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I wonder why Pixel Qi didn't become popular enough to fit this niche and not die as a company - seems to have many benefits over e-ink, including refresh rate a

by akavel 9y ago

I wonder why Pixel Qi didn't become popular enough to fit this niche and not die as a company - seems to have many benefits over e-ink, including refresh rate and some colors: https://the-digital-reader.com/2015/01/12/reports-death-pixel-qi-somewhat-exaggerated/ https://the-digital-reader.com/2015/01/12/reports-death-pixe...

seltzered_ 9y ago
I tried to follow pixel qi closely, my guess is that they were focused more on the portables market and not getting enough traction in that area. Outside of being sold in the OLPC, they were sold at small volumes on sparkfun as diy panels to install into netbooks and in the nearly failed notion ink tablet, they were also in some ruggedized windows tablets made for industrial/military use. I'd have to find the old videos with Mary-Lou Jepsen, but before they went out of business it was around when the iPad retina came out and they were focusing on retina screens. As far as the screen itself, while it seemingly had some trans reflective properties it was also doing it on a TN, not IPS, panel, so it had that problem where holding it vertically would introduce that odd gradient across the screen. Today I'm more curious about clearink which showed up out of nowhere at the society for information display conference this year with a new outdoor readable technology: https://youtu.be/9aEYT79-vuo https://youtu.be/9aEYT79-vuo
joecool1029 9y ago
> I wonder why Pixel Qi didn't become popular enough to fit this niche and not die as a company I dunno, maybe you could hit up Toshiba and ask them why they stopped putting transreflective screens on their laptops as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXO7u6bzVGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXO7u6bzVGQ
WaxProlix 9y ago
As someone who jumped at the chance to have the best of all possible worlds and snagged up a NI Adam on release day, I can tell you that the display was harder to get used to than I'd expected. View angle was a bit odd, and all of the qualities you'd want from a color display suffered a little. That said, it wasn't the thing that killed the Adam - that was the weird approach to PR combined with lack of delivery on device-specific software.

by akavel 9y ago

seltzered_ 9y ago

I tried to follow pixel qi closely, my guess is that they were focused more on the portables market and not getting enough traction in that area. Outside of being sold in the OLPC, they were sold at small volumes on sparkfun as diy panels to install into netbooks and in the nearly failed notion ink tablet, they were also in some ruggedized windows tablets made for industrial/military use. I'd have to find the old videos with Mary-Lou Jepsen, but before they went out of business it was around when the iPad retina came out and they were focusing on retina screens. As far as the screen itself, while it seemingly had some trans reflective properties it was also doing it on a TN, not IPS, panel, so it had that problem where holding it vertically would introduce that odd gradient across the screen. Today I'm more curious about clearink which showed up out of nowhere at the society for information display conference this year with a new outdoor readable technology: https://youtu.be/9aEYT79-vuo https://youtu.be/9aEYT79-vuo

joecool1029 9y ago

> I wonder why Pixel Qi didn't become popular enough to fit this niche and not die as a company I dunno, maybe you could hit up Toshiba and ask them why they stopped putting transreflective screens on their laptops as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXO7u6bzVGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXO7u6bzVGQ

WaxProlix 9y ago

As someone who jumped at the chance to have the best of all possible worlds and snagged up a NI Adam on release day, I can tell you that the display was harder to get used to than I'd expected. View angle was a bit odd, and all of the qualities you'd want from a color display suffered a little. That said, it wasn't the thing that killed the Adam - that was the weird approach to PR combined with lack of delivery on device-specific software.