10 ms·

As written by others, probably due to eink the company itself. I love eink. I have several readers, a remarkable which I adore. I wouldn't mind using a slow-r

As written by others, probably due to eink the company itself. I love eink. I have several readers, a remarkable which I adore. I wouldn't mind using a slow-refresh display for coding. The price just makes it impossible. Having color for this task, even if washed out, would be an absolute boon. As for all eink announcements, they may have the tech, but they might make it so so expensive that nobody is going to translate it into mass production product. Without volume, we'll never get better prices. Been watching eink for a lifetime now. I read each announcement as a red herring at this point..

dotancohen 4y ago
> Been watching eink for a lifetime now. I read each announcement as a red herring at this point.. I didn't even want to read the announcement, because I already know it's showcasing exactly the tech that I want but will never be made available. I've had half a dozen E-ink devices and I love them. But it seems like the company behind the tech has an active incentive to keep it out of consumers' hands.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  >an active incentive to keep it out of consumers' hands. They seem to act that way, but what would be the actual incentive? (As apposed to just bad business acumen)
  - mertd 4y ago
    They are either impossibly incompetent or there is something about the technology that makes mass availability in different form factors not viable and our laymen understanding doesn't see it.
    - jve 4y ago
      Yeah I wonder if price point is justified or not. Accessible pricing may result in eink screens taking consumers, businesses, hobbyists and whatnot by storm. But meh...
    - derefr 4y ago
      Conspiracy theory: it's because e-ink technology has military (stealth / penaid) applications. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=499TkWOl4PM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=499TkWOl4PM; then picture a "chameleon jet-fighter" that syncs its color to the surrounding sky; or better yet, a chameleon missile. Without losing range due to needing to power active panels.) I don't necessarily mean to imply that the military is restricting the tech for competitive reasons; but rather just that E Ink Corporation might be price-anchoring relative to what their biggest customer is willing to pay. (See also: why "holographic glitter" is so expensive, compared to other metallic glitters. Holo-glitter paint is an effective radar diffuser; and, more obviously, the glitter itself is literally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure) !)
      - h2odragon 4y ago
        Another conspiracy theory: the LCD cartel has been paying them not to compete. Given any actual difficulties yet to be worked out for mass production of eink (and there's always something), they may just be making more money by threatening to compete with LCD displays than they could by actually doing so.
      - xvector 4y ago
        > a "chameleon jet-fighter" that syncs its color to the surrounding sky; would be largely worthless as visual isn't really the primary way we detect and destroy aircraft anymore.
        derefr 4y ago
        In combat, sure. Making yourself invisible to satellite imagery during long-range flyover missions, on the other hand...
      - ggm 4y ago
        Holo glitter works in the radar domain. So, its passive tech which has an effect. EInk has a refresh time. Which is a significant mismatch to the flight speed of devices which seek to mask themselves against changing background. More to the point, optical detection is the least worry in this space. by the time it's visible in motion, its already a problem. ' For on-the-ground, its easier to put it under a canopy. EInk does nothing for radar, or thermal imaging. So your proposed conspiracy is to defeat human eyes, which rarely if ever are the first-spotters. The circumstances where using radar breaches your own privacy are understood. I would expect an ML vision system could defeat this anyway. (and I say that as a bit of a long-term non-believer in AI) I love a good conspiracy, but alas, I think this isn't it. The grassy knoll is just, after all, a patch of grass, and not an EInk facsimile, in my personal opinion.
    - robinsoh 4y ago
      > They are either impossibly incompetent or there is something about the technology that makes mass availability in different form factors not viable and our laymen understanding doesn't see it. You are correct, it is the equivalent of me as a display engineer coming here and saying "Cray computers has an active incentive to keep it out of consumer's hands" or alleging "Microsoft is blocking progress in the operating system industry using their patent". If you examine my comment history, you'll see I've tried repeatedly before on HN to explain why the physics of electrophoresis is the dominant limitation in the industry but that is apparently harder to understand and harder to accept, whereas people saying things like "the company behind the tech has an active incentive to keep it out of consumers' hands." or "the technology is locked by a company that doesn't innovate nor mass produce their tech. " without citations or any evidence is accepted as the gospel truth. :-)
      - haroldp 4y ago
        Why does my 12 year old kindle-keyboard refresh so much faster and better than any eink hobby display that I can buy? Do you think there is any hope of this changing?
        robinsoh 4y ago
        > Why does my 12 year old kindle-keyboard refresh so much faster and better than any eink hobby display that I can buy? Do you think there is any hope of this changing? I have no idea what you mean by "refresh so much faster and better" or what an "eink hobby display" is. To me, you can buy the same panel Kindle uses on the market and you can drive it with various different controllers and the "update latency" (electrophoretic panels don't refresh) will be different.
        captainmuon 4y ago
        The panels are very similar. Amazon made their own driver board, and they put a lot of work into tuning it. The ones you can buy for hobbyists have very cheap driver boards that are merely "good enough". Why they can't be a dollar or two more expensive and have better components, or why they can't just release the firmware source so people can improve it, I have no idea. I would almost say they are intentionally limiting it, but I've seen the same behavior from single-board-computer vendors, for example. It's really short sighted.
  - maratc 4y ago
    I would not assume any malicious intent. e-Ink is a wonderful solution looking for a problem. Anything with a mouse pointer can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates. Anything looking at a web page can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates. Anything playing video can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates. This leaves us with e-readers, but that market is very limited in size. Not everyone wants a dedicated book-reading device when a multipurpose device can, besides everything else, also read books. Even smaller markets are information kiosks and "smart" price tags in supermarkets.
    - roeles 4y ago
      There's a whole range of applications where it makes sense. Since it is very well readable in full sunlight, e-ink is very suitable for low refresh aircraft displays. I suspect the same could apply for all kinds of HMIs which are used outdoors.
      - maratc 4y ago
        Aircraft displays need to work in full darkness too. e-Ink might make sense but its price, compared to some LCD screen, might not. Otherwise, I take from your comment that we're in agreement that "e-Ink is a solution looking for a problem".
        roeles 4y ago
        My experience is from gliders, which are only operated in VFR conditions (not more than 30 minutes before sunrise and not more than 30 minutes after sundown). VFR is nothing glider-specific though, so I can see them being useful in other VFR-operated aircraft too. In my experience e-ink displays reduce eye strain and attract less attention. This results in more attention being drawn to the outside world, which in turn is a good thing for safety. I am not at all in agreement with your statement. In some contexts price is not a big issue and the qualities that e-ink brings are worth the money.
        drooglyman 4y ago
  - n8cpdx 4y ago
    You might be surprised at how many companies get comfortable servicing a commercial niche and just choose not to pursue consumer growth. Without pursuing it, the potential value is hypothetical and internally it can be hard to build a compelling case for mass marketization. There is a lot of effort required to scale up technologies to the point that it is affordable for consumers. In the software space I see it with solutions (think $500+/year/seat licensing) that could be broadly useful, but the company doesn’t want to make intuitive or bug free (enterprise software users will tolerate a lot of abuse). In the hardware space, there is a risk of building a million units of something that doesn’t sell (think Surface RT).
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    My thought: market segmentation, and/or the inability to do so meaningfully. The principle characteristics of e-ink displays are size, resolution, refresh rate, and colour gamut. (Even B&W displays have a range of greyscale gamuts.) Small displays are now reasonably cheap, with displays of ~6--8" available for $20--50. Larger displays, suitable for advertising, marketing, or other commercial/industrial applications are much more expensive, as noted here. Some of that is likely cost-driven, but another element is that if a larger supply were offered, the price would fall. Absent some way of bracketing specific applications, there's little to keep, say, advertising or commercial users from making do with cheaper consumer-grade displays. There's a somewhat similar rationale that was arrived at in the 19th century by French engineer / economist / polymath Jules Dupuit, in describing the rationale by which 3rd class rail carriages were so much poorly fitted than 2nd class --- if the 3rd class accommodations were merely sufficient then they would cannibalise 2nd class ticket sales. Instead, 3rd class was made intentionally bad. That's a dynamic which is replicated today in both transporation (e.g., airline coach class seating) and free-tier Internet and information services. I don't know that this is what's driving EInk's business strategy. But I have my suspicions.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  Musk should buy them and put a fire under their asses.
  - bipson 4y ago
    Not sure if you're joking or not... :S
    - stjohnswarts 4y ago
      mostly tongue-in-cheek. it would be nice to see progress rather than milking the patents.
- captainmuon 4y ago
  I can confirm (take it with a grain of salt, I can't give you written sources but it matches the experience of many people). I previously worked in the display and industrial PC industry, and we tried to buy e-ink panels. The reseller would only sell them to us after giving them a detailed business plan. The sample we got had labels scratched from the chips (OK this is actually more common than you might think). And I had a strong suspicion that it was artificially limited to a lower color depth than possible [1]. Even further, a Chinese colleague hinted that they will never sell to you if you are doing anything in the consumer space (except you are one of the big e-reader makers of course). And that the traditional display companies could retool pretty quickly to make e-ink instead, but won't. It's all very very odd to me. I would suspect a cartel, but it doesn't make any sense - e-ink is too slow and to ugly to really cannibalize laptop and monitor sales. We had good use cases: industrial PCs, outdoors informational displays, and so on. But apparantly not good enough for e-ink. ---- [1] There is a look-up-table in the microcontroller that tells the display how much current to use to switch a pixel to a given color. It depends on the previous color of the pixel and the temperature. These "waveforms" or "wavetables" are proprietary and secret. It looks like they are just "good enough" and small enough to fit into the cheap MCU. I suspect you could get better results by using larger and better tuned tables, and I've seen a hobbyist actually get higher color depth by using their own waveforms.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    > And that the traditional display companies could retool pretty quickly to make e-ink instead, but won't. [...] e-ink is too slow and to ugly to really cannibalize laptop and monitor sales. I don't think it would cannibalize these sales, but I do think that if e-ink was cheaper and competitive with LCD, it would be everywhere. As it stands though, LCD and probably OLED will overtake any use cases that e-ink would have had. The company behind e-ink dropped the ball there, thinking too highly and too exclusively of their own product. It's not that fancy, like, bruh.
mrandish 4y ago
> Been watching eink for a lifetime now. If it's been that long, do the blocking patents expire soon?
- voakbasda 4y ago
  One modus operandi of such companies is to amass a lot of patentable ideas as trade secrets, which subsequently can be rolled out as sequential patents. This effectively extends their monopoly on the products as a whole, despite patents expiring that protect the initial innovations. They can always roll something out sooner if a competitor might be approaching their IP moat.
  - resoluteteeth 4y ago
    If the devices are being embedded in consumer products like eink screens, is it really possible to treat the technology as a trade secret?
    - lostcolony 4y ago
      They only go out in devices after they've been patented. Think of 3 years of research. Rather than it leading to three years of progressively better consumer devices, you instead patent the first idea and use it to go to market, then sit on the rest. After X amount of time (where X < 20 years), you patent the next winning idea, and go to market with it. Etc. This presents a challenge to would be competitors; to go to market, you have to leapfrog the existing technology and patent (with as broad a language as patents tend to have), hope the incumbent doesn't have something that would immediately deprecate your product (or at least, relies itself on something you patented along the way), and then overcome the incumbent's existing advantage in in the market. And also be prepared for a legal fight, since almost assuredly one of you is going to accuse the other of infringing a patent.
  - nicd 4y ago
    One of my friends works on an e-ink product. My understanding is that one of the major trade secrets are the e-ink waveforms (the sequence of voltages used to print and erase content on the display). They are shared under NDA and baked into product firmware. Apparently the open-source versions are significantly worse.
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
Do they just not believe the pricing rules all other business is pretty much based on or what? With scale comes the real money, right?
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I think this is the real head-scratcher. Wondering if either they just fundamentally aren't capable of scaling up their business, so they are getting as much as they can out of what little they can make. Or maybe there's some confusing IP situation and they just want to create a minimal number of devices to keep some sort of... copyrights or patents alive or something (as far as I know they don't work that way in the US, but maybe other countries?) Or maybe this is, like, just the CEO's hobby project and and they don't realize that people want these things? Or maybe, actually, only a couple nerds like us want these E-ink screens. Assuming tech nerds are generally pretty well off overall, but a fairly small-ish group, maybe E-ink screens just end up being fairly price insensitive as a result? I dunno. Seems weird though.
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    Do they even manufacture the screens themselves? I though they mostly just did r&d and licensed things, in which case scale shouldn't really be an issue, at least on manufacturing the things.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    > Or maybe this is, like, just the CEO's hobby project and and they don't realize that people want these things? There was definitely a time when I really wanted a color e-ink screen. But now, with iPads having 10 hour battery life, I can get all day performance and better colors and refresh rates from that device, so my desire for color e-ink has greatly declined. I do love my b&w e-reader though and use it every day.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      I mean, is 10 hours really that long? My SuperNote notebook lasts for days, my Kobo for weeks. I certainly have had flights longer than 10 hours. At least nowadays you sometimes have a USB-A charging port if you needed, or a 120V if you're lucky.
jandrese 4y ago
It's like 3D printers back in the 90s and 2000s. There's a huge potential industry just waiting for the patents to finally run out because the early innovator only cares about tiny niche uses of the product and not undercutting those niches with affordable consumer goods.
Cd00d 4y ago
> I wouldn't mind using a slow-refresh display for coding I've seen this sentiment a lot when eink displays are discussed here. But, I'm not quite sure I get it. I've typed in platforms with significant lag between a keystroke and the character showing. It's horrible! So often, you think maybe you made a typo, but have to wait to see it and fix it, instead of a quick few backspaces and ONWARD! I find it really disruptive to my train of thought and it breaks the brain-interface link. Maybe the eink displays refresh fast enough to make this be a minimal issue, but my few years old Kindle Paperwhite doesn't have me confident that's true. Or, maybe I just type way worse than those of you that want an eink dev environment.
- LeifCarrotson 4y ago
  Displaying a character on an e-ink display can be low latency, it's deleting a character that takes time (or vice versa, depending on the chemistry and fore/background inversion).
- wakeupcall 4y ago
  An eink display doesn't handle the same as a regular framebuffer, and the speed of the update depends a lot of what operation you want to do on it and how you want it to look like. With partial updates the latency can be pretty low. There are many ways to control ghosting in a way that doesn't affect the latency too much (essentially, refresh asynchronously - and again - only where needed) For regular typing, I have no doubts it can work without disruption. What is harder is modifying blocks of text. Scrolling quickly. It can be done, but would eventually require a full screen refresh to get good quality due to ghosting again. (Ironically eink demonstrated high refresh rate video playback what.. one year ago on their screens? - another vaporware demo) In a sense, it's like working remotely with a slow modem. The latency is not high, but you need to be smart on what you display (the original vi editor would actually be a _perfect_ fit for this ;)) The question is why I would put up with all this effort and limitations with eink. For me, it's because eink is MUCH easier on the eyes. It's pretty much the only display which is truly readable outdoors. So far I wasn't able to use any single tablet/phone/laptop outside, despite owning devices with pretty bright 500nit screens.

dotancohen 4y ago

> Been watching eink for a lifetime now. I read each announcement as a red herring at this point.. I didn't even want to read the announcement, because I already know it's showcasing exactly the tech that I want but will never be made available. I've had half a dozen E-ink devices and I love them. But it seems like the company behind the tech has an active incentive to keep it out of consumers' hands.

ineedasername 4y ago
>an active incentive to keep it out of consumers' hands. They seem to act that way, but what would be the actual incentive? (As apposed to just bad business acumen)
- mertd 4y ago
  They are either impossibly incompetent or there is something about the technology that makes mass availability in different form factors not viable and our laymen understanding doesn't see it.
  - jve 4y ago
    Yeah I wonder if price point is justified or not. Accessible pricing may result in eink screens taking consumers, businesses, hobbyists and whatnot by storm. But meh...
  - derefr 4y ago
    Conspiracy theory: it's because e-ink technology has military (stealth / penaid) applications. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=499TkWOl4PM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=499TkWOl4PM; then picture a "chameleon jet-fighter" that syncs its color to the surrounding sky; or better yet, a chameleon missile. Without losing range due to needing to power active panels.) I don't necessarily mean to imply that the military is restricting the tech for competitive reasons; but rather just that E Ink Corporation might be price-anchoring relative to what their biggest customer is willing to pay. (See also: why "holographic glitter" is so expensive, compared to other metallic glitters. Holo-glitter paint is an effective radar diffuser; and, more obviously, the glitter itself is literally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure) !)
    - h2odragon 4y ago
      Another conspiracy theory: the LCD cartel has been paying them not to compete. Given any actual difficulties yet to be worked out for mass production of eink (and there's always something), they may just be making more money by threatening to compete with LCD displays than they could by actually doing so.
    - xvector 4y ago
      > a "chameleon jet-fighter" that syncs its color to the surrounding sky; would be largely worthless as visual isn't really the primary way we detect and destroy aircraft anymore.
      - derefr 4y ago
        In combat, sure. Making yourself invisible to satellite imagery during long-range flyover missions, on the other hand...
    - ggm 4y ago
      Holo glitter works in the radar domain. So, its passive tech which has an effect. EInk has a refresh time. Which is a significant mismatch to the flight speed of devices which seek to mask themselves against changing background. More to the point, optical detection is the least worry in this space. by the time it's visible in motion, its already a problem. ' For on-the-ground, its easier to put it under a canopy. EInk does nothing for radar, or thermal imaging. So your proposed conspiracy is to defeat human eyes, which rarely if ever are the first-spotters. The circumstances where using radar breaches your own privacy are understood. I would expect an ML vision system could defeat this anyway. (and I say that as a bit of a long-term non-believer in AI) I love a good conspiracy, but alas, I think this isn't it. The grassy knoll is just, after all, a patch of grass, and not an EInk facsimile, in my personal opinion.
  - robinsoh 4y ago
    > They are either impossibly incompetent or there is something about the technology that makes mass availability in different form factors not viable and our laymen understanding doesn't see it. You are correct, it is the equivalent of me as a display engineer coming here and saying "Cray computers has an active incentive to keep it out of consumer's hands" or alleging "Microsoft is blocking progress in the operating system industry using their patent". If you examine my comment history, you'll see I've tried repeatedly before on HN to explain why the physics of electrophoresis is the dominant limitation in the industry but that is apparently harder to understand and harder to accept, whereas people saying things like "the company behind the tech has an active incentive to keep it out of consumers' hands." or "the technology is locked by a company that doesn't innovate nor mass produce their tech. " without citations or any evidence is accepted as the gospel truth. :-)
    - haroldp 4y ago
      Why does my 12 year old kindle-keyboard refresh so much faster and better than any eink hobby display that I can buy? Do you think there is any hope of this changing?
      - robinsoh 4y ago
        > Why does my 12 year old kindle-keyboard refresh so much faster and better than any eink hobby display that I can buy? Do you think there is any hope of this changing? I have no idea what you mean by "refresh so much faster and better" or what an "eink hobby display" is. To me, you can buy the same panel Kindle uses on the market and you can drive it with various different controllers and the "update latency" (electrophoretic panels don't refresh) will be different.
      - captainmuon 4y ago
        The panels are very similar. Amazon made their own driver board, and they put a lot of work into tuning it. The ones you can buy for hobbyists have very cheap driver boards that are merely "good enough". Why they can't be a dollar or two more expensive and have better components, or why they can't just release the firmware source so people can improve it, I have no idea. I would almost say they are intentionally limiting it, but I've seen the same behavior from single-board-computer vendors, for example. It's really short sighted.
- maratc 4y ago
  I would not assume any malicious intent. e-Ink is a wonderful solution looking for a problem. Anything with a mouse pointer can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates. Anything looking at a web page can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates. Anything playing video can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates. This leaves us with e-readers, but that market is very limited in size. Not everyone wants a dedicated book-reading device when a multipurpose device can, besides everything else, also read books. Even smaller markets are information kiosks and "smart" price tags in supermarkets.
  - roeles 4y ago
    There's a whole range of applications where it makes sense. Since it is very well readable in full sunlight, e-ink is very suitable for low refresh aircraft displays. I suspect the same could apply for all kinds of HMIs which are used outdoors.
    - maratc 4y ago
      Aircraft displays need to work in full darkness too. e-Ink might make sense but its price, compared to some LCD screen, might not. Otherwise, I take from your comment that we're in agreement that "e-Ink is a solution looking for a problem".
      - roeles 4y ago
        My experience is from gliders, which are only operated in VFR conditions (not more than 30 minutes before sunrise and not more than 30 minutes after sundown). VFR is nothing glider-specific though, so I can see them being useful in other VFR-operated aircraft too. In my experience e-ink displays reduce eye strain and attract less attention. This results in more attention being drawn to the outside world, which in turn is a good thing for safety. I am not at all in agreement with your statement. In some contexts price is not a big issue and the qualities that e-ink brings are worth the money.
        drooglyman 4y ago
- n8cpdx 4y ago
  You might be surprised at how many companies get comfortable servicing a commercial niche and just choose not to pursue consumer growth. Without pursuing it, the potential value is hypothetical and internally it can be hard to build a compelling case for mass marketization. There is a lot of effort required to scale up technologies to the point that it is affordable for consumers. In the software space I see it with solutions (think $500+/year/seat licensing) that could be broadly useful, but the company doesn’t want to make intuitive or bug free (enterprise software users will tolerate a lot of abuse). In the hardware space, there is a risk of building a million units of something that doesn’t sell (think Surface RT).
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  My thought: market segmentation, and/or the inability to do so meaningfully. The principle characteristics of e-ink displays are size, resolution, refresh rate, and colour gamut. (Even B&W displays have a range of greyscale gamuts.) Small displays are now reasonably cheap, with displays of ~6--8" available for $20--50. Larger displays, suitable for advertising, marketing, or other commercial/industrial applications are much more expensive, as noted here. Some of that is likely cost-driven, but another element is that if a larger supply were offered, the price would fall. Absent some way of bracketing specific applications, there's little to keep, say, advertising or commercial users from making do with cheaper consumer-grade displays. There's a somewhat similar rationale that was arrived at in the 19th century by French engineer / economist / polymath Jules Dupuit, in describing the rationale by which 3rd class rail carriages were so much poorly fitted than 2nd class --- if the 3rd class accommodations were merely sufficient then they would cannibalise 2nd class ticket sales. Instead, 3rd class was made intentionally bad. That's a dynamic which is replicated today in both transporation (e.g., airline coach class seating) and free-tier Internet and information services. I don't know that this is what's driving EInk's business strategy. But I have my suspicions.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
Musk should buy them and put a fire under their asses.
- bipson 4y ago
  Not sure if you're joking or not... :S
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    mostly tongue-in-cheek. it would be nice to see progress rather than milking the patents.
captainmuon 4y ago
I can confirm (take it with a grain of salt, I can't give you written sources but it matches the experience of many people). I previously worked in the display and industrial PC industry, and we tried to buy e-ink panels. The reseller would only sell them to us after giving them a detailed business plan. The sample we got had labels scratched from the chips (OK this is actually more common than you might think). And I had a strong suspicion that it was artificially limited to a lower color depth than possible [1]. Even further, a Chinese colleague hinted that they will never sell to you if you are doing anything in the consumer space (except you are one of the big e-reader makers of course). And that the traditional display companies could retool pretty quickly to make e-ink instead, but won't. It's all very very odd to me. I would suspect a cartel, but it doesn't make any sense - e-ink is too slow and to ugly to really cannibalize laptop and monitor sales. We had good use cases: industrial PCs, outdoors informational displays, and so on. But apparantly not good enough for e-ink. ---- [1] There is a look-up-table in the microcontroller that tells the display how much current to use to switch a pixel to a given color. It depends on the previous color of the pixel and the temperature. These "waveforms" or "wavetables" are proprietary and secret. It looks like they are just "good enough" and small enough to fit into the cheap MCU. I suspect you could get better results by using larger and better tuned tables, and I've seen a hobbyist actually get higher color depth by using their own waveforms.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  > And that the traditional display companies could retool pretty quickly to make e-ink instead, but won't. [...] e-ink is too slow and to ugly to really cannibalize laptop and monitor sales. I don't think it would cannibalize these sales, but I do think that if e-ink was cheaper and competitive with LCD, it would be everywhere. As it stands though, LCD and probably OLED will overtake any use cases that e-ink would have had. The company behind e-ink dropped the ball there, thinking too highly and too exclusively of their own product. It's not that fancy, like, bruh.

mrandish 4y ago

> Been watching eink for a lifetime now. If it's been that long, do the blocking patents expire soon?

voakbasda 4y ago
One modus operandi of such companies is to amass a lot of patentable ideas as trade secrets, which subsequently can be rolled out as sequential patents. This effectively extends their monopoly on the products as a whole, despite patents expiring that protect the initial innovations. They can always roll something out sooner if a competitor might be approaching their IP moat.
- resoluteteeth 4y ago
  If the devices are being embedded in consumer products like eink screens, is it really possible to treat the technology as a trade secret?
  - lostcolony 4y ago
    They only go out in devices after they've been patented. Think of 3 years of research. Rather than it leading to three years of progressively better consumer devices, you instead patent the first idea and use it to go to market, then sit on the rest. After X amount of time (where X < 20 years), you patent the next winning idea, and go to market with it. Etc. This presents a challenge to would be competitors; to go to market, you have to leapfrog the existing technology and patent (with as broad a language as patents tend to have), hope the incumbent doesn't have something that would immediately deprecate your product (or at least, relies itself on something you patented along the way), and then overcome the incumbent's existing advantage in in the market. And also be prepared for a legal fight, since almost assuredly one of you is going to accuse the other of infringing a patent.
- nicd 4y ago
  One of my friends works on an e-ink product. My understanding is that one of the major trade secrets are the e-ink waveforms (the sequence of voltages used to print and erase content on the display). They are shared under NDA and baked into product firmware. Apparently the open-source versions are significantly worse.

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago

Do they just not believe the pricing rules all other business is pretty much based on or what? With scale comes the real money, right?

bee_rider 4y ago
I think this is the real head-scratcher. Wondering if either they just fundamentally aren't capable of scaling up their business, so they are getting as much as they can out of what little they can make. Or maybe there's some confusing IP situation and they just want to create a minimal number of devices to keep some sort of... copyrights or patents alive or something (as far as I know they don't work that way in the US, but maybe other countries?) Or maybe this is, like, just the CEO's hobby project and and they don't realize that people want these things? Or maybe, actually, only a couple nerds like us want these E-ink screens. Assuming tech nerds are generally pretty well off overall, but a fairly small-ish group, maybe E-ink screens just end up being fairly price insensitive as a result? I dunno. Seems weird though.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  Do they even manufacture the screens themselves? I though they mostly just did r&d and licensed things, in which case scale shouldn't really be an issue, at least on manufacturing the things.
- brewdad 4y ago
  > Or maybe this is, like, just the CEO's hobby project and and they don't realize that people want these things? There was definitely a time when I really wanted a color e-ink screen. But now, with iPads having 10 hour battery life, I can get all day performance and better colors and refresh rates from that device, so my desire for color e-ink has greatly declined. I do love my b&w e-reader though and use it every day.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    I mean, is 10 hours really that long? My SuperNote notebook lasts for days, my Kobo for weeks. I certainly have had flights longer than 10 hours. At least nowadays you sometimes have a USB-A charging port if you needed, or a 120V if you're lucky.

jandrese 4y ago

It's like 3D printers back in the 90s and 2000s. There's a huge potential industry just waiting for the patents to finally run out because the early innovator only cares about tiny niche uses of the product and not undercutting those niches with affordable consumer goods.

Cd00d 4y ago

> I wouldn't mind using a slow-refresh display for coding I've seen this sentiment a lot when eink displays are discussed here. But, I'm not quite sure I get it. I've typed in platforms with significant lag between a keystroke and the character showing. It's horrible! So often, you think maybe you made a typo, but have to wait to see it and fix it, instead of a quick few backspaces and ONWARD! I find it really disruptive to my train of thought and it breaks the brain-interface link. Maybe the eink displays refresh fast enough to make this be a minimal issue, but my few years old Kindle Paperwhite doesn't have me confident that's true. Or, maybe I just type way worse than those of you that want an eink dev environment.

LeifCarrotson 4y ago
Displaying a character on an e-ink display can be low latency, it's deleting a character that takes time (or vice versa, depending on the chemistry and fore/background inversion).
wakeupcall 4y ago
An eink display doesn't handle the same as a regular framebuffer, and the speed of the update depends a lot of what operation you want to do on it and how you want it to look like. With partial updates the latency can be pretty low. There are many ways to control ghosting in a way that doesn't affect the latency too much (essentially, refresh asynchronously - and again - only where needed) For regular typing, I have no doubts it can work without disruption. What is harder is modifying blocks of text. Scrolling quickly. It can be done, but would eventually require a full screen refresh to get good quality due to ghosting again. (Ironically eink demonstrated high refresh rate video playback what.. one year ago on their screens? - another vaporware demo) In a sense, it's like working remotely with a slow modem. The latency is not high, but you need to be smart on what you display (the original vi editor would actually be a _perfect_ fit for this ;)) The question is why I would put up with all this effort and limitations with eink. For me, it's because eink is MUCH easier on the eyes. It's pretty much the only display which is truly readable outdoors. So far I wasn't able to use any single tablet/phone/laptop outside, despite owning devices with pretty bright 500nit screens.