms, can be the issue: they are *organizers* (meant to optimize your time). If people use them differently, that is not a fault in the device.
To your statement again: focus and attention are skills that individuals develop. If they are underdeveloped, they should if sough be developed. If your point is elsewhere, please make it explicit. I must presume you do not think that it is the responsibility of your sofa to sculpt your abdominals (nor, for that matter, to make you use your sofa wisely).
In the 00s, there were reflective color LCDs in things like phones and portable game consoles. The kind that isn't black when off. Why is this technology not developed further any more, and all modern color LCDs rely on backlight? If it's a dead end, why?
Brightness and contrast in reflective color LCDs are very poor, because the polarizing filter blocks half the light, then the color filter on each subpixel blocks a further two thirds, so a fully "white" image will only return one-sixth of the incoming light. Power efficiency has also improved for backlights, so there's less of a benefit to omitting one than there once was.
But since human vision perceives brightness logarithmically, a 6x drop still looks like a surface darker by a constant amount I think. This is an issue that regular, backlit LCDs also need to overcome.
No question reflective LCDs are rare, but you can look at the pebble smart watch or playdate game console for modern devices using reflective LCDs, for an idea of where that tech has gone.
It's just a strange set of constraints. If you need a miniscule battery, long battery life, where the device will often be used outdoors, and don't care about color accuracy at all, they're perfect.
Smartwatches are the obvious application, and it's why all Garmin watches use this tech. For most other things, it just makes more sense to sacrifice battery life or put in a bigger battery to get a massively better quality screen indoors.
Power. I don't think there were cheap blue LEDs when these displays first came out, so the backlights were all fluorescent, which was the main power draw in the display. Once LEDs came along it massively reduced the power consumption of the backlight to where it could be used even in low-power devices.
Garmin GPS watches use "transflective" displays that are always-on, daylight-readable LCDs with an optional backlight for use at night. They're not as glossy as an Apple watch, but the battery can last for a month in some modes!
The new instinct 2 solar is the first smartwatch that lasts indefinitely without plugging in. If you are outside enough it will go forever. And it has so many impressive features. We have really entered a new era, thanks largely to this screen tech.
Garmin uses them extensively in both their smart watches and handheld GPS devices like the GPSmap series. The displays are not very impressive as far as color reproduction or contrast goes, but the readability in bright sunlight is superb - way better than any LCD or OLED screen. Which is far more important for outdoor devices.
I think in the failed first e-reader wave actually used reflective LCDs. The problem was that these were quite dark and somewhat viewpoint dependent. The successful second wave (pioneered by Sony and dominated by Amazon) used electrophoresis displays by E Ink and another company I can't remember. Those were much more reflective, somewhat approaching actual paper.
Yeah, so the reflective LCD technology isn't quite dead. I guess when both reflectivity and quick refresh rates are required, monochrome LCD is still the only solution, since Liquavista and Mirasol were discontinued. For color displays there is simply no solution at all with decent reflectivity I believe. The E Ink Gallery 3 display seems to mostly solve the low reflectivity problem, since it does not rely on standard additive sub-pixel color mixing. But there is no similar solution for higher refresh rates. There were improved Mirasol prototypes which apparently solved the issue, but shortly after they were shown, the development of the Mirasol technology was discontinued.
I wish Qualcomm's Mirasol display had seen light - you could even watch videos on them comfortably (as per the demo). They were building a huge plant to manufacture those displays commercially and suddenly the whole thing tanked. I think Apple bought parts of it.
Their last innovation was called Mirasol SMI, which let them change color within one MEMS block (instead of just switching it between color/black), so that they wouldn't need subpixels to create color. They were way ahead of E Ink in these respects. Unfortunately Qualcomm pulled the plug shortly after the SMI announcement. I'm not sure which part Apple actually bought, whether it was just labs or actual IP as well.
apple device with back light toggle would be fantastic. the pulse width modulation used on their current screens makes my vision slightly blurry even after only a few minutes of use.
i didn't realize there was a chance they might own some passively lit screen technology already. you've gotten my hopes up.
I thought the color in Mirasol displays was achieved by electrically adjusting the distance between a transparent and a reflective plate, creating a controlled iridescence. Were there shutters on top?
There are full updates and partial updates. The former involves refreshing the whole display multiple times to remove ghosting, and a complete redraw. The latter is a targeted change at specific coordinates, which typically involves going from white to black. Very fast, but it's a single point/block at a time.
I do wish there was a reasonably priced color remarkable equivalent. Very frequently, I start reading a paper on the remarkable and have to bail when a chart distinguishes lines by color.
Remarkable owner here. RM display doesn't anti-alias actual pen strokes, pretty sure this makes the screen refresh faster. Everything else that is anti-alias tho is a bit slower to refresh.
I'm still waiting for someone to create a modern equivalent to the Pebble watch with a color e-ink screen that can stay on all the time. I still use my Pebble, but the battery charge only lasts about a day and a half and I'll have to replace it at some point.
I'd pay top dollar for a pebble time with smaller bezels and thinner body. Although, the pebble time was super thin compared to today's standards.
Are there any truly thin smart watches? The leaks for the new pixel watch kill all hope in my mind that I'll ever get a smart watch again since they are all thick and heavy. Even fit bits are thick compared to the pebble time.
The garmin Phoenix has the same color display as the color pebbles. The instinct however is solar and never needs to be charged, while simultaneously having more features than the pebble.
I still wear a pebble 2 daily, but am going to upgrade when price drops on the garmin
I find that turning on Airplane Mode overnight substantially extends my battery life, perhaps from 3 to 5 days. It also prevents me from being awakened by notifications, which seem to come through regardless of DND mode on my iPhone. It's also easy to trigger: just hold the left side button for a couple seconds.
I would pay $75 for someone to replace the battery in my Pebble and maintain water resistance. I don't trust myself to do it, but eventually I may try. My current fallback plan is a Fossil hybrid smartwatch, which is nicer looking, but has a worse UI/UX.
You can buy new ones on eBay for about that. I have been buying them for years and have a stash. Battery and waterproofing practically the same as when they released.
The garmin instinct 2 solar has the same screen tech as the pebble and NEVER needs to be charged. It really is game changing and I am finally ready to upgrade. In fact by you want to buy my in box pebble 2 se I have 3 for 100 usd each!
I'm not familiar with the 2 SE but will take a look. I have a Time Steel, which I like the look/usability of. What's your contact info? Mine is in my profile.
Wow, that's probably the first time an always-on electronic device actually surpassed my Nokia 6310's 21-day battery life in the last two decades. It's really hard to imagine a cellphone charge lasting for three weeks today. How far we've come :P
I returned my amazfit bip almost immediately. It's too dim with the backlight off and looks like a toy with the backlight on. If you look for photos of real life usage you'll see what I mean. The wyze watch blew me away in terms of looks and battery life (especially considering the price), they must be selling at a loss. However I'm also not a fitness junkie so I don't use the watch heavily and can't report on how useful the watch actually is
Did you have the Bip (which iirc hasn't been sold officially for over a year now) or the Bip U/Bip Pro? The OG Bip screen is much more reflective. Here's an image of my Bip - https://i.imgur.com/DBzoDp5.jpg
That does look better than the display I remember. Though if you check out real life photos of the Wyze Watch I think you might be surprised at the quality
Actually I don't use the Pebble for fitness. I like having the weather, calendar, location, and sunrise/moon phase (though that depends on the watch face).
The black-white e-readers are doing a great job at a great price point. Color would have to have a similar battery life, resolution, and only an incremental price-increase to be appealing.
They're not doing that great. A4 (or letter) sized ereaders right now cost $800+, have a resolution of about 200dpi and only a few shades of gray, so they're practically monochrome. For that amount I can print thousands upon thousands of pages at 1200+ dpi on real paper which I prefer. I thought about it and bought a laser printer. When the technology matures a bit more, I'll be waiting. Less eagerly every year though, as I've been waiting for affordable large ereaders for 10+ years now. And I'm seeing a shift to tablet-like device features which I'm not fond of.
That sounds like an interesting idea - now I want to print ebooks in my favorite font size... but that feature is locked behind DRM. Still, for webnovels it may be viable.
There are tons of e-reader out there, but if you aren't searching it's likely you will only know Kindle. Kobo is also very popular, but there're also PocketBook, Nook, Likebook, Onyx Boox, Bigme, etc.
I have been very stoked with color epaper since the mirasol days and alas nothing has materialized yet out to the mainstream. Looking forward to see how this pans out.
I was in the same position but ended up buying the Onyx Boox Nova 3 color. They recently released the Nova Air color which has a better body and warm light functional (wish I had that on mine for night time reading.)
I love it for reading technical blogs, code, tech books. I wanted an ereader I could install android apps on and preserve color syntax highlighting.
Disclaimer, these devices phone home to China so most people install apps like NetGuard to curate an Allowlist of apps that can access the internet.
Some people push this stuff to the extreme and code on them. I would not enjoy that and do not recommend it but it is possible.
There is also the technology used by the reinkstone.com. The big advantage is that they can turn color on and off, without getting the reduced contrast that eink gets. That said they just delayed their delivery to autumn I believe, so likely they have issues with production consistency or so. It's still not comparable to a proper color display, but I wouldnt mind one of these for readi g papers, where I can switch to color for graphs etc. It would also make highlighting etc much nicer.
Can E Ink finally launch a product at a reasonable price point? I get that they are trying to mostly be an IP company, but at this point, when everyone is begging for their product, shouldn't they at least consider pivoting? Their competitors in China are starting to have good products now, and I can't wait for E Ink Inc to become irrelevant in the market it created.
There isn't a use case that I personally want, that couldn't be satisfied with transflective LCD instead of e-ink.
They are dirt cheap but only a handful of chinese manufacturers are using them.
On top of the e-ink IP stronghold, I think there is also a Product manager issue in consumer electronics. Everyone wants to show case Macbook-esque glossy displays whereas a large number of consumers want displays that they can use outdoors and without eye strain. Everybody complements garmins transflective displays but somehow nobody makes the leap of slapping them on phones or laptops.
My suggestion is to get Calibre, install the DeDRM plugins, and then every ereader works with the Kindle store. You would lose the wireless integrations with Amazon on some non-Amazon devices. If that's important to you, then this might not be a great solution. But otherwise, it's the best way to go.
Not only could you then use any device on the market, but your books are truly yours. Immune to Amazon revising them in the future, and immune to having your books revoked. They'll last as long as your preferred backup methods last.
And that's a good reason to do this even if you keep using Kindles.
This is great, and I can't wait for it to commoditized, but I bet I'm way priced out.
In general, I find e-ink displays relatively expensive for modestly sized ones (say 6 inch +). What's some of the best deals/value for e-ink displays for some personal projects? Broken e-readers for parts?
Kobo readers run Linux.
I used kobo mini's as moving map display in my glider. The entire thing cost me about 60 euros from eBay.
The root system is even an SD card, so you can just swap cards to restore the stock firmware.
For smaller displays than you're looking for (<4 inch), AliExpress has some pretty reasonable prices. Even for color displays.
For larger ones, I think the best option is something like a recycled kindle. There was even a post on HN a few months ago from a company selling Kindle displays hooked up to breakout boards (may have even had on-onboard microcontroller, like an ESP-32?)
I have a number of Dasung products and the results are spectacular. I can code for hours on end with no eye strain and my sleeping schedule is normal for the first time in 15 years. The lack of flashiness on the screen also lets me think more about what I'm doing.
The problem is that it states "Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS operating systems" are supported. The Dasung specifically states that they support Linux, so that's probably the one that I'll order anyway despite the price.
i think you can do it on an Onyx ereader with a vim terminal android app. For sure, I've run Vim on an Onyx with a BT keyboard. Worked ok. Not sure about a full blown vim terminal. I know the apps exist on playstore.
That video could have been rather improved on, for a marketing video... The display didn't update after the second "page flip," so the user flipped a third time, and then it turned out the page had flipped to page 3 while it was closed and immediately flipped to page 4.
I get that that's how it will probably actually happen, but re-shoot for a little bit of polish...
Also the webpage didn't correctly fit on my Android browser (both Firefox and Chrome).
> I get that that's how it will probably actually happen
I don't think that's what happened. The rollable video shows two of the same pages in the same order; it looks more like a slideshow they didn't time right.
Yes simpler panels have even faster BW update. But the old 7-colour panels took 15s to do anything... so being able to do partial updates in a region at 300ms is a huge upgrade for them.
What's so innovative about E Ink Gallery is the fact that they apparently mix color similar to printed-on paper. This means they don't have to use additive subpixel color mixing, which darkens the display a lot, and which is the reason why colored e-paper isn't a thing in actual products.
The problem was that E Ink Gallery was extremely slow to refresh, but with E Ink Gallery 3, the technology is now "just" slow instead of extremely slow. Though perhaps still a bit too slow to use it in actual e-reader devices.
Can't wait for E Ink to make it to the masses at a reasonable price. I am suspect that it won't get surpassed by its competitors by that it gets there and everyone will have moved on. Would be sad but a high probability outcome.
Think of it like a split-flap display. It physically must “rotate” something to the right color. I’m no e-ink expert, but there may always be some level of “shimmer”.
> It physically must “rotate” something to the right color. I’m no e-ink expert, but there may always be some level of “shimmer”.
You're thinking of gyricon where the balls rotate. That's different. The bulk of the industry now uses electrophoresis which is moving ink particles electrically.
It appears unsolvable by the electrophoresis displays which E Ink makes. Since it is based on moving solid particles through a viscous liquid, which is slow.
oh sure, it's kind of cool if you're only seeing it occasionally... but not something I'd enjoy for anything that updates more often than a powerpoint presentation (which is fine as a known limitation)
This company has held back e-ink technology via patents. They refuse to talk to small/independent vendors, and try to squash anybody ordering components from abroad. Now, why does that matter? Cause the Chinese had 'full color eink' for years.
And there's eink phones AND tablets both. Reasonably priced. Yet we see none of that kind of innovation here... I guess we might in 5-7 years. If it's profitable.
Given their previous track record of rampant IP theft (from EU + Japan in addition to US), it's rather likely that these Chinese companies "developed" this technology through IP theft, rather than greenfield development.
That's also a contributing factor to their products being affordable - because they don't have any R&D costs to recoup, just those associated with espionage.
This would make an amazing tablet specifically for topographic mapping. I would love something that can be used for days or weeks on end without charging and also could do a GPS ping as needed (manually)
On the one hand, I would suggest if that laptop you are using can be charged with a "powerbank": that would increase your "mileage". On the other, I am suspecting you are referring to an OLED display: contrary to LCDs, I have not yet seen a natural light friendly OLED and I suspect it would be drastically power inefficient.
No, when I say e-ink I mean e-ink. I want a display that looks like a printed page, lit by reflecting whatever ambient lighting is around. Like the displays shown in the page this post is about except with a better refresh rate and better dot density. Maybe with a front light for working in the dark. I would love to stop staring into a big light panel all day long when I work. Replacing a bunch of complex filters over a big white light with a bunch of tiny lights is still staring into a light panel.
There is a misunderstanding there: I meant, your current machine probably uses OLED. I meant that your struggle for working outdoors, hindered by power consumption and screen visibility, can be already supported maybe by a portable power sources and tricks (solar etc.), but if the display you are using is OLED then I guess (by experience, not by numbers which I have unfortunately never checked) that you are using the "least" outdoors-friendly option.
> I mean e-ink
A bit pedantically, 'E Ink' refers to a producer of ElectroPhoretic Displays (EPD). You probably "dream of" a "good EPD" for working outdoors, but the limits of EPD, as seen in 'E Ink' products, do involve a number of compromises. Contrast can be an issue, and real EPD instances may require care in lighting similarly to (and in a way more than) more traditional displays. Saturation will similarly be a "difficult" area.
You are getting lost in implementation details when interpreting my statement.
If you insist on being excruciatingly precise, then what I have been wanting for multiple years is a Mac that has a display that works via reflection, rather than emission. I do not care in the slightest whether it is by moving around electrically-charged bits of ink, flipping around tiny little tiles, shivering the atoms of the screen into a new configuration that reflects the desired wavelengths, by broadcasting a magical sigil into my brain that makes me think I'm seeing an image when I'm actually seeing a piece of bare wood with a spell carved into it, or any other implementation details. I merely care that it is working with the sunlight instead of fighting it.
And I am sad that the R&D funding for reflective display technologies seems to have largely dried up, leaving only a slow series of underwhelming announcements of new displays from E Ink Holdings, Incorporated. Whose name is sufficiently generic that it would probably be at risk of becoming a generic name for any reflective display technology even if they weren't the only people making any attempt to push it forwards.
This is what "I have been wanting a color e-ink Mac I can work with under direct sunlight for so long now. I will be waiting many years longer." is intended to unpack to.
Right. Very many of us have been wanting that, you know. And we are all very «sad that the R&D funding for reflective display technologies seems to have largely dried up». Last time, when CLEARink vanished.
So, again: practically, for your work outdoors, if it involves graphics, * you may have a chance within some months to combine your Mac with a VNC connected large enough Kaleido or ACeP based tablet, and bear with the compromises each involves, or * bring around some batteries, but if your Mac is OLED based that will make little sense, unless * you bring around an effective shader (umbrella, shield, pizza delivery box etc.) - many of us do. This was the suggestion.
I'm a freelance artist. I have a decent studio setup at home but I also really love taking my laptop out to a cafe or a park.
When I'm under a tree in the park, there's no power (so yes, battery life helps - it's why I mostly use Mac Airs), and my screen has to fight the sunshine. Which makes battery life even worse because I've gotta run the backlight at full power. Sitting under a tree with a sunscreen attached to the computer helps some, but I would be delighted if I could sit out under the sun.
Personally I'm worried about battery damage to my electronic devices when they get direct sunlight. I've had a phone cook its battery in the sun (battery swelled up), and my kindle gets pretty hot as well. Is that something you're worried about?
Nah, not really. The only heat problems I've ever had are the design flaw with my current 2016 Macbook Pro that makes it heat up its batteries when charging.
I'm also probably not gonna sit out in the direct sun for hours on end, I tend to stay in one spot working 2h at the absolute most. Gotta get up and take a break to bike around the city every so often.
It's wild how in 2022 there's nothing consumers can do to stop this "price gouging" - I guess it's a free market and it's a niche so they have little competition and kinda a monopoly?
I don't understand the legal aspect of this stuff, but if the EU bureaucrats were able to impose USB-C standard instead of custom-charging-ports, surely they could do something about this too? Am I totally wrong? Seriously curious....
One more thought: colored rollable e-ink can have so many good uses, from being used in education to cut back on paper-books to displaying advertising and more utilitarian uses in our every-day life. gatekeeping this tech is absurd to me.
Why do you think this is price gouging and not just expensive to make? Plenty of things cost a heap of money even after years of development - I'm pretty sure you can buy a flying car if you have a billion lying around.
If you didn't have billions of people around the world buying them, the technology in your typical smartphone would cost many many thousands of dollars. Big markets with big demand can drive down cost curves almost unimaginably. It starts making sense to hire smart people to look at every aspect of how the thing works and is made, and to invest huge amounts of capital into equipment that can only be justified when the number of units is in the tens of millions. Something as niche as oversized passive e-ink screens will never attract that capital or expertise, since it could never recoup those costs. Eventually someone will either improve the technology enough for it to have a large end market (changing wallpaper in the home?) or it will stay niche until the patents run out and the tech can find more applications that currently don't make sense because the licensing fees would be too high.
I read an article posted here on HN about how using an iPad to cut back on paper basically never becomes worth it (from an environmental perspective). If you already have an iPad, sure, use it for not taking and it will be better than using paper. But don't go buy an iPad specifically to save on paper, because that will make the problem worse.
I wonder how much of that same principle applies to e-ink displays. They obviously use a lot less power, so maybe it would be worth it. I'm really not sure.
This is great less because anyone needs a folding display but because hopefully it won't shatter if you look at it wrong (like all their other displays).
Get e.g. a SC1452-GHA 7.8'' Kaleido (btw with frontlight and touchscreen) and hook it to a laptop through the development kit, or get a device mounting it and connect to it through VNC or better. Maybe the dev-kit is better than a remote desktop session, maybe not: further info about it would be needed.
I have worked on 8'' (not a Kaleido) and it's very doable if you accept the real estate compromise.
You can have it already and spend maybe around 200u, plus your time to set it up.
Took about 5 years for Onyx to release a color e-reader. People are buying them. They are kind of niche because the screens are greyer than monochrome screens, and the main use of an e-reader is to read b/w text. But it's first gen tech. As contrast improves, more color e-readers will be sold. Onyx is always the first to push the new tech. Eventually Amazon etc will start releasing them. Give it about 3 years.
I think they are niche because they have a much worse reflectivity (and hence contrast) than usual monochromatic displays. The existing approaches use sub-pixels to create color via additive color mixing. This approach throws away roughly two thirds of the incoming light. E.g. a red pixel consists of red+black+black sub-pixels.
someone tag the go to open-source driver board person, and someone else tag the frame.work people so we can slap a display on one of those too. My eyeballs are ripe and ready for this transflective goodness.
These results have to be sandbagged right? Is there any reason this stuff wasn't rolled out years ago except one company sandbagging technical development so they can sell 2008 technology at 2022 prices?
It's the explicit letter-spacing in the CSS that makes the English language site look really odd. I suppose they add it to make the Chinese/etc variants of the site look better.
Seems like we're still a long way off from reasonably priced large e-ink displays -- very curious to see any progress in this space.