14 ms·

This is just gorgeous and begs the question: what is wrong with e-ink and their non-marketing of their technology? You can get LCDs in almost any form and size

• zitterbewegung 7y ago
  Because worse is better and LCDs and OLED dominate the display market. People rather have a backlit display in a small form factor with a higher refresh rate than reading on an eink display. My Phone / Tablet allows me to read and also watch movies in color but eink can't do that.
  • heavenlyblue 7y ago
    On that matter, is there any reason why I can’t find high-resolution monochrome non-backlit TFT matrices? I.e. how are they worse than rink?
    • mdorazio 7y ago
      If you've never had a screen with a broken backlight it might not be obvious, but without the light a normal TFT display is basically unreadable except in very specific orientations due to the way the layers are sandwiched. You're probably looking for what's referred to as "transparent LCD", which I think still are not very nice to look at (Google has plenty of example pictures).
  • 101404 7y ago
    What is better, a hammer or a screw driver?
    • FlyMoreRockets 7y ago
      You can use a hammer to make a screw driver.
      • WalterBright 7y ago
        I often use a screw driver to hammer things.
• m463 7y ago
  Same question here -- I bought a kindle DX when it first came out and was surprised that the line petered out and never continued to the higher contrast light-up models. What a shame.
• sneak 7y ago
  "raises the question", not "begs". That means something else. http://begthequestion.info http://begthequestion.info
  • chrbr 7y ago
    Never knew that. Today I learned something!
  • alexilliamson 7y ago
    You're doing God's work. That site is hilarious.
  • _ph_ 7y ago
    Thanks for the information, I am a non-native speaker and only picked up the expression from the net. I have to admit though, that I fail to understand the reasoning on that page other than "it means something different".
    • sneak 7y ago
      Don't sweat it, it's a common error made by native speakers too, myself included until I learned about it. :)
      • zimpenfish 7y ago
        It's really not an error anymore because it's been in common usage for years.
        • rriepe 7y ago
          Let them be. If we didn't have prescriptivists, everything would literally mean nothing.
          • zimpenfish 7y ago
            And if that was the common usage that people agreed on and understood, that would be perfectly fine. It's literally how language works!
• secfirstmd 7y ago
  You should try a ReMarkable. I love mine for reading and marking PDFs, especially work related and note taking. It's one of the few things I backed as a KickStarter that has come along massively since it first began. The 2nd version looks great also.
  • Jagat 7y ago
    Comments below indicate people's shock at the price: $1500. ReMarkable isn't cheap either: $400
    • limomium 7y ago
      Well, I don't know. A decent tablet goes for $300. I could see myself paying +33% for significantly increased battery life. On mobile devices, the screen eats most of the battery charge, therefore also contributing most to the battery's degredation over years. An e-ink tablet could potentially last much longer.
      • secfirstmd 7y ago
        It's not cheap but for me the added productivity of so many notes and being able to read long pdf documents comfortably makes it well with it.
  • _ph_ 7y ago
    I have been eying the remarkable. I would literally like to try it, but I am not aware of any German shops carrying it. I am very hesitant to order an expensive gadget I might not like. As you have one: what is the basis for sharing documents? I would mostly be using it as an ebook reader, how do you upload ebooks, what formats are supported?
    • jmilloy 7y ago
      They have a 30-day free return period if you don't like it.
    • 7y ago
• luma 7y ago
  One problem is the cost of these devices. The unit shown in this article sells for $1500. Another is the slow refresh rate, which is often-times fine for tasks like reading a large set of text (ebooks, entire newspaper sheets, etc), but might not be well suited for touchscreen use where UI elements need to react to user interactions in a timely manner. The project in the OP skips user controls altogether, meaning you can't actually read anything beyond the front page. eInk is cool, and the technology continues to be developed, but it's still a niche solution applicable to limited use cases due to the slow refresh and high cost.
  • _ph_ 7y ago
    Well, obviously, this price is extremely high. But the question is: why is it so high? Is there anything in the technology which makes it even more expensive than OLED technology, or is this a problem with the company, which kind of seems to work hard at preventing the technology to enter the mass market and become cheaper? And of course, I am very aware of the downsides of e-ink. Readers like the kindle are pushing as far as it is possible with respect for interactivity. But for all kind of mostly static displays, it would shine.
    • magduf 7y ago
      Because the volumes are low. It's the same with any technology. High volumes = low cost, and vice-versa. When the manufacturing is geared up to produce enormous volumes and there's a bunch of competitors, the final product cost will be very low. When there's only one manufacturer and it's a niche product and there's very low demand, the cost is very high.
      • _ph_ 7y ago
        Right, I just wonder why no one tried hard to break that cycle and whenever I read about e-ink technology, I get the impression that the company behind it is not making it easy to create products with their technology.
        • 7y ago
• throwanem 7y ago
  E-ink's contrast ratio is quite poor, typically around 8:1 and with even marketing claims topping out around 12:1. For comparison, a baseline gallery-quality inkjet with good glossy photo paper can easily exceed 200:1, and professional repro methods do better still. So, emulating newsprint is a good e-ink use case, since newsprint's contrast sucks too. But black and white photos, which depend critically on effective use of contrast for a lot of their effect, will not look good on an e-ink display, any more than they would on a Game Boy.
  • m463 7y ago
    But you can read it outside.
    • throwanem 7y ago
      Presumably taking it off the wall, first? I don't claim that e-ink has no use case, only that it's bad at displaying photographs. If you mean to argue otherwise, please do so with respect to statements I've made, rather than to ones I have not.
      • m463 7y ago
        I was addressing the contrast ratio, which people seem to sort of measure inadequately in sunlight. There are two comparisons between LCD displays that should properly be referencing S/N ratio instead of contrast. With a glossy display, whatever is behind you STRONGLY affects your S/N ratio, especially in black. In sunlight even a very bright LCD is washed out almost to unreadability (though I am surprised how well recent phones still manage to still function)
  • Roritharr 7y ago
    For the quoted 1500$ for the display I could buy a printer and print the page for quite some time...
    • throwanem 7y ago
      A large-format printer, yet. A Pixma Pro 1000 that can do excellent 17x22-inch prints - and color! - only runs about a grand, so you'd even have a bit left over for some good Hahnemuhle photo paper.
• luka-birsa 7y ago
  Chicken and the egg? You need high volumes to drop the price and you can't get high volumes with high price. The E Ink technology has a lot of downsides compared to OLED and LCD, such as update speed, limited colors,... We (http://www.visionect.com http://www.visionect.com) have been building E Ink solutions for past decade and we just stoped convincing people that they should use E Ink where they could use LCD or OLED. E Ink is useful only as a niche solution for specific, mostly not consumer (exception being Kindle and Remarkable) products. We've sold a platform for any application and after a while we saw that it only makes sense to focus on specific niches (digital signage, transportation, bus stops) or go for finished product (see our https://getjoan.com https://getjoan.com). In the end it is what it is - everybody says they'd use an E Ink display everyday, but almost nobody is prepared to spend the cash when they can use iPads, phones or huge LCD/OLED instead. E Ink will have it's day in digital signage as they solve the colors as these screens will replace all paper advertising eventually, but untill the you'll see this screens on ebook readers / note takers, on conference rooms and on digital bus stops.
  • ghaff 7y ago
    And even E Ink Kindle is a bit niche. It's great for reading flowing text as in most fiction. However, for things with a lot of graphics/photographs a tablet or even a phone tends to be a lot better. To say nothing of all the other things you can do with a tablet. As a result, when I travel, I almost never take my Kindle because a tablet is so much more versatile.
    • _ph_ 7y ago
      Right. E-ink ist really only for mostly static display. Thats why I think that for proper pdf-reading you would need an e-ink reader which can display the whole page at its original size, so roughly A4 sized. Even the 12.9" iPad Pro is a bit small for that, but at least it can quickly zoom and scroll.
      • pfortuny 7y ago
        Well, margins do not need to exist when reading on a tablet (unless for margin notes but these are usually scant). I have an iPad 2019 which I think is 10’3’’ and honestly, math papers (my area) are pretty much equal to the “real thing”.
• IkmoIkmo 7y ago
  Because the screen costs $1500 and has the benefit of lower power consumption. Problem is that a 24 inch monitor takes about $15 to run 24/7 for a full year. You can run that for 50 years and still have a set-up that's hundreds of dollars cheaper with better contrast, can show colour, can show moving images etc. And if you put a motion/use sensor on it and connect it to a smart home setup, the energy use differences (e.g. reading the paper while brushing teeth) become minimal. We're talking about pennies per year. They're interesting as part of experimental art pieces, but as a large-scale consumer product very much unproven for these usecases.
• Ericson2314 7y ago
  Yeah E-ink is really dropping the ball. You could write for days a moralistic mannifesto touching: - blue LCD light (facebook's blue!), mass sleep deprivation - eyeball markets, surveillance capitalism, end of independent thought - power consumption, global warming Conclusion, e-ink is the difference between UBI utopia and cyberpunk distopia! C'mon, chronically anxious Brooklyn ad industry employees, this shit is easy.
  • anthk 7y ago
    sct 3500.
• Rebelgecko 7y ago
  I've been seeing Eink displays get more and more commercial use over the last few years. A lot of the grocery/department stores have replaced printed out paper prices on the shelves with Eink ones. The modules are pretty cool too, it looks like the display is updated via NFC/RFID and the display itself doesn't have any sort of power source. It gets electricity wirelessly whenever it needs to be updated. Edit: actually most of the eink price tags use a button cell battery, oops
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• bArray 7y ago
  > The newspaper is a great implemantation of this, but I also > would like to have a large e-ink display for displaying b/w > photographs. I'm surprised that newspapers haven't picked up on this already, they could play the "we're going green" card, cut their own overheads and lock people into a platform. Hell, they could even elbow their way into much larger markets, such as books, note taking, pictures, emails, document signing, etc. Why the Amazon Kindle doesn't come with a newspaper is beyond me - it seems like it would be an absolutely killer feature for getting people to use their kindles every day. Doesn't Jeff Bezos own some newspaper already anyway?
• svat 7y ago
  Along a different direction than larger displays: there was a popular post recently about an e-Ink display that doesn't require batteries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22604617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22604617 (alternative link to the product: https://www.seeedstudio.com/7-5inch-Passive-NFC-Powered-e-Paper-without-Battery-p-4494.html https://www.seeedstudio.com/7-5inch-Passive-NFC-Powered-e-Pa...).
• stevewillows 7y ago
  I spent the better part of last night comparing e-readers. I really want something that is large enough to comfortably read a magazine (PDF), but everything seems to be 7" or so. I'm with you. I can't wait until we have a proper A4 / letter sized e-reader -- or better yet 2x A5 that could close. I haven't kept tabs on the e-ink scene outside of a little digging twice a year. Outside of refresh rates, it doesn't seem like a lot has changed. The price is still up there and the screens are still roughly half of what they should be. I fell in love with the general idea of e-ink with the Pebble watches (Sharp's Memory LCD.) Having a device that just works and doesn't require frequent charging is such a pleasure. What I really don't understand is why e-ink hasn't consumed the mobile market (like the Yotaphone.) edit: proper paper sizing
• anarcat 7y ago
  Patents. I can't find a source for this on the top of my head now, but "E-ink" is both a trademark and patented, strongly so. (It's not only a technology, it's the name of the company too, so you can't say "e-ink" without treading on their trademark. And they want you to say "E ink" and not "E-ink", apparently.) Whereas there is a multitude of color display technologies with lots of prior art and overlap that would make patent disputes difficult, e-ink is so "special" in the way it works that it's easier for them to aggressively defend their patent, which means they take a huge skim off the top of anything that's produced. So there's lots of competition and innovation in the space of LCD and LED technology, because both those technologies are out of patent protection, but E-ink is a wasteland right now. I think it's why it's so niche.
• m-p-3 7y ago
  I hope that once color eInk displays starts to show up, advertisers will switch to it instead of printing large posters and drive the mass manufacturing costs down. I can't wait to see a color eReader and see magazines and comic books in all their glory.