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How E Ink developed full-color e-paper
- Abroszka 5y agoI can't wait for a proper ACEP eInk device. I have a "colour" eInk with the RGB filter, but it's horrible. There is a very visible "screendoor" effect. Basically you can see each individual pixel of the filter layer. I wouldn't recommend it.
- dqpb 5y agoI’m more interested in the other article: How E Ink Failed to Bring Their Product to Consumers
- yeetaccount4 5y agoHas there been any progress on extending e ink lifespan?
- fallat 5y agoWhat's the current lifespan? My original Kindle is still working just fine.
- Sunspark 5y agoDon't you find the low-resolution and the low-contrast of the first generation panels annoying?
- fallat 5y agoNo, since I've upped the boldness since day 1 lol. I never noticed it being "low resolution".
- yeetaccount4 5y agoDepends on how things are set up with the refresh rate; subpixel rendering may have an effect IIRC. Details I don’t really understand, but e ink has a shorter lifespan than other tech.
- dredmorbius 5y agoThat's a non-issue so far as I'm aware. The displays will last and function for years. Long enough that other components are generally long obsolete.
- yeetaccount4 5y agoObsolete, but still functional for their intended purpose. The screen will fail before the components get tin whiskers, if you use it often-ish. E ink readers will fail later because of a very low refresh rate, but as a screen monitor it may be a poor match. Pixel-Qi full sun display mode may be a better match for what most want.
- dredmorbius 5y agoThat depends. For anything networked, not having access to the latest and greatest ciphers, or CA certificates, eventually causes problems. It's possible that mobile formats won't be supported. And a decade or so out, what was once a generous provisioning of storage and memory will frequently come to seem small. Android-based devices such as the Onyx BOOX line probably won't be able to get newer OS updates even if the vendor was willing to support them as Android itself seems to have a moving hardware baseline (I'm typing this on ... an older Android device). That said, the displays themselves should still function, yes.
- empalms 5y agoEvery time an E Ink article is posted the patent defeatism is inevitable. I’m curious if there are other techniques to implement reflective(?) displays being explored that wouldn’t fall within the scope of E Ink’s defensible moat, or, if their parents are simply so broad as to stifle most hopes of accessible solutions and broader consumer/professional adoption. Frankly, I’m quite sick of straining my eyes and circadian rhythm for 8hrs+ a day
- christkv 5y agoThe one laptop per child had one but never went anywhere
- Sunspark 5y agoIt had a transflective LCD.
- throwthere 5y agoWhen does the original parent run out? Will that be the end of this or are there other “process” aka bs patents coming?
- empalms 5y agoGood question. Skimming the uspto’s documentation, identifying the term does not appear to be a straightforward process [0]. Someone with more experience in the matter might be able to say. [0] https://www.uspto.gov/patents/laws/patent-term-calculator https://www.uspto.gov/patents/laws/patent-term-calculator
- beckman466 5y ago> When does the original parent run out? ten years. so just after the world collapses. it's so great that we are blocking the development of vital tech /s. i mean, imagine a world without today's level of production of laptop screens/OLED TVs/LCD TVs/phone/tablet screens. all those toxic chemicals. there's so many things we don't need a flashlight being shone in our faces for, and (as someone else in this thread already mentioned) our circadian rhythm being disrupted for. of course e-ink tech and the health of our eyes and sleep is just the tip of the iceberg. in the larger perspective capitalist firms are suffocating the earth with their single-use, non-modular, non-upgradeable, black box e-waste. they're not even 'tools' to me because the living and breathing Silicon Valley AI is using and abusing us (the workers) through these 'products'. i abhor the intellectual property system and monopolized vital technologies, it means capitalism makes the worst technological tools.
- amelius 5y agoThe colors in the opening image look faded.
- zmix 5y agoThis is just what these displays are capable of. I guess, that also might be the reason, they took book covers from the 1940's. Vintage look is quite attractive, this way, but it would be worse with modern high-def imagery.
- ineedasername 5y agoThey are very faded compared to a normal screen. With no backlight and in direct natural light, the Kaleido screens look similar to a color newspaper or many comics. (Some comics use paper and printing that produces much more vibrant color though) In artificial light a lot depends on the specifics of the environment. Trying one out in warmer light, somewhat indirectly (light overhead, screen partly vertical for reading) it was a little dark, and needed the backlight. It was a cool backlight, so the warm overhead light combined with it to counteract a bit of the shift toward blue. In the dark w/o external light, the cool backlight very much shifted color towards blue.
- bhauer 5y agoI wish they had not used vintage magazine covers for their illustration. By using old covers, I wasn't sure how much of the drabness was caused by the device and how much was attributable to the original image being drab.
- amelius 5y agoFor comparison, this is what the Alice in Wonderland cover is supposed to look like: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pW6QZ0TMgIU/T5t2xpQjrfI/AAAAAAAAAMs/VabP015_kFE/s1600/001-color-cover-scan-alice-in-wonderland.jpeg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pW6QZ0TMgIU/T5t2xpQjrfI/AAAAAAAAAM...
- jagger27 5y agoFor most reading and writing tasks I think I’d rather have a a monochrome display with much higher DPI with extremely crisp high contrast edges. I hope that keeps improving too. Colour is something I’m willing to go without for this type of device. Maybe a single highlight colour would be nice to have as long as the red or yellow pigment occupies the same cell as black, not an adjacent one. A 600 dpi A4 sized tablet would be lovely. It would be a lot harder to get to that effective dot pitch with colour displays. 300 dpi should be the entry level.
- Kuinox 5y agoI want color, to read code, I can't give up on syntax highlighting
- emteycz 5y agoI found out that text styling (bold, underline, italic, and different fonts) are more than enough.
- ectopod 5y agoI've seen this in a few software books. It works very well.
- alpaca128 5y agoI've been wondering for a while whether syntax highlighting had a role in certain code style changes. Like the one where open curly brackets were placed at the start of a new line but nowadays are just appended to the end. Without syntax highlighting the older style seems to make more sense as it makes scope delimiters more visible without using colors.
- emteycz 5y agoIMHO it's just preference - at least the last 15 years - but now propagated as a sort of common default/standard with the advent of auto code formatting tools. C# still does what you say (and practically always did - but the Mono people formatted it differently) while Java and JavaScript do the other. Before Prettier, I formatted JS code like C# - I thought it's nicer. Now I use the other because that's what Prettier does and it's usefulness greatly outweighs my preference.
- ineedasername 5y agoThe article misses a significant device: Onyx Nova 3. The major difference between its prior color offering (poke 2) is the integration of a Wacom layer that makes this very good for note taking. The other hardware and software improvements appear to be incremental. Of particular note with all Onyx readers is that they run Android, opening up the ecosystem of the Play store and particularly your note-taking app of choice. Unfortunately, color eink are roughly 100 dpi compared to the 300 of b&w, although it's a layer over the b&w display so normal black and white content is still much crisper. The color layer does make it all appear darker though. Also, ghosting can be a problem. Onyx has a few refresh settings that minimize it at the cost of refresh time. It looks like note taking is usually done on a faster refresh rate with occasional full screen refreshes to clean things up. I'm not sure the tech is fully there yet, but it looks like it works well enough for things like color PDFs and comics. For heavy note taking color is probably not a requirement for most. I like the idea of the other larger b&w Onyx readers running android though. The Play store apps would add a lot of options over the Remarkable.
- seneca 5y agoIt's worth noting that Onyx violates the Linux kernel license, and has a ton of telemetry that phones home to China. Major down sides for otherwise interesting tech.
- ineedasername 5y agoWow yes, that's a downside. I found a forum post [0] where someone monitored web traffic and it was analytics data, but still not great. And the GPL violation is an abuse of the FOSS community they rely on for free development. [0] https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=335605 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=335605
- unityByFreedom 5y agoWell, they come out with three new versions of their devices per month and you probably have no chance of servicing any type of warranty as they are based in China. You're not missing much if you wait for a company who can make decisions to release a better product, and you'll probably save yourself a headache.
- mmastrac 5y agoE-ink is the coolest tech with the worst business practices. The availability of affordable e-ink tech is just not there. I understand the research-intensive nature of these displays, but the company itself has been holding back the e-ink market by just operating poorly in so many ways. My biggest worry is that they'll fold at some point, leaving all the e-ink patents in the hand of a troll that will hold tech back for 20 years.
- black_puppydog 5y agoWell, some of these patents should already be reaching their half-life at least. :) But yeah, it was a sad day for me when I learned why e-ink isn't ubiquitous.
- zouhair 5y ago> why e-ink isn't ubiquitous. Do you have any source?
- cogman10 5y agoHere's a throwaway on HN explaining the problem. [1] Here's an example of E-Ink defending their patents [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779 [2] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171220005895/en/E-Ink-Successfully-Defends-Patent-Infringement-Case https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171220005895/en/E-I...
- WillPostForFood 5y ago#2 is RFI suing E-Ink claiming E-ink infringed on RFI's patents.
- Tagbert 5y agoThe first generation of patents has already expired. The company has been issued additional patents for techniques that went into the more recent versions. It means that someone probably could make screens now, but they would be lower resolution, slower refresh and have less contrast than your typical Kindle. Probably good for some uses but probably not enough of a volume to bring prices down.
- smeej 5y agoI've been using an Onyx Boox Poke 2 Color for about a year now, mostly to upload epubs and highlight in 4 colors using Google Play Books, which then sends all the highlights to a Google Doc per book. I'd say that device is "color" like the Gameboy Color was "color." It certainly isn't vivid, but the colors are distinguishable. I wish I knew how to take that output (a really annoying table format) and process it into an outline, though. That would be a real game-changer for me!
- jck 5y agoYou could use readwise.io (a paid service) to import your highlights from Google play books and many other services. Readwise offers an API which would help you process those annotations easier than parsing the google doc
- gnicholas 5y agoDid these ACeP readers [1] ever materialize? It sounded like they were a big step forward from existing devices in terms of fidelity and page turn speed. I think I recall reading that they were delayed into 2022, but I haven't heard anything about them recently. 1: https://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper/e-ink-plans-on-adding-acep-to-e-readers-in-2021 https://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper/e-ink-plans-on-adding-a...
- diggernet 5y agoIt's strange. Like you, I have gotten the impression (from articles such as your link) that ACeP is better than Kaleido. But in this article, they dismiss ACeP as a failure halfway through before moving on to talk about Kaleido.
- keewee7 5y ago>These include the Guoyue Smartbook V5 Color, the HiSense A5C Color Smartphone, the Onyx Boox Poke 2 Color, and the PocketBook Color. Three of these are designed and made by Chinese companies. Only the PocketBook is designed by a Swiss company. Why has the West lost the ability to innovate? No, creepy adtech from Silicon Valley is not useful innovation.
- not_math 5y agoAMD, Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia and Apple are all American companies that are innovating in the CPU and GPU market designed in the US. Except maybe Samsung with their Exynos chip, who has better innovation in this sphere? Might have been a long time the west had real competition, but I personally feel they still have the upper hand in the innovation sector. Maybe not in the future, who knows.
- ComputerGuru 5y agoI think GP’s point was about revolutionary vs evolutionary tech.
- not_math 5y agoRight. Oculus Rift has been developed in the US, and seeing all the companies that have followed the trend of VR (Valve, Sony, HTC, HP), I guess this could be an example of a revolutionary tech. Tesla while not revolutionary (electric vehicles as an idea and some demo has been around for a long time) has been the first to democratized the vehicle to the masses. Now every car makers are making an electric model. That's revolutionary. A lot of example from China I'm seeing are good looking and impressing demo (Xiaomi Alpha Mix) but are impractical for general consumers.
- wastoids 5y agoNow lets talk about the e ink monopoly
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoThis is second hand info, so sorry if it's totally wrong, I'll edit this: E-ink tech is great, but patents and other paper-limitations are slowing down developments of cheap e-ink devices devices, and e-ink will become "great again", when patents expire. I personally see many, many usecases of e-ink all around me, but the prices are way too high for anything that is not either really small or a repurposed old existing device (eg. jailbroken kindle)
- hourislate 5y agoHere is a thread about what you mentioned. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779
- wyre 5y agoI want to hook up a small e ink screen to a pi and use it with my mechanical keyboard as a modern typewriter of sorts but the prices on eink are so prohibitive it doesn’t seem worth it.
- JohnTHaller 5y agoThe response time is what makes devices like this kinda annoying.
- dredmorbius 5y agoFor text-based interaction, current-generation E-ink is more than suficient. Source: Own an Onyx BOOX Max Lumi and use it in this mode frequently.
- reginaldo 5y agoDo you say that from experience? I have both a Dasung Paperwhite monitor and a fairly hacked reMarkable 1 that I use for that purpose. Both work well for typing, as long as you type in a way that full refreshes are the exception, not the norm.
- zimpenfish 5y ago
- jszymborski 5y agoSo what's the over-under on E-ink replacing our current computer monitors much like we've come to replace cathode ray tubes.
- bloopernova 5y agoI'd like a dual-layer tablet screen. One layer is e-ink for reading, the other is a standard OLED screen. Since I'm wishing, I'd like it to be 16k and something like 1200dpi :)
- TranquilMarmot 5y agoWhile we're at it, make it so that you can designate specific parts of the screen to be e-ink or OLED haha
- saxonww 5y agohttps://dasung-tech.myshopify.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink-monitor-paperlike-253 https://dasung-tech.myshopify.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink... Monochrome. It has "turbo refresh tech" but unclear what that really means; with e-readers, similar verbiage just means it's less bad. The resolution and pixel density is very nice. The prices would have to come down by at least a factor of 3 though, IMO. I'd take the under.
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoE-inks screens don't have to be monochrome. I have one with black, white, and yellow. The hard part is fitting a range of color pigments in the pixel units, so the first e-inks so far have had 2-3. At only three colors, black, white, and one shade makes most sense for information contrast. But nothing says it can't be red, green, and blue... and as the technology miniaturizes, we can fit three in the space of one, maybe achieve sub-rotation, and thus achieve full color range. Actually if they're pigments... we're looking forward for CMYK. That's 4 separate pigments stuffed thrice into a pixel, that need to rotate separately! Possible? Difficult.
- 5y ago