7 ms·

$1000 for the screen. These E-ink patents can’t expire soon enough.

myself248 6y ago
So what I don't get, is there's no shortage of jurisdictions where intellectual property doesn't seem to be worth the paper it's printed on, and really convincing counterfeits flood some well-known markets. Where are the e-ink knockoffs? What sort of enforcement are these folks doing that nobody else seems to be able to?
- freeqaz 6y ago
  They apparently buy up any competition to keep the market small. There have been other similar tech promised by startups but they buy them up. Pretty interesting! Infuriating too, of course. But the system is what it is. I'm surprised they can't make more money by cross licensing the tech and just granting royalties. I'm no economics expert though.
  - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    > "They apparently buy up any competition to keep the market small." Which companies / patents did they buy up? I keep seeing this rumor floating around but their Wikipedia article lists exactly one acquisition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink#Acquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink#Acquisition) and a casual Google doesn't show any others.
- derekp7 6y ago
  The truth is that most real consumers (as apposed to us technologists) don't want e-ink technology. It is monochrome, can't do video, limited interactive due to refresh rate and ghosting... the only real thing it has going for it is low power usage. And that pairs well with applications where you spend a long time staring at the screen, and periodically initiating a compute burst to change the screen contents. In other words, e-readers and note-taking devices. And consumers are fairly satisfied with devices that get charged once every day, and can take a 15 minute quick-charge to add multiple hours of additional usage to them.
  - fortran77 6y ago
    The "Patents are Bad!" trope always comes up in any e-ink thread. Not sure why. I love e-ink (I prefer to read books on a kindle), but I think if the demand were there the prices would come down, as you pointed out.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      Demand doesn't bring prices down. Or not much anyway. Everybody would like a Ferrari/Rolex/etc., but they don't get cheaper because of it. In fact, high demand combined with a monopoly means you don't need to lower prices at all. (You lower price to raise demand, but you don't need to if you have strong demand at your current prices). Competition does lower prices. And with patents competition is impossible. As if for a competitor to make improvements to the process/technology, while still using parts of it (they would still infringe).
      - robinsoh 6y ago
        > Demand doesn't bring prices down. Or not much anyway. In my experience in the display industry, the main driver of price is cost and the main driver of cost is volume. If a customer puts in a signed escrowed order for a million displays lilke what Apple did, then processes get scaled, factories get built, and per-unit prices go down. That my understanding of how 6" matrix E-Ink displays went from costing thousands of dollars per display when they were being built in low volumes of hundreds of displays to costing sub-50 when they were being built for Sony, Amazon and others in volumes of hundreds of thousands of displays. The same is true of the LCD industry and the OLED industry. The same is true of the cellphone industry. > And with patents competition is impossible I can't understand what exactly you're talking about. Is this the E-Ink-is-expensive-because-of-patents trope? I've asked before whenever I see this trope on HN, what specific patent are you referring to? Patent thicket? This extraordinary claim requires evidence. I go to SID, never heard anyone claiming this kind of stuff. Tonnes of competition but physics, featureset, costs, volume, customer demand gets in the way. It is why even well funded companies like Liquavista-Amazon and Mirasol-Qualcom didn't make it.
Nition 6y ago
One thing I don't get: Aren't the patents from the 90s? And US patents last 20 years, right? So why haven't they expired already?
- monocasa 6y ago
  They've got patents with issue dates through the mid 2000s.
  - GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago
    Is there a particular year coming where it becomes a free-for-all?
- Matrixik 6y ago
  They are constantly creating new patents: https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation
  - Nition 6y ago
    Man, I didn't expect that to be 36 pages long. Crazy amount of patents.
FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
The PixelQi display spun from the OLPC project was really good and clearly affordable, considering the original target market. Granted, E-ink is superior in many aspects, but I'd settle for a sunlight readable, low power monochrome LCD display. As an added benefit it updates much faster than E-ink.
- pabs3 6y ago
  It appears that the Pixel Qi company no longer exists unfortunately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi
- robinsoh 6y ago
  > The PixelQi display spun from the OLPC project was really good and clearly affordable, I am curious if you work in the display industry. Do you know what the pricing for PQi displays actually was? Did you actually use a PixelQi display on a daily basis yourself? To be clear, I'm not attempting to be negative, but I actually work in the display industry and found the PixelQi display on the OLPC-XO-1 to be unusable. My perception of the display was one with very low quality color with backlight; and terrible viewing angle and unreadable contrast levels in bright sunlight. It also had low resolution. The XO-1 display I had access to had lots of pixel defects. If I am not mistaken (as I do not know actual pricing that Quanta got for the PixelQi displays) they were more expensive than LCDs and required additional parts that made managing their supply chain overall difficult. Most experts in my industry that I talked to expressed the opinion that it was a reality-distortion field type charismatic executive who managed to convince people at OLPC to try that idea. It was funded by UN and money from developing countries budgets who were excited by the promise of being able to educate their masses. Sadly it looks as if those countries were taken for a ride, rather than benefiting from a genuinely merit based idea. So I am very interested to hear what details you will share to back up the "really good" and "clearly affordable" parts of your claim. If your claim is true then it would suggest that my whole industry ought to abandon our current design and architectural roadmaps and switch to Jepsen's design! :-D I say that in a humourous context because last I heard in 2019 Jepsen abandoned badmouthing the entire display industry and switched to talking about telepathy and VR.
godelski 6y ago
When does the patent actually end? I see it noted here that the invention was 1997 and a typical patent is 20 years? What's the missing variable? (I know nothing about patents nor e-ink besides my paperwhite)
- robinsoh 6y ago
  It is sad to see that this article itself is literally citing a throwaway HN comment about patents and E-Ink as if it was a fact. I questioned the veracity of that claim and never got a response from the poster. I'll paste what I last commented about this because I'm already giving up trying to get any form of sane discussion on it. " As I have stated, I was looking for evidence or proof for OP's claim about patents and did not find it, nor does OP appear to be able or willing to back up his/her claim. My opinion is that display pricing is driven primarily by volume, and secondarily by a lot of other rapidly fluctuating variables related to ITO/TFT manufacturing costs. I'm sure patents has some effect on the industry, but most likely negligible as I've never heard companies being impacted by it. At least not in my corner of the industry. To be frank, I believe OP's claim about patents is wrong and is just some kind of worldview that for some reason has caught on recently in HN and is getting repeated without being challenged. The simplest evidence I can give that volume is the main driver of pricing is to compare EPD 6" matrix display pricing between 2007 where it was 100x more expensive than it is today. Patents haven't changed. Volume has. That was driven by large scale buyers like Sony, Amazon, and others. "
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mleonhard 6y ago
    Thank you for this information!
  - alex-a-soto 6y ago
    Thank you for providing this information; you are correct; I will update the original post.
AshamedCaptain 6y ago
This is absurd. Not only we have no evidence whatsoever that any patents whatsoever are hampering e-ink in any way, but not only this does not prevent people here on HN from continuously claiming that, but in fact the very TFA's only source for this claim is HN ITSELF! What's next, people will continue to repeat this bullshit while citing this article as source? Will we go full circle?
- jagger27 6y ago
  Yikes, sorry. There only seems to be a vague notion of supposed “limited market use” for e-ink which means that volume is low and therefore R&D investment is low and so on. Patents are a convenient scapegoat, for lack of something more convincing. I admit my opinion was shaped by the HN peanut gallery. It seems kind of obvious to me that if it was cheaper people would reach for it more often and find cool uses for it. There’s some more circular logic for you.

So what I don't get, is there's no shortage of jurisdictions where intellectual property doesn't seem to be worth the paper it's printed on, and really convincing counterfeits flood some well-known markets. Where are the e-ink knockoffs? What sort of enforcement are these folks doing that nobody else seems to be able to?

freeqaz 6y ago
They apparently buy up any competition to keep the market small. There have been other similar tech promised by startups but they buy them up. Pretty interesting! Infuriating too, of course. But the system is what it is. I'm surprised they can't make more money by cross licensing the tech and just granting royalties. I'm no economics expert though.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "They apparently buy up any competition to keep the market small." Which companies / patents did they buy up? I keep seeing this rumor floating around but their Wikipedia article lists exactly one acquisition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink#Acquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink#Acquisition) and a casual Google doesn't show any others.
derekp7 6y ago
The truth is that most real consumers (as apposed to us technologists) don't want e-ink technology. It is monochrome, can't do video, limited interactive due to refresh rate and ghosting... the only real thing it has going for it is low power usage. And that pairs well with applications where you spend a long time staring at the screen, and periodically initiating a compute burst to change the screen contents. In other words, e-readers and note-taking devices. And consumers are fairly satisfied with devices that get charged once every day, and can take a 15 minute quick-charge to add multiple hours of additional usage to them.
- fortran77 6y ago
  The "Patents are Bad!" trope always comes up in any e-ink thread. Not sure why. I love e-ink (I prefer to read books on a kindle), but I think if the demand were there the prices would come down, as you pointed out.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Demand doesn't bring prices down. Or not much anyway. Everybody would like a Ferrari/Rolex/etc., but they don't get cheaper because of it. In fact, high demand combined with a monopoly means you don't need to lower prices at all. (You lower price to raise demand, but you don't need to if you have strong demand at your current prices). Competition does lower prices. And with patents competition is impossible. As if for a competitor to make improvements to the process/technology, while still using parts of it (they would still infringe).
    - robinsoh 6y ago
      > Demand doesn't bring prices down. Or not much anyway. In my experience in the display industry, the main driver of price is cost and the main driver of cost is volume. If a customer puts in a signed escrowed order for a million displays lilke what Apple did, then processes get scaled, factories get built, and per-unit prices go down. That my understanding of how 6" matrix E-Ink displays went from costing thousands of dollars per display when they were being built in low volumes of hundreds of displays to costing sub-50 when they were being built for Sony, Amazon and others in volumes of hundreds of thousands of displays. The same is true of the LCD industry and the OLED industry. The same is true of the cellphone industry. > And with patents competition is impossible I can't understand what exactly you're talking about. Is this the E-Ink-is-expensive-because-of-patents trope? I've asked before whenever I see this trope on HN, what specific patent are you referring to? Patent thicket? This extraordinary claim requires evidence. I go to SID, never heard anyone claiming this kind of stuff. Tonnes of competition but physics, featureset, costs, volume, customer demand gets in the way. It is why even well funded companies like Liquavista-Amazon and Mirasol-Qualcom didn't make it.

Nition 6y ago

One thing I don't get: Aren't the patents from the 90s? And US patents last 20 years, right? So why haven't they expired already?

monocasa 6y ago
They've got patents with issue dates through the mid 2000s.
- GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago
  Is there a particular year coming where it becomes a free-for-all?
Matrixik 6y ago
They are constantly creating new patents: https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation
- Nition 6y ago
  Man, I didn't expect that to be 36 pages long. Crazy amount of patents.

FlyMoreRockets 6y ago

The PixelQi display spun from the OLPC project was really good and clearly affordable, considering the original target market. Granted, E-ink is superior in many aspects, but I'd settle for a sunlight readable, low power monochrome LCD display. As an added benefit it updates much faster than E-ink.

pabs3 6y ago
It appears that the Pixel Qi company no longer exists unfortunately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi
robinsoh 6y ago
> The PixelQi display spun from the OLPC project was really good and clearly affordable, I am curious if you work in the display industry. Do you know what the pricing for PQi displays actually was? Did you actually use a PixelQi display on a daily basis yourself? To be clear, I'm not attempting to be negative, but I actually work in the display industry and found the PixelQi display on the OLPC-XO-1 to be unusable. My perception of the display was one with very low quality color with backlight; and terrible viewing angle and unreadable contrast levels in bright sunlight. It also had low resolution. The XO-1 display I had access to had lots of pixel defects. If I am not mistaken (as I do not know actual pricing that Quanta got for the PixelQi displays) they were more expensive than LCDs and required additional parts that made managing their supply chain overall difficult. Most experts in my industry that I talked to expressed the opinion that it was a reality-distortion field type charismatic executive who managed to convince people at OLPC to try that idea. It was funded by UN and money from developing countries budgets who were excited by the promise of being able to educate their masses. Sadly it looks as if those countries were taken for a ride, rather than benefiting from a genuinely merit based idea. So I am very interested to hear what details you will share to back up the "really good" and "clearly affordable" parts of your claim. If your claim is true then it would suggest that my whole industry ought to abandon our current design and architectural roadmaps and switch to Jepsen's design! :-D I say that in a humourous context because last I heard in 2019 Jepsen abandoned badmouthing the entire display industry and switched to talking about telepathy and VR.

godelski 6y ago

When does the patent actually end? I see it noted here that the invention was 1997 and a typical patent is 20 years? What's the missing variable? (I know nothing about patents nor e-ink besides my paperwhite)

robinsoh 6y ago
It is sad to see that this article itself is literally citing a throwaway HN comment about patents and E-Ink as if it was a fact. I questioned the veracity of that claim and never got a response from the poster. I'll paste what I last commented about this because I'm already giving up trying to get any form of sane discussion on it. " As I have stated, I was looking for evidence or proof for OP's claim about patents and did not find it, nor does OP appear to be able or willing to back up his/her claim. My opinion is that display pricing is driven primarily by volume, and secondarily by a lot of other rapidly fluctuating variables related to ITO/TFT manufacturing costs. I'm sure patents has some effect on the industry, but most likely negligible as I've never heard companies being impacted by it. At least not in my corner of the industry. To be frank, I believe OP's claim about patents is wrong and is just some kind of worldview that for some reason has caught on recently in HN and is getting repeated without being challenged. The simplest evidence I can give that volume is the main driver of pricing is to compare EPD 6" matrix display pricing between 2007 where it was 100x more expensive than it is today. Patents haven't changed. Volume has. That was driven by large scale buyers like Sony, Amazon, and others. "
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mleonhard 6y ago
  Thank you for this information!
- alex-a-soto 6y ago
  Thank you for providing this information; you are correct; I will update the original post.

AshamedCaptain 6y ago

This is absurd. Not only we have no evidence whatsoever that any patents whatsoever are hampering e-ink in any way, but not only this does not prevent people here on HN from continuously claiming that, but in fact the very TFA's only source for this claim is HN ITSELF! What's next, people will continue to repeat this bullshit while citing this article as source? Will we go full circle?

jagger27 6y ago
Yikes, sorry. There only seems to be a vague notion of supposed “limited market use” for e-ink which means that volume is low and therefore R&D investment is low and so on. Patents are a convenient scapegoat, for lack of something more convincing. I admit my opinion was shaped by the HN peanut gallery. It seems kind of obvious to me that if it was cheaper people would reach for it more often and find cool uses for it. There’s some more circular logic for you.