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$179 for a 12 inch three color display is approaching reasonable. Are eink prices finally going down?
by morsch 6y ago
$179 for a 12 inch three color display is approaching reasonable. Are eink prices finally going down?
- wojciii 6y agoThe refresh rate of 16 seconds for the whole display is not reasonable in my opinion. Unless you just use it to display static images that don't change while you're looking at it. With partial refresh it would be ok, I think.
- fmajid 6y agoYes. If he is updating the display every minute, that's 25% of the time spent in refresh, where presumably the display is unreadable.
- cookiengineer 6y agoI don't understand why the refresh latency is so absurdly high...can somebody ELI5 why there's not even 1 frame/second possible with eink displays?
- NathanOsullivan 6y agoThis particular screen is slow even by e-ink standards
- PurpleFoxy 6y agoIt’s not slow compared to other 3 color displays. I have tested some from another brand and the b/w version was 2 seconds and the black/white/yellow version was 15 seconds
- candiodari 6y agoBecause of the weight of the particles that are being moved. They have to shake them, move them a bit, shake them again, move them a bit again. Moving a blob of plastic takes a lot more energy than what LCD's do: who just moves something like 1 electron per 10000 in the layer between the polarization filters. The way multicolor e-color displays work is by having multiple size/weight particles that are moved by different field strengths, but require being even more careful (because every field, shaking and moving, will move every particle)
- generj 6y agoOften for eInk screens the problem with speed is the driver (either code or chip), not the paper itself. For example, many drivers don’t support partial refreshes. I just bought the B/W version of this screen and read the data sheet. Internally, it is four different screens. So I think (haven’t yet received it) each quadrant takes about 2 seconds to refresh (2 seconds is a pretty common refresh time for eInk). A better driver could do all quadrants at once for a ~2 second refresh.
- mobilio 6y agoExactly! Also count their low-power consumption and you can easy convinced even fans of LCD displays.
- hobby-coder-guy 6y agoI don’t think LCD displays have fans.
- icedistilled 6y agoIt seems it's actually a refresh of 8 seconds for the black layer and another 8 seconds for the red layer done separately. Kindles refresh the black layer much faster. I don't see why it's soo much slower. But since it's literally particles moving inside the display, it will never super fast but 8 seconds is very limiting.
- baybal2 6y agoYou always pay a huge premium for the bigger screen you want with Eink.
- webmobdev 6y agoIt's neither reasonable nor going down. I remember reading that full colour displays are not much costlier to manufacture than the greyscale ones, yet they still have a large price gap.
- m463 6y agoI believe this is a niche market. It would be nice to have the volume necessary to drive the price down (ane get the volume up) That said, having a display that refreshes in seconds vs single-digit milliseconds works to keep it niche.
- orev 6y agoIt’s a niche market because the prices are so unreasonably high. Plenty of people want e-ink displays to use with Raspberry Pis, which would then become prototypes for real products, which would then open up the market. But the e-ink people seem intent on keeping the technology restricted for some reason by keeping the prices high.
- morsch 6y agoI think it's much cheaper than eink's offerings. E.g. they want $149 for a 5.6 inch three color display https://shopkits.eink.com/product/5-65-spectra-3000-yellow-epaper-display-ea2220-egl/ https://shopkits.eink.com/product/5-65-spectra-3000-yellow-e...
- ThrowawayR2 6y agoEink is selling development kits which are always more expensive. They even explicitly say on their web site that what they are selling is not intended for consumers or hobbyists.