12 ms·

The fact that this type of device is virtually inaccessible, short of DIY, is for me a prime example of market failure ever since I learned about transflectives

The fact that this type of device is virtually inaccessible, short of DIY, is for me a prime example of market failure ever since I learned about transflectives. Btw I'd opt to replace the "E-INK" in the title with "transflective" assuming HN folks know to tell the two apart.

mtgx 6y ago
Qualcomm has had this tech for about a decade, but failed to commercialize/improve on it: https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/23/3178117/qualcomm-mirasol-screen-licensing-commercialization https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/23/3178117/qualcomm-mirasol-...
- fractallyte 6y ago
  It belongs to Apple now... (https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/15/apple-has-taken-over-qualcomms-imod-mirasol-display-lab-in-taiwan https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/15/apple-has-taken-o...) And Mirasol is a different technology than Pixel Qi.
  - chrisjc 6y ago
    Wow, I had no idea about this even though I was somewhat following the 'e-ink' technologies quite closely. An ipad with a colored 'e-ink'/LED hybrid screen would be such a perfect tablet in my opinion (even though I've never owned an ipad).
    - bigfudge 6y ago
      It would require a major iOS re-write though. Designing for e-ink is a really different paradigm, both statically and in relation to UX interactions. I just returned an onyx boox note because although the hardware was quite nice, the UI was just garbage. I'm sure Apple could do it, but it does't seem very on-brand for them. I'm waiting of a delivery of an RM2, but I'm still not that hopeful that they have solved the problem of reading an A4 academic PDF. Yet another reason to kill off the commercial academic publishing industry — we can get proper epubs of papers!
atrus 6y ago
e-ink displays and 3d printing have both convinced me that patents do more harm than good these days.
- fortran77 6y ago
  3D printers -- both resin and filament-- are everywhere and cheap today. And there are many great affordable devices with e-Ink--I have several Amazon ebook readers that I use every day. I'm not sure I was harmed by any patent. Many of the things we talk about on Hacker News are covered by patents. Why do you want to shred a piece of the U.S. Constitution (assuming you're talking about U.S. patents) over eInk?
  - Miraste 6y ago
    I believe that was GP's point - 3D printers are cheap and ubiquitous because a patent on them expired in 2009. Before that they were expensive and had little tooling or support: useless outside large corporations, despite all the technology involved existing for years and years. I don't know the patent situation of e-ink but patent law was incredibly counterproductive in the case of 3D printing.
    - robinsoh 6y ago
      > patent law was incredibly counterproductive in the case of 3D printing. I don't work in the 3d printing industry so I don't have enough knowledge to know that with any level of confidence. It sounds plausible but not sure if it is true. That's why, I am curious whether you do, ie: do you work in the 3d printing industry? How confident are you that the recent proliferation was due to an expiration of a counterproductive patent (which one?) rather than just technologies, volume, demand, industrial production finally coming together and becoming mass market? Has there been any actual detailed analysis or study proving this? The reason I ask is not because I am opposed to the claim, rather I often see unsubstantiated claims like this go unchallenged for a long time. In the case of E Ink, I even saw someone blog that statement and they cited an HN comment about E Ink patents that I had challenged and the poster never responded, and then someone cited that very blog post in another HN comments so it became a circle of references where all the dots on the circle are unsubstantiated.
andai 6y ago
Mary Lou Jepsen (who created the One Laptop Per Child laptop also developed transflective displays for the laptop, which could switch between backlit color mode and sunlight-readable monochrome mode. Later her company Pixel Qi even developed a screen with solar panels inside it, to charge the device while it is used outside. Pixel Qi is now defunct. Today Jepsen is working on Clearwater, a non invasive brain imaging technology (an infrared headband which reconstructs a 3D image from scattered photons), which can be used for brain computer interfaces.
- phonon 6y ago
  > Jepsen is working on Clearwater, Openwater. https://www.openwater.cc/about-us https://www.openwater.cc/about-us
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >Later her company Pixel Qi even developed a screen with solar panels inside it, to charge the device while it is used outside. That's such a pointless gimmick though. Solar panels works best when they track the sun or are at least angled properly. Between the very few times you'd be using your device outside in direct sunlight, and actually having those panels angled towards the sun, you're not going to be charging anything at any reasonable rate. Those panels are completely useless and just add complexity and cost to the design. If you really care, you can buy portable solar chargers real cheap but they are universally mediocre at best. Why do stupid gimmicks like this? Why not have an efficient device and just charge it from the grid? Or, given that this was made for the developing world, charge it from a generator or a proper solar array or wind turbines ... or the grid (even developing nations will have a grid that functions at least most of the time)
  - goldenCeasar 6y ago
    Many places in my country have no access or reliable access to the grid and kids have to walk many miles to go to school, in this pandemic with the remote schooling this made millions of kids to miss classes or even leave school. I can think something like this would be very useful for these kids as chargers and solar panels wouldn't last long in the hand of childrens.
xioxox 6y ago
I have a Toshiba R500 - it's a machine ahead of its time - transreflective display, SSD, very light, long battery life, nice keyboard. Unfortunately the CPU and memory are limited, otherwise I would be using it today.
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  Would you be willing to part with it and ship it to the EU? :) I've been hunting on ebay for these every now and again, but I'm not quite desperate enough to piece one together from the parts I can find.
rbanffy 6y ago
Yeah... The e-ink, combined with 30fps is very misleading. I guess most people would immediately know what it is with the PixelQi name.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mbar84 6y ago
Please be aware that "market failure" is also a technical term in economics, relating to positive and negative externalities. Your use appears to be the (by now probably dominant) colloquial use. I personally would not use this term, just as I would not use e.g. "to beg the question". I wonder if this phenomenon has a name, along the lines of "euphemistic treadmill".
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  I use "market failure" colloquially I guess, yes. I use it to mean that despite demonstrated technological viability by multiple vendors, and despite the devices providing a solution to the issue of actual portability beyond closed rooms, the market has failed to make these devices accessible. IIRC one of the problems is that the benefit doesn't become obvious in "good" lighting conditions like a walmart building. In that way I'm putting much of the blame in this on the buying side of the market for making shallow, lazy buying decisions. But the producers are equally to blame here. Nobody made a serious first move, so no competition evolved, despite the availability of transflectives being technically governed by market forces.
  - mbar84 6y ago
    I don't know enough to judge the root cause. My ideological priors would make me look to blame the government granted monopoly patents on the display tech.
    - emteycz 6y ago
      Then I'd suggest to use another term, e.g. just failure.
- goodpoint 6y ago
  "market failure" has various interpretations and objections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure The way black_puppydog used it fits the term quite well.
macawfish 6y ago
Well and there are large, high resolution full color transflective displays out there! It's really frustrating that these aren't available. My mental health would improve substantially if it were easier to work outside.
- ohazi 6y ago
  Availability is also one of the principal problems with e-Ink, and is directly related to the patent issue. It is next to impossible to source e-Ink displays (even at outrageous prices), or to work with E Ink corporation in any capacity unless you are huge and are in a market they are interested in. Making another generic ebook and can credibly claim that you might sell half a million? Maybe they'll talk to you. Work for Lenovo and want to put an e-Ink layer in a trackpad? "We're not pursuing that market segment at this time." It's not an open market, and they haven't been interested in moving beyond ebook readers for the last decade. Smaller designers who want access to the technology can't get it from a western company, because none are stupid enough to attempt to design a competitor while E Ink the company is still around to sue them. Fairly recently we've started to see Chinese electrophoretic displays crop up, and I can actually get a devkit or buy them by the low thousand, because E Ink isn't going to be able to sue them in China. But you still don't see them designed into very many products sold in the west, because it would be easy for E Ink to stop the end product from being sold.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    What is preventing someone from creating a display with the same concept as e-ink? This is not a new technology and the idea has been around since 70s.
  - wjdp 6y ago
    If nobody can buy these displays, who is keeping the E Ink corporation in business?
  - macawfish 6y ago
    Transflective displays are different from e-ink though, I believe the term usually refers to liquid crystal displays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_d...
UI_at_80x24 6y ago
In my experience the Palm Pilot Pro had the best view-ability of any electronic device (GameBoy being a close second) in (outdoor) full sunlight.
comboy 6y ago
The title is very misleading, these are not even comparable. Btw, why aren't transflective displays more poplar? They doesn't seem as technologically challenging as e-ink and there clearly is some market for rugged phones/laptops/tablets. It seems they would be a perfect fit for some construction site type of uses.
emteycz 6y ago
Patents aren't part of the market, it's regulation.
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  That's actually the fairest point of critique about my rambling that I've heard in a while, and I have been rambling about this since 2012. :D That being said, the Toshiba Portege showed that a big manufacturer can produce these at scale if they want to, and they haven't continued with it. If someone here is willing to share stories from the trenches if that particular battle ground, I'm all ears. :)
dannyw 6y ago
I really want this now. I'd pay $2k in a heartbeat.
- guffaw5 6y ago
  The creator posted on reddit [0] that they are exploring making these commercially available (in small quantities). Maybe you could reach out and get one? [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/mtf3hf/thinkpad_mod_x230_with_an_eink_display_at_30fps/ https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/mtf3hf/thinkpad_m...
  - rasz 6y ago
    There is an ebay link with 7 available right in the YT description
    - guffaw5 6y ago
      Wow! 10 sold for ~$600 each!
      - cfjgvjh 6y ago
        Considering how expensive E-ink based products are, I'm not really surprised that it sold.
        rasz 6y ago
        Its not e-ink. It a ~$110 transreflective screen mounted into ~$200 laptop using $50 converter, laser cut bezel and some ingenuity.
  - krupan 6y ago
    Thank you for this link. The discussion there on reddit is, sadly, way better than the one here. Hacker News, RTFA before you comment. Don't comment if you don't really know what you are talking about. Please.
ChrisClark 6y ago
I really loved my Dell Axim long, long ago. Specifically because of the transflective display. The Ipaqs were only reflective, great in sunlight but needed a front light panel over the screen for use indoors, not always evenly lit. The transflective seemed to be the best of both worlds, reflective in sunlight and backlit for a more even light.

mtgx 6y ago

Qualcomm has had this tech for about a decade, but failed to commercialize/improve on it: https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/23/3178117/qualcomm-mirasol-screen-licensing-commercialization https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/23/3178117/qualcomm-mirasol-...

fractallyte 6y ago
It belongs to Apple now... (https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/15/apple-has-taken-over-qualcomms-imod-mirasol-display-lab-in-taiwan https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/15/apple-has-taken-o...) And Mirasol is a different technology than Pixel Qi.
- chrisjc 6y ago
  Wow, I had no idea about this even though I was somewhat following the 'e-ink' technologies quite closely. An ipad with a colored 'e-ink'/LED hybrid screen would be such a perfect tablet in my opinion (even though I've never owned an ipad).
  - bigfudge 6y ago
    It would require a major iOS re-write though. Designing for e-ink is a really different paradigm, both statically and in relation to UX interactions. I just returned an onyx boox note because although the hardware was quite nice, the UI was just garbage. I'm sure Apple could do it, but it does't seem very on-brand for them. I'm waiting of a delivery of an RM2, but I'm still not that hopeful that they have solved the problem of reading an A4 academic PDF. Yet another reason to kill off the commercial academic publishing industry — we can get proper epubs of papers!

atrus 6y ago

e-ink displays and 3d printing have both convinced me that patents do more harm than good these days.

fortran77 6y ago
3D printers -- both resin and filament-- are everywhere and cheap today. And there are many great affordable devices with e-Ink--I have several Amazon ebook readers that I use every day. I'm not sure I was harmed by any patent. Many of the things we talk about on Hacker News are covered by patents. Why do you want to shred a piece of the U.S. Constitution (assuming you're talking about U.S. patents) over eInk?
- Miraste 6y ago
  I believe that was GP's point - 3D printers are cheap and ubiquitous because a patent on them expired in 2009. Before that they were expensive and had little tooling or support: useless outside large corporations, despite all the technology involved existing for years and years. I don't know the patent situation of e-ink but patent law was incredibly counterproductive in the case of 3D printing.
  - robinsoh 6y ago
    > patent law was incredibly counterproductive in the case of 3D printing. I don't work in the 3d printing industry so I don't have enough knowledge to know that with any level of confidence. It sounds plausible but not sure if it is true. That's why, I am curious whether you do, ie: do you work in the 3d printing industry? How confident are you that the recent proliferation was due to an expiration of a counterproductive patent (which one?) rather than just technologies, volume, demand, industrial production finally coming together and becoming mass market? Has there been any actual detailed analysis or study proving this? The reason I ask is not because I am opposed to the claim, rather I often see unsubstantiated claims like this go unchallenged for a long time. In the case of E Ink, I even saw someone blog that statement and they cited an HN comment about E Ink patents that I had challenged and the poster never responded, and then someone cited that very blog post in another HN comments so it became a circle of references where all the dots on the circle are unsubstantiated.

andai 6y ago

Mary Lou Jepsen (who created the One Laptop Per Child laptop also developed transflective displays for the laptop, which could switch between backlit color mode and sunlight-readable monochrome mode. Later her company Pixel Qi even developed a screen with solar panels inside it, to charge the device while it is used outside. Pixel Qi is now defunct. Today Jepsen is working on Clearwater, a non invasive brain imaging technology (an infrared headband which reconstructs a 3D image from scattered photons), which can be used for brain computer interfaces.

phonon 6y ago
> Jepsen is working on Clearwater, Openwater. https://www.openwater.cc/about-us https://www.openwater.cc/about-us
macspoofing 6y ago
>Later her company Pixel Qi even developed a screen with solar panels inside it, to charge the device while it is used outside. That's such a pointless gimmick though. Solar panels works best when they track the sun or are at least angled properly. Between the very few times you'd be using your device outside in direct sunlight, and actually having those panels angled towards the sun, you're not going to be charging anything at any reasonable rate. Those panels are completely useless and just add complexity and cost to the design. If you really care, you can buy portable solar chargers real cheap but they are universally mediocre at best. Why do stupid gimmicks like this? Why not have an efficient device and just charge it from the grid? Or, given that this was made for the developing world, charge it from a generator or a proper solar array or wind turbines ... or the grid (even developing nations will have a grid that functions at least most of the time)
- goldenCeasar 6y ago
  Many places in my country have no access or reliable access to the grid and kids have to walk many miles to go to school, in this pandemic with the remote schooling this made millions of kids to miss classes or even leave school. I can think something like this would be very useful for these kids as chargers and solar panels wouldn't last long in the hand of childrens.

xioxox 6y ago

I have a Toshiba R500 - it's a machine ahead of its time - transreflective display, SSD, very light, long battery life, nice keyboard. Unfortunately the CPU and memory are limited, otherwise I would be using it today.

black_puppydog 6y ago
Would you be willing to part with it and ship it to the EU? :) I've been hunting on ebay for these every now and again, but I'm not quite desperate enough to piece one together from the parts I can find.

rbanffy 6y ago

Yeah... The e-ink, combined with 30fps is very misleading. I guess most people would immediately know what it is with the PixelQi name.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

mbar84 6y ago

Please be aware that "market failure" is also a technical term in economics, relating to positive and negative externalities. Your use appears to be the (by now probably dominant) colloquial use. I personally would not use this term, just as I would not use e.g. "to beg the question". I wonder if this phenomenon has a name, along the lines of "euphemistic treadmill".

black_puppydog 6y ago
I use "market failure" colloquially I guess, yes. I use it to mean that despite demonstrated technological viability by multiple vendors, and despite the devices providing a solution to the issue of actual portability beyond closed rooms, the market has failed to make these devices accessible. IIRC one of the problems is that the benefit doesn't become obvious in "good" lighting conditions like a walmart building. In that way I'm putting much of the blame in this on the buying side of the market for making shallow, lazy buying decisions. But the producers are equally to blame here. Nobody made a serious first move, so no competition evolved, despite the availability of transflectives being technically governed by market forces.
- mbar84 6y ago
  I don't know enough to judge the root cause. My ideological priors would make me look to blame the government granted monopoly patents on the display tech.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    Then I'd suggest to use another term, e.g. just failure.
goodpoint 6y ago
"market failure" has various interpretations and objections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure The way black_puppydog used it fits the term quite well.

macawfish 6y ago

Well and there are large, high resolution full color transflective displays out there! It's really frustrating that these aren't available. My mental health would improve substantially if it were easier to work outside.

ohazi 6y ago
Availability is also one of the principal problems with e-Ink, and is directly related to the patent issue. It is next to impossible to source e-Ink displays (even at outrageous prices), or to work with E Ink corporation in any capacity unless you are huge and are in a market they are interested in. Making another generic ebook and can credibly claim that you might sell half a million? Maybe they'll talk to you. Work for Lenovo and want to put an e-Ink layer in a trackpad? "We're not pursuing that market segment at this time." It's not an open market, and they haven't been interested in moving beyond ebook readers for the last decade. Smaller designers who want access to the technology can't get it from a western company, because none are stupid enough to attempt to design a competitor while E Ink the company is still around to sue them. Fairly recently we've started to see Chinese electrophoretic displays crop up, and I can actually get a devkit or buy them by the low thousand, because E Ink isn't going to be able to sue them in China. But you still don't see them designed into very many products sold in the west, because it would be easy for E Ink to stop the end product from being sold.
- varispeed 6y ago
  What is preventing someone from creating a display with the same concept as e-ink? This is not a new technology and the idea has been around since 70s.
- wjdp 6y ago
  If nobody can buy these displays, who is keeping the E Ink corporation in business?
- macawfish 6y ago
  Transflective displays are different from e-ink though, I believe the term usually refers to liquid crystal displays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_d...

UI_at_80x24 6y ago

In my experience the Palm Pilot Pro had the best view-ability of any electronic device (GameBoy being a close second) in (outdoor) full sunlight.

comboy 6y ago

The title is very misleading, these are not even comparable. Btw, why aren't transflective displays more poplar? They doesn't seem as technologically challenging as e-ink and there clearly is some market for rugged phones/laptops/tablets. It seems they would be a perfect fit for some construction site type of uses.

emteycz 6y ago

Patents aren't part of the market, it's regulation.

black_puppydog 6y ago
That's actually the fairest point of critique about my rambling that I've heard in a while, and I have been rambling about this since 2012. :D That being said, the Toshiba Portege showed that a big manufacturer can produce these at scale if they want to, and they haven't continued with it. If someone here is willing to share stories from the trenches if that particular battle ground, I'm all ears. :)

dannyw 6y ago

I really want this now. I'd pay $2k in a heartbeat.

guffaw5 6y ago
The creator posted on reddit [0] that they are exploring making these commercially available (in small quantities). Maybe you could reach out and get one? [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/mtf3hf/thinkpad_mod_x230_with_an_eink_display_at_30fps/ https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/mtf3hf/thinkpad_m...
- rasz 6y ago
  There is an ebay link with 7 available right in the YT description
  - guffaw5 6y ago
    Wow! 10 sold for ~$600 each!
    - cfjgvjh 6y ago
      Considering how expensive E-ink based products are, I'm not really surprised that it sold.
      - rasz 6y ago
        Its not e-ink. It a ~$110 transreflective screen mounted into ~$200 laptop using $50 converter, laser cut bezel and some ingenuity.
- krupan 6y ago
  Thank you for this link. The discussion there on reddit is, sadly, way better than the one here. Hacker News, RTFA before you comment. Don't comment if you don't really know what you are talking about. Please.

ChrisClark 6y ago

I really loved my Dell Axim long, long ago. Specifically because of the transflective display. The Ipaqs were only reflective, great in sunlight but needed a front light panel over the screen for use indoors, not always evenly lit. The transflective seemed to be the best of both worlds, reflective in sunlight and backlit for a more even light.