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E Ink has developed a 2nd generation Advanced Color E-Paper

339 points by miles 6y ago

jagger27 6y ago
I'll believe it when I see it. 32,000 colours at 200 to 300 DPI is incredible.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  It's already here, they speak of the current-generation ACeP: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-impression https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-impression Saturation, contrast and refresh are still the main weaknesses though. Especially because a full-color display uses numerous full-page refreshes to achieve all colours which are really jarring.
  - zimpenfish 6y ago
    > Especially because a full-color display uses numerous full-page refreshes to achieve all colours which are really jarring. Can confirm - I have a Kaleido based e-reader and whilst I do like that book covers are in colour, scrolling through even a small library is jank central due to the multiple refreshes.
    - Groxx 6y ago
      Worth noting that Kaleido and ACeP are very different. Kaleido is effectively an RGB LCD in front of an E-Ink screen - you get color at 1/3 the resolution of black and white, but "normal" refresh rates. This accounts for all of the multi-color e-ink readers on the market now. AcEP is 4 pigments per cell, so you get full resolution and better saturation and contrast, but terrible refresh rates. Last I saw for ACeP it was something like 15 seconds. Presumably this 2nd generation is much faster, but I haven't seen anything that actually says how fast. https://www.eink.com/color-technology.html https://www.eink.com/color-technology.html
      - zimpenfish 6y ago
        > you get color at 1/3 the resolution of black and white, but "normal" refresh rates. It might be "normal" refresh rates but it takes multiple refreshes to generate colour output compared with mono. It is an awful janky experience.
        Groxx 6y ago
        Not with Kaleido, it's a normal monochrome eink screen underneath. The color filter on top changes in something like 1ms, it's invisibly fast. ACeP and the other black/white/(red|yellow) "color" inks do require multiple cycles though, and yeah - wildly unusable for reading purposes.
        zimpenfish 6y ago
        I have a Pocketbook Colour which uses E Ink Kaleido and it takes multiple refreshes to correctly display colours - there's 3 or 4 flashes on the coloured areas. Go to about 3:57 on this video and watch the book covers flash on and off as they do multiple refreshes - easier at 0.25x but still visible in real time. https://goodereader.com/blog/product/pocketbook-color-e-reader https://goodereader.com/blog/product/pocketbook-color-e-read...
_Microft 6y ago
Let us hope that there will also be normal, maybe smaller?, e-ink displays for PCs and that they will not only be used for eBook readers or similar. I for one would love to have a display that blends perfectly in with its surroundings and doesn’t stand out under any lighting conditions.
- underseacables 6y ago
  Or ..perhaps..based on your biometric/phone/personal data. Here comes Tom. Tom can afford prices to be 15% more. Change the price. We’ve sort of seen this before with websites showing different prices to PC and Macintosh users; based on the analytics that people who own a Macintosh would pay more
  - _Microft 6y ago
    I removed this part of my comment as it distracted from the idea of using reflective displays with PCs.
davesque 6y ago
I've heard people argue that e-ink displays would be in much wider use if the patent-holding company weren't so protective of the technology. So the news I'm waiting to hear is when E-Ink the company decides to loosen up its business practices.
- listerOfSmeg 6y ago
  not going to happen it s the only thing they have and they know its a cash cow if it gets wide adoption unfortunately they have gotten greedy and no one will pay it. They also seem to think their market is digital signage and aren't that interested in licensing for other mass market consumer products despite the fact the market it has been adopted most in is e-readers
  - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
    This is why I am so against intellectual monopoly like this. It does not create continuous incentive to innovate and instead allows companies with just a bit of innovation to rest on their laurels. I think there would be much more innovation in the world, aka a “higher rate of innovation” without intellectual monopolies and intellectual property restrictions.
    - est31 6y ago
      Why would you want to innovate when the bigger competitor can just copy you without paying you anything? This current situation is unfortunate, but I think it's an imperfection of the market. If the patent owning company had been a bit less greedy, they could have made far more money with it.
      - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
        > Why would you want to innovate when the bigger competitor can just copy you without paying you anything? Because they can't begin to copy you until you've released your product to market, so you have profit potential for being the first mover. This happens all the time as only a small percentage of the innovation that occurs actually gets patented. In some cases it would be possible for a big company to take your innovation out from under you but if they can do a better job then we're all better off for that. If as an inventor you've only got one idea, you're screwed. You need to be able to innovate repeatedly. But the concise way of responding to this is: markets already reward innovation. We do not need state controls on information to "stimulate innovation". The incentive exists as a natural effect of markets.
listerOfSmeg 6y ago
E-ink is one of those techs that only advanced when large batches of patents expire. E-ink the company has tied up the tech stack in so many patents, NDA's, and exorbitant prices that no one wants to touch it. E-ink the technology wont go any where for 10-15 years when that next big batch of patents expire. Its just like 3D displays and VR there will be a massive consumer push new batches of patents will be filed progress will grind to a halt as no-one can afford everyone else's patent licensing fees on a unproven market until the next wave expires and better products can be built again repeat
- _Microft 6y ago
  Don’t forget 3D printing that also only really started when patents expired.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    Between 2007-2009, 80+ Stratasys patents expired. Think about this - a single company holding back the world in advancing forward in 3D printing. Orthogonally, ever wondered why memory on your PC is so expensive? Thanks to Micron, Hynix and Samsung triopoly.
    - dragosmocrii 6y ago
      Can you elaborate on the memory pricing?
      - dsr_ 6y ago
        Here's an article from 2011 doing Moore's Law extrapolation of RAM and disk prices: https://antranik.org/using-moores-law-to-predict-future-memory-trends/ https://antranik.org/using-moores-law-to-predict-future-memo... RAM, 2011: "A single 8GB stick of RAM is about $80 right now. In 2021, you’d be able to buy a single stick of RAM that contains 64GB for the same price." Disks, 2011: "The price of a 1-terabyte hard drive is $80 now... In 2013, a 2TB drive will be $80. In 2015, a 4TB drive will be $80. After that the doubling rate may lengthen to 3 years instead of 2 years so.. In 2018, an 8TB drive will be $80. And finally in 2021, for $80, you’d be able to buy a 16 terabyte hard drive"
vimy 6y ago
Foldable E-ink screen and you'll have the perfect comic reader.
itronitron 6y ago
I'm interested to see how this will compare with a printed photograph, and whether they are at all distinguishable from each other when framed.
chrismorgan 6y ago
> They can display a total of 32,000 colors and 200 to 300 PPI, depending on the screen size. I’m going to guess that’s 15-bit colour (32,768 colours) in the form of RGB channels, 5 bits per channel (32 possible values). For full colour imagery, I imagine you’d still want dithering to simulate higher bit depths. 300dpi is fine enough that I believe you could make it very subtle indeed, so that you could well have to examine it quite closely to notice. > It will be able to display over 40,000 different colors … but then again, maybe it’s not done as RGB data in this way. I have no idea what array of inputs a range of 40,000 would correspond to. I’m not familiar with this sort of hardware.
- fencepost 6y ago
  It may depend in part on the nature and color of the pigments being used - they may have 64k colors in theory but not all distinguishable. There are also ongoing discoveries in pigments, for example YInMn Blue which still has very limited availability. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YInMn_Blue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YInMn_Blue https://news.artnet.com/art-world/yinmn-blue-comes-market-1921665 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/yinmn-blue-comes-market-19...
  - chrismorgan 6y ago
    I very much doubt they’d shrink 65,536 to 40,000, even if some of the values were indistinguishable from others. That’s not how marketing works! If you have a 3×9 gear combination on a bicycle, you call it 27 gears, never mind that a lot of it is overlap and that it’s even possible for some ratios to be identical (e.g. 26:9 and 52:18 is conceivable).
- s800 6y ago
  Wouldn't e-ink be in CMY(K) instead of RGB since it's reflective?
  - rubatuga 6y ago
    No, still RGB. We're not mixing pigments, just using subpixels.
elaus 6y ago
I'm still waiting for widely available and affordable e-ink displays for tinkerers. I'd love to put one onto a Raspberry Pi to show some information, but it's just too expensive right now.
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  Yes a little tablet with the Pi4 compute module would be very nice!
- coder543 6y ago
  Define "too expensive". Is $20 really too much? https://www.adafruit.com/product/4687 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4687 The larger the display, the more expensive it is, but that's not unusual, and LCDs aren't much different in price until you start to get to really large e-ink panels. (Given the depth of the LCD market, I'm sure you can find unusually cheap panels somewhere... the point remains. The prices aren't that bad these days for e-ink.)
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    For that size screen, yes. I think roughly $1-3/screen for that size is good. That’s what a small OLED screen will run you at any kind of volume. For $20 I would want something on the order of 6x8”. For $35 a 20” diagonal panel. Granted you linked to Adafruit which is wonderful for their educational resources and easy to use high quality components, but that’s not where I would source parts for a project unless they had something truly unique or I was buying it for a newbie who could use the support they provide (bought some Arduino stuff from them recently for my kids).
    - i386 6y ago
      You’re quibbling over something that costs less than a moderately priced lunch and a parking meter ticket. Buy the screen.
    - coder543 6y ago
      > For that size screen, yes. I think roughly $1-3/screen for that size is good. That's just unrealistic. Similar LCD screen is also $20: https://www.adafruit.com/product/358 https://www.adafruit.com/product/358 If you negotiate directly with manufacturers, or order direct from china, I'm certain both of these would be much cheaper, but I'm talking about US retail prices and how LCD and E-Ink are very similarly priced at this level. > but that’s not where I would source parts for a project unless they had something truly unique I can link you to other retailers who charge very similar prices. Direct from china is different, and similarly, you can find these e-ink displays for cheaper on aliexpress and similar. That's irrelevant to the discussion. $20 is fine for this. We're not (as far as I'm aware) talking about someone making a product to sell in bulk on kickstarter. We're talking about buying one to use at home.
amelius 6y ago
Why does every article on e-paper omit the most interesting bit of information? I.e. the refresh time.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Because it’s bad compared to every other digital display. They’re always on the order of seconds, and get even worse the more colors there are. Tri-color displays (red, white, and black) are sometimes up to a dozen seconds or worse. For example, [0] has a refresh time of fifteen seconds! I’d be surprised if this isn’t an order of magnitude worse than that. [0]: https://www.good-display.com/product/223.html https://www.good-display.com/product/223.html
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    Bad yes. But that makes improvements even more important! Especially linked with partial refresh could make this really feasible for stuff with small text updates happening etc.
  - Mayzie 6y ago
    > Because it’s bad compared to every other digital display. DASUNG seems to have a very fast refresh rate on their e-paper displays, enough so that they’re marketing an e-paper monitor.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGblzUc_Z1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGblzUc_Z1I
    - mromanuk 6y ago
      Is Dasung using patents from E-ink?
  - m-p-3 6y ago
    Isn't that because of this? I guess it could be improved by making a better waveform for that specific display? I'm not saying that's a trivial task. https://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper/e-ink-waveforms-are-a-closely-guarded-secret https://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper/e-ink-waveforms-are-a-c...
bergstromm466 6y ago
Goddammit I hate patents, trade secrets and intellectual property. I want this out there on all my devices. Imagine how much less energy we'd use, how much less e-waste we would generate, and how grateful our eyes would be if we weren't staring at blue lights all day.
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
  Its difficult to find the details on this because these companies are so secretive, but from everything I have seen, the e paper technology we have is completely useless for anything but displaying mostly static content. The refresh time is insanely slow so simply typing text or scrolling a page would be almost impossible. Also almost all of the full color eink screens I have been able to find details on are actually just normal TFT LCD displays with some matte film over the top. The core eink tech seems to be fairly easily changed to get 3 colours at the cost of 15 second refresh times but any more colurs seems unlikely.
  - c-c-c-c-c 6y ago
    Check out the high end dasung, theyre not bad at all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9qrURPAtnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9qrURPAtnY
sosuke 6y ago
The picture presented has 133134 colors in it from my very rough calculation. That is not at all how the display will look.
- comboy 6y ago
  I agree with the conclusion but how did you do your calculation? If you take a picture of a 16 colors screen you will find many more colors in that picture (main reason being that pixels won't align perfectly).
  - sosuke 6y ago
    I saved the image and cut out everything but the flowers. Then used this online tool https://www.imgonline.com.ua/eng/unique-colors-number.php https://www.imgonline.com.ua/eng/unique-colors-number.php
- ivegotnoaccount 6y ago
  How did you get to this result ? (I'm not claiming this is the real look it will have, simply wanted to check the metodology) Simply counting the number of colors in the image does not seem a good idea since even with a real photo, a screen with all pixels outputing the same will not give you a single-color image when captured with a camera. The issue is even worse with e-ink due to their technology.
  - sosuke 6y ago
    I saved the image and cut out everything but the flowers. Then used this online tool https://www.imgonline.com.ua/eng/unique-colors-number.php https://www.imgonline.com.ua/eng/unique-colors-number.php
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  It's probably a simple photoshop as the image even seems to be higher resolution than the hardware. But counting unique pixel colors in a photo of a display tells you nothing about the display. Find a picture of a gameboy screen (10 colors) or gameboy color (56 colors) and send the jpg through that tool. You should be able to realize the problem from simple intuition about what a photo is.
kevas 6y ago
What’s your thoughts on ever using color eInk for coding/development? - easier on the eyes - hammock driven development What do you think the refresh rates would need to be to do that?
- randoramax 6y ago
  Comic books will start to make sense on eink
- haneefmubarak 6y ago
  Probably at least 1 Hz to even be slightly usable as a screen you are composing or editing on, but current refresh times are multiple seconds so there's still likely a long way to go...
  - Qwertious 6y ago
    Current refresh rates for sections of the screen are 20ms. Full-screen refresh is a full second, sure, but you don't need that if you're just typing.
    - haneefmubarak 6y ago
      Huh. I wasn't aware that they had such fast partial refresh for color ones - I thought that was only for the B&W kind. Things improve quickly I guess!
sircastor 6y ago
I’ll be interested to see how long it takes for this to redraw. Two color eink panels can be pretty quick these days , but the color panels take a while because they’re addressing multiple layers. This is apparently just one layer.
qwerty456127 6y ago
I really want an e-ink (I mean an e-ink-only, not a dual-screen Lenovo ThinkBook) laptop. And I want it monochrome, low-refresh, no-clutter lo-fi. Rich colour, high refresh rates? No, thank you, I appreciate the mental silence classic e-ink devices provide. Just give me a reMarkable with a keyboard, capable to run a terminal and something like Emacs with org-roam.
- patothon 6y ago
  how do you type with low refresh screen?
  - qwerty456127 6y ago
    I never tried to actually type, only to enter words letter-by-letter with a stylus (on a PocketBook). Obviously I would prefer it to be fast enough to handle typing but I don't want dynamic visual effects which modern UI/web designers consider a norm and I don't need it to play realtime games or videos.
  - Groxx 6y ago
    Most refresh times that are listed are for "full" refreshes, not specific state-to-state timings, specific color transitions can be MUCH faster. This is how the reMarkable achieves its low latency drawing (around 21ms for white to black), which it can do for the whole screen, not just a sub-section. Other specific shade transitions can also be quick, it depends on the details. But it's more than fast enough for typing purposes, your current keyboard-to-display latency stands a decent chance of being higher. The tradeoff is that continually doing those faster transitions gradually accumulates errors, i.e. ghosting. Which is why e-readers tend to do a few pages of fast changes, then do a full refresh to clear things out (or before/after an image is shown). Fast-transition latency beyond something like 50-100ms from button-press to page-turn nowadays is almost exclusively due to software on the device, not the screen.
- lightdot 6y ago
  reMarkable 2 has pogo pins for the second USB at the left side, and that one supports a keyboard just fine. Terminal and emacs aren't there out of the box, but can be added. A really nice and quite hackable writing/reading device...
GekkePrutser 6y ago
Nice, but that screenshot looks too good to be real.. Probably a render/photoshop? Unless there has really been a huge improvement recently but I doubt it.
willvarfar 6y ago
So I’ll ask here as there may be some lurkers who can help me in my quest: I am trying to find a basic e-reader. I have a simple want: I want a built in browser that will let me download ePub and pdf etc from the browser. I’m not interested in bundled bookstores. I’m not keen on having to load books onto it via a pc app nor emailing them nor having an Amazon account neither. I just want to be able to browse and download FanFiction and stuff like that from a basic browser. I am guessing I want an android tablet with an e-ink screen? What choices do I have and what do people recommend?
- SamuelAdams 6y ago
  I use a Kobo Clara HD. It has a Kobo store where you can buy books, or you can use the “experimental web browser”, point it to libgen or your libraries website, and download whatever book you want. More often than not though I just hook it up to my Linux laptop and transfer books via usb.
  - Sparkle-san 6y ago
    I use a Kobo Libra H2O which has been quite good to me. For people that want to take it to the next level, there's the calibre-web project[1]. It's able to tie into calibre and push books to kobo devices through the built-in sync command. [1] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
    - leokennis 6y ago
      I have the same ereader, and I can understand the want for wireless book loading from a convenience point of view. But from the “I don’t want to depend on proprietary software and/or require a privacy breaching login account” point of view, a Kobo is just fine. If you so desire, it’s just a USB drive with an e-ink screen attached. Connect - drop files - eject - read files.
  - willvarfar 6y ago
    Aha, this brand is easy to get ahold of where I am! Googling suggests the “beta” browser has been beta forever; does the software never update? And does the beta browser support multiple tabs and copy+pasting urls? (FanFiction doesn’t do ePub, but there are several helper websites that provide it if you can copy paste the FanFiction URLs) Thanks awfully for helping me with my research!
locusofself 6y ago
I'd love to see a quality color e-reader, but mostly I just want a better black and white kindle. Smoother refresh and better contrast.
458aperta 6y ago
From their photos, this looks mighty impressive! https://goodereader.com/blog/uploads/images/2021/01/1-75sD-qwuz-W97i_9zof-QQ-e1610420012600.jpg https://goodereader.com/blog/uploads/images/2021/01/1-75sD-q... Still not as good as printed ink but this is good enough for many applications.
karmasimida 6y ago
Unless they can solve the refreshing rate, I won't be too thrilled about this. In fact there are so much more content nowadays are developed/created beyond text format isn't good news for E-Ink. They are risking solving a problem that people would soon forget why it worthy solving in the first place.
jmwilson 6y ago
> ACEP achieves a full color gamut, including all eight primary colors Last I checked there are three primary colors, and what is a full color gamut? There are several standard choices of gamut. What confuses me about color e-ink products is that it is a reflective display, yet none of them use a reflective color model (CMY) - all of them talk about RGB pigmented subpixels. Either what I learned about color reproduction for print media is wrong, or these devices are probably incapable of showing a large number of colors. Given the washed-out appearance of several photos of real products, I'm leaning toward the latter conclusion. I'd love to see magazine-quality color in a reflective display some day, but they don't seem to be starting from the right fundamentals. Has anyone benchmarked the color reproduction of these products?
- Diggsey 6y ago
  In a subtractive colour model you typically have a fourth channel (CMYK) because simply mixing all three primary colours together still reflects too much light to get good contrast. For E-ink the colours don't actually mix with each other, so some basic maths shows that you would have even worse contrast with only three colours in a subtractive model: Each ink colour absorbs only a single RGB channel, eg. cyan absorbs red. This means that at each location on the display, 2/3 of the light is reflected even when CMY channels are all at their maximum. I think E-ink is neither an additive nor a subtractive colour model: it can only produce colours that exist somewhere between the extreme primary colours, ie. it's more of an "interpolating" colour model. The inks probably come in pairs: black/white, red/cyan, green/magenta, blue/yellow. This gives the expected eight primary colours. For each pair, you would be able to pick any mix, eg. 30% black, 70% white. For the darkest black you would have 100% black, red, green and blue. For lightest white you would have 100% white, cyan, magenta and yellow. (This would reflect (1/3) * 3/4 + 0/4 = 25%, and (2/3) * 3/4 + 1/4 = 75% of the light respectively assuming perfect inks and equal coverage for the channels, which is pretty decent contrast)
  - jmwilson 6y ago
    Right, but this situation also happens in traditional color printing as well. Ink can't be varied in intensity, so images are halftoned/dithered. Halftone screening is done at a different angle per channel to avoid moire, so there is a mix of true overprinting and places where dots of distinct color are next to each other.
ncfausti 6y ago
Does anyone have a link to a good technical comparison between e-ink and lcd?
mikevm 6y ago
The iPad's screen has become so good that I don't touch my Kindle anymore...
nudpiedo 6y ago
so many people complaining about the patents, but it is indeed their waranty to keep strongly innovating. That said, _as consumer_ I wish there weren't patents, but we have to acknowledge that the patents are what made the company innovate

339 points by miles 6y ago

jagger27 6y ago

I'll believe it when I see it. 32,000 colours at 200 to 300 DPI is incredible.

GekkePrutser 6y ago
It's already here, they speak of the current-generation ACeP: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-impression https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-impression Saturation, contrast and refresh are still the main weaknesses though. Especially because a full-color display uses numerous full-page refreshes to achieve all colours which are really jarring.
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  > Especially because a full-color display uses numerous full-page refreshes to achieve all colours which are really jarring. Can confirm - I have a Kaleido based e-reader and whilst I do like that book covers are in colour, scrolling through even a small library is jank central due to the multiple refreshes.
  - Groxx 6y ago
    Worth noting that Kaleido and ACeP are very different. Kaleido is effectively an RGB LCD in front of an E-Ink screen - you get color at 1/3 the resolution of black and white, but "normal" refresh rates. This accounts for all of the multi-color e-ink readers on the market now. AcEP is 4 pigments per cell, so you get full resolution and better saturation and contrast, but terrible refresh rates. Last I saw for ACeP it was something like 15 seconds. Presumably this 2nd generation is much faster, but I haven't seen anything that actually says how fast. https://www.eink.com/color-technology.html https://www.eink.com/color-technology.html
    - zimpenfish 6y ago
      > you get color at 1/3 the resolution of black and white, but "normal" refresh rates. It might be "normal" refresh rates but it takes multiple refreshes to generate colour output compared with mono. It is an awful janky experience.
      - Groxx 6y ago
        Not with Kaleido, it's a normal monochrome eink screen underneath. The color filter on top changes in something like 1ms, it's invisibly fast. ACeP and the other black/white/(red|yellow) "color" inks do require multiple cycles though, and yeah - wildly unusable for reading purposes.
        zimpenfish 6y ago
        I have a Pocketbook Colour which uses E Ink Kaleido and it takes multiple refreshes to correctly display colours - there's 3 or 4 flashes on the coloured areas. Go to about 3:57 on this video and watch the book covers flash on and off as they do multiple refreshes - easier at 0.25x but still visible in real time. https://goodereader.com/blog/product/pocketbook-color-e-reader https://goodereader.com/blog/product/pocketbook-color-e-read...

_Microft 6y ago

Let us hope that there will also be normal, maybe smaller?, e-ink displays for PCs and that they will not only be used for eBook readers or similar. I for one would love to have a display that blends perfectly in with its surroundings and doesn’t stand out under any lighting conditions.

underseacables 6y ago
Or ..perhaps..based on your biometric/phone/personal data. Here comes Tom. Tom can afford prices to be 15% more. Change the price. We’ve sort of seen this before with websites showing different prices to PC and Macintosh users; based on the analytics that people who own a Macintosh would pay more
- _Microft 6y ago
  I removed this part of my comment as it distracted from the idea of using reflective displays with PCs.

davesque 6y ago

I've heard people argue that e-ink displays would be in much wider use if the patent-holding company weren't so protective of the technology. So the news I'm waiting to hear is when E-Ink the company decides to loosen up its business practices.

listerOfSmeg 6y ago
not going to happen it s the only thing they have and they know its a cash cow if it gets wide adoption unfortunately they have gotten greedy and no one will pay it. They also seem to think their market is digital signage and aren't that interested in licensing for other mass market consumer products despite the fact the market it has been adopted most in is e-readers
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  This is why I am so against intellectual monopoly like this. It does not create continuous incentive to innovate and instead allows companies with just a bit of innovation to rest on their laurels. I think there would be much more innovation in the world, aka a “higher rate of innovation” without intellectual monopolies and intellectual property restrictions.
  - est31 6y ago
    Why would you want to innovate when the bigger competitor can just copy you without paying you anything? This current situation is unfortunate, but I think it's an imperfection of the market. If the patent owning company had been a bit less greedy, they could have made far more money with it.
    - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
      > Why would you want to innovate when the bigger competitor can just copy you without paying you anything? Because they can't begin to copy you until you've released your product to market, so you have profit potential for being the first mover. This happens all the time as only a small percentage of the innovation that occurs actually gets patented. In some cases it would be possible for a big company to take your innovation out from under you but if they can do a better job then we're all better off for that. If as an inventor you've only got one idea, you're screwed. You need to be able to innovate repeatedly. But the concise way of responding to this is: markets already reward innovation. We do not need state controls on information to "stimulate innovation". The incentive exists as a natural effect of markets.

listerOfSmeg 6y ago

E-ink is one of those techs that only advanced when large batches of patents expire. E-ink the company has tied up the tech stack in so many patents, NDA's, and exorbitant prices that no one wants to touch it. E-ink the technology wont go any where for 10-15 years when that next big batch of patents expire. Its just like 3D displays and VR there will be a massive consumer push new batches of patents will be filed progress will grind to a halt as no-one can afford everyone else's patent licensing fees on a unproven market until the next wave expires and better products can be built again repeat

_Microft 6y ago
Don’t forget 3D printing that also only really started when patents expired.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Between 2007-2009, 80+ Stratasys patents expired. Think about this - a single company holding back the world in advancing forward in 3D printing. Orthogonally, ever wondered why memory on your PC is so expensive? Thanks to Micron, Hynix and Samsung triopoly.
  - dragosmocrii 6y ago
    Can you elaborate on the memory pricing?
    - dsr_ 6y ago
      Here's an article from 2011 doing Moore's Law extrapolation of RAM and disk prices: https://antranik.org/using-moores-law-to-predict-future-memory-trends/ https://antranik.org/using-moores-law-to-predict-future-memo... RAM, 2011: "A single 8GB stick of RAM is about $80 right now. In 2021, you’d be able to buy a single stick of RAM that contains 64GB for the same price." Disks, 2011: "The price of a 1-terabyte hard drive is $80 now... In 2013, a 2TB drive will be $80. In 2015, a 4TB drive will be $80. After that the doubling rate may lengthen to 3 years instead of 2 years so.. In 2018, an 8TB drive will be $80. And finally in 2021, for $80, you’d be able to buy a 16 terabyte hard drive"

vimy 6y ago

Foldable E-ink screen and you'll have the perfect comic reader.

itronitron 6y ago

I'm interested to see how this will compare with a printed photograph, and whether they are at all distinguishable from each other when framed.

chrismorgan 6y ago

> They can display a total of 32,000 colors and 200 to 300 PPI, depending on the screen size. I’m going to guess that’s 15-bit colour (32,768 colours) in the form of RGB channels, 5 bits per channel (32 possible values). For full colour imagery, I imagine you’d still want dithering to simulate higher bit depths. 300dpi is fine enough that I believe you could make it very subtle indeed, so that you could well have to examine it quite closely to notice. > It will be able to display over 40,000 different colors … but then again, maybe it’s not done as RGB data in this way. I have no idea what array of inputs a range of 40,000 would correspond to. I’m not familiar with this sort of hardware.

fencepost 6y ago
It may depend in part on the nature and color of the pigments being used - they may have 64k colors in theory but not all distinguishable. There are also ongoing discoveries in pigments, for example YInMn Blue which still has very limited availability. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YInMn_Blue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YInMn_Blue https://news.artnet.com/art-world/yinmn-blue-comes-market-1921665 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/yinmn-blue-comes-market-19...
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  I very much doubt they’d shrink 65,536 to 40,000, even if some of the values were indistinguishable from others. That’s not how marketing works! If you have a 3×9 gear combination on a bicycle, you call it 27 gears, never mind that a lot of it is overlap and that it’s even possible for some ratios to be identical (e.g. 26:9 and 52:18 is conceivable).
s800 6y ago
Wouldn't e-ink be in CMY(K) instead of RGB since it's reflective?
- rubatuga 6y ago
  No, still RGB. We're not mixing pigments, just using subpixels.

elaus 6y ago

I'm still waiting for widely available and affordable e-ink displays for tinkerers. I'd love to put one onto a Raspberry Pi to show some information, but it's just too expensive right now.

TaylorAlexander 6y ago
Yes a little tablet with the Pi4 compute module would be very nice!
coder543 6y ago
Define "too expensive". Is $20 really too much? https://www.adafruit.com/product/4687 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4687 The larger the display, the more expensive it is, but that's not unusual, and LCDs aren't much different in price until you start to get to really large e-ink panels. (Given the depth of the LCD market, I'm sure you can find unusually cheap panels somewhere... the point remains. The prices aren't that bad these days for e-ink.)
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  For that size screen, yes. I think roughly $1-3/screen for that size is good. That’s what a small OLED screen will run you at any kind of volume. For $20 I would want something on the order of 6x8”. For $35 a 20” diagonal panel. Granted you linked to Adafruit which is wonderful for their educational resources and easy to use high quality components, but that’s not where I would source parts for a project unless they had something truly unique or I was buying it for a newbie who could use the support they provide (bought some Arduino stuff from them recently for my kids).
  - i386 6y ago
    You’re quibbling over something that costs less than a moderately priced lunch and a parking meter ticket. Buy the screen.
  - coder543 6y ago
    > For that size screen, yes. I think roughly $1-3/screen for that size is good. That's just unrealistic. Similar LCD screen is also $20: https://www.adafruit.com/product/358 https://www.adafruit.com/product/358 If you negotiate directly with manufacturers, or order direct from china, I'm certain both of these would be much cheaper, but I'm talking about US retail prices and how LCD and E-Ink are very similarly priced at this level. > but that’s not where I would source parts for a project unless they had something truly unique I can link you to other retailers who charge very similar prices. Direct from china is different, and similarly, you can find these e-ink displays for cheaper on aliexpress and similar. That's irrelevant to the discussion. $20 is fine for this. We're not (as far as I'm aware) talking about someone making a product to sell in bulk on kickstarter. We're talking about buying one to use at home.

amelius 6y ago

Why does every article on e-paper omit the most interesting bit of information? I.e. the refresh time.

colejohnson66 6y ago
Because it’s bad compared to every other digital display. They’re always on the order of seconds, and get even worse the more colors there are. Tri-color displays (red, white, and black) are sometimes up to a dozen seconds or worse. For example, [0] has a refresh time of fifteen seconds! I’d be surprised if this isn’t an order of magnitude worse than that. [0]: https://www.good-display.com/product/223.html https://www.good-display.com/product/223.html
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  Bad yes. But that makes improvements even more important! Especially linked with partial refresh could make this really feasible for stuff with small text updates happening etc.
- Mayzie 6y ago
  > Because it’s bad compared to every other digital display. DASUNG seems to have a very fast refresh rate on their e-paper displays, enough so that they’re marketing an e-paper monitor.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGblzUc_Z1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGblzUc_Z1I
  - mromanuk 6y ago
    Is Dasung using patents from E-ink?
- m-p-3 6y ago
  Isn't that because of this? I guess it could be improved by making a better waveform for that specific display? I'm not saying that's a trivial task. https://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper/e-ink-waveforms-are-a-closely-guarded-secret https://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper/e-ink-waveforms-are-a-c...

bergstromm466 6y ago

Goddammit I hate patents, trade secrets and intellectual property. I want this out there on all my devices. Imagine how much less energy we'd use, how much less e-waste we would generate, and how grateful our eyes would be if we weren't staring at blue lights all day.

SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
Its difficult to find the details on this because these companies are so secretive, but from everything I have seen, the e paper technology we have is completely useless for anything but displaying mostly static content. The refresh time is insanely slow so simply typing text or scrolling a page would be almost impossible. Also almost all of the full color eink screens I have been able to find details on are actually just normal TFT LCD displays with some matte film over the top. The core eink tech seems to be fairly easily changed to get 3 colours at the cost of 15 second refresh times but any more colurs seems unlikely.
- c-c-c-c-c 6y ago
  Check out the high end dasung, theyre not bad at all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9qrURPAtnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9qrURPAtnY

sosuke 6y ago

The picture presented has 133134 colors in it from my very rough calculation. That is not at all how the display will look.

comboy 6y ago
I agree with the conclusion but how did you do your calculation? If you take a picture of a 16 colors screen you will find many more colors in that picture (main reason being that pixels won't align perfectly).
- sosuke 6y ago
  I saved the image and cut out everything but the flowers. Then used this online tool https://www.imgonline.com.ua/eng/unique-colors-number.php https://www.imgonline.com.ua/eng/unique-colors-number.php
ivegotnoaccount 6y ago
How did you get to this result ? (I'm not claiming this is the real look it will have, simply wanted to check the metodology) Simply counting the number of colors in the image does not seem a good idea since even with a real photo, a screen with all pixels outputing the same will not give you a single-color image when captured with a camera. The issue is even worse with e-ink due to their technology.
- sosuke 6y ago
  I saved the image and cut out everything but the flowers. Then used this online tool https://www.imgonline.com.ua/eng/unique-colors-number.php https://www.imgonline.com.ua/eng/unique-colors-number.php
hombre_fatal 6y ago
It's probably a simple photoshop as the image even seems to be higher resolution than the hardware. But counting unique pixel colors in a photo of a display tells you nothing about the display. Find a picture of a gameboy screen (10 colors) or gameboy color (56 colors) and send the jpg through that tool. You should be able to realize the problem from simple intuition about what a photo is.

kevas 6y ago

What’s your thoughts on ever using color eInk for coding/development? - easier on the eyes - hammock driven development What do you think the refresh rates would need to be to do that?

randoramax 6y ago
Comic books will start to make sense on eink
haneefmubarak 6y ago
Probably at least 1 Hz to even be slightly usable as a screen you are composing or editing on, but current refresh times are multiple seconds so there's still likely a long way to go...
- Qwertious 6y ago
  Current refresh rates for sections of the screen are 20ms. Full-screen refresh is a full second, sure, but you don't need that if you're just typing.
  - haneefmubarak 6y ago
    Huh. I wasn't aware that they had such fast partial refresh for color ones - I thought that was only for the B&W kind. Things improve quickly I guess!

sircastor 6y ago

I’ll be interested to see how long it takes for this to redraw. Two color eink panels can be pretty quick these days , but the color panels take a while because they’re addressing multiple layers. This is apparently just one layer.

qwerty456127 6y ago

I really want an e-ink (I mean an e-ink-only, not a dual-screen Lenovo ThinkBook) laptop. And I want it monochrome, low-refresh, no-clutter lo-fi. Rich colour, high refresh rates? No, thank you, I appreciate the mental silence classic e-ink devices provide. Just give me a reMarkable with a keyboard, capable to run a terminal and something like Emacs with org-roam.

patothon 6y ago
how do you type with low refresh screen?
- qwerty456127 6y ago
  I never tried to actually type, only to enter words letter-by-letter with a stylus (on a PocketBook). Obviously I would prefer it to be fast enough to handle typing but I don't want dynamic visual effects which modern UI/web designers consider a norm and I don't need it to play realtime games or videos.
- Groxx 6y ago
  Most refresh times that are listed are for "full" refreshes, not specific state-to-state timings, specific color transitions can be MUCH faster. This is how the reMarkable achieves its low latency drawing (around 21ms for white to black), which it can do for the whole screen, not just a sub-section. Other specific shade transitions can also be quick, it depends on the details. But it's more than fast enough for typing purposes, your current keyboard-to-display latency stands a decent chance of being higher. The tradeoff is that continually doing those faster transitions gradually accumulates errors, i.e. ghosting. Which is why e-readers tend to do a few pages of fast changes, then do a full refresh to clear things out (or before/after an image is shown). Fast-transition latency beyond something like 50-100ms from button-press to page-turn nowadays is almost exclusively due to software on the device, not the screen.
lightdot 6y ago
reMarkable 2 has pogo pins for the second USB at the left side, and that one supports a keyboard just fine. Terminal and emacs aren't there out of the box, but can be added. A really nice and quite hackable writing/reading device...

GekkePrutser 6y ago

Nice, but that screenshot looks too good to be real.. Probably a render/photoshop? Unless there has really been a huge improvement recently but I doubt it.

willvarfar 6y ago

So I’ll ask here as there may be some lurkers who can help me in my quest: I am trying to find a basic e-reader. I have a simple want: I want a built in browser that will let me download ePub and pdf etc from the browser. I’m not interested in bundled bookstores. I’m not keen on having to load books onto it via a pc app nor emailing them nor having an Amazon account neither. I just want to be able to browse and download FanFiction and stuff like that from a basic browser. I am guessing I want an android tablet with an e-ink screen? What choices do I have and what do people recommend?

SamuelAdams 6y ago
I use a Kobo Clara HD. It has a Kobo store where you can buy books, or you can use the “experimental web browser”, point it to libgen or your libraries website, and download whatever book you want. More often than not though I just hook it up to my Linux laptop and transfer books via usb.
- Sparkle-san 6y ago
  I use a Kobo Libra H2O which has been quite good to me. For people that want to take it to the next level, there's the calibre-web project[1]. It's able to tie into calibre and push books to kobo devices through the built-in sync command. [1] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
  - leokennis 6y ago
    I have the same ereader, and I can understand the want for wireless book loading from a convenience point of view. But from the “I don’t want to depend on proprietary software and/or require a privacy breaching login account” point of view, a Kobo is just fine. If you so desire, it’s just a USB drive with an e-ink screen attached. Connect - drop files - eject - read files.
- willvarfar 6y ago
  Aha, this brand is easy to get ahold of where I am! Googling suggests the “beta” browser has been beta forever; does the software never update? And does the beta browser support multiple tabs and copy+pasting urls? (FanFiction doesn’t do ePub, but there are several helper websites that provide it if you can copy paste the FanFiction URLs) Thanks awfully for helping me with my research!

locusofself 6y ago

I'd love to see a quality color e-reader, but mostly I just want a better black and white kindle. Smoother refresh and better contrast.

458aperta 6y ago

From their photos, this looks mighty impressive! https://goodereader.com/blog/uploads/images/2021/01/1-75sD-qwuz-W97i_9zof-QQ-e1610420012600.jpg https://goodereader.com/blog/uploads/images/2021/01/1-75sD-q... Still not as good as printed ink but this is good enough for many applications.

karmasimida 6y ago

Unless they can solve the refreshing rate, I won't be too thrilled about this. In fact there are so much more content nowadays are developed/created beyond text format isn't good news for E-Ink. They are risking solving a problem that people would soon forget why it worthy solving in the first place.

jmwilson 6y ago

> ACEP achieves a full color gamut, including all eight primary colors Last I checked there are three primary colors, and what is a full color gamut? There are several standard choices of gamut. What confuses me about color e-ink products is that it is a reflective display, yet none of them use a reflective color model (CMY) - all of them talk about RGB pigmented subpixels. Either what I learned about color reproduction for print media is wrong, or these devices are probably incapable of showing a large number of colors. Given the washed-out appearance of several photos of real products, I'm leaning toward the latter conclusion. I'd love to see magazine-quality color in a reflective display some day, but they don't seem to be starting from the right fundamentals. Has anyone benchmarked the color reproduction of these products?

Diggsey 6y ago
In a subtractive colour model you typically have a fourth channel (CMYK) because simply mixing all three primary colours together still reflects too much light to get good contrast. For E-ink the colours don't actually mix with each other, so some basic maths shows that you would have even worse contrast with only three colours in a subtractive model: Each ink colour absorbs only a single RGB channel, eg. cyan absorbs red. This means that at each location on the display, 2/3 of the light is reflected even when CMY channels are all at their maximum. I think E-ink is neither an additive nor a subtractive colour model: it can only produce colours that exist somewhere between the extreme primary colours, ie. it's more of an "interpolating" colour model. The inks probably come in pairs: black/white, red/cyan, green/magenta, blue/yellow. This gives the expected eight primary colours. For each pair, you would be able to pick any mix, eg. 30% black, 70% white. For the darkest black you would have 100% black, red, green and blue. For lightest white you would have 100% white, cyan, magenta and yellow. (This would reflect (1/3) * 3/4 + 0/4 = 25%, and (2/3) * 3/4 + 1/4 = 75% of the light respectively assuming perfect inks and equal coverage for the channels, which is pretty decent contrast)
- jmwilson 6y ago
  Right, but this situation also happens in traditional color printing as well. Ink can't be varied in intensity, so images are halftoned/dithered. Halftone screening is done at a different angle per channel to avoid moire, so there is a mix of true overprinting and places where dots of distinct color are next to each other.

ncfausti 6y ago

Does anyone have a link to a good technical comparison between e-ink and lcd?

mikevm 6y ago

The iPad's screen has become so good that I don't touch my Kindle anymore...

nudpiedo 6y ago

so many people complaining about the patents, but it is indeed their waranty to keep strongly innovating. That said, _as consumer_ I wish there weren't patents, but we have to acknowledge that the patents are what made the company innovate