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>For comparison a 42" full-color 60fps TV with remote, speakers, wifi, etc. etc. is $140. Because it's a lot easier and cheaper to manufacture large LCD panels

>For comparison a 42" full-color 60fps TV with remote, speakers, wifi, etc. etc. is $140. Because it's a lot easier and cheaper to manufacture large LCD panels at scale than E-ink film. >It seems like the patent holder could be making a lot more money if they dropped the price. I don't know any company or shareholders that would say no to making more money so if this would actually be true then it would, but that's not the reality. The FUD that large e-ink displays are expensive because of some patent conspiracy needs to stop. Large e-ink screens are expensive because manufacturing yields are very low and so are sales volumes. Source: worked with e-ink on products with big and small displays Edit: So I'm saying the truth and getting down voted for it? Fine, then feel free to keep believing whatever you think is the truth. No point in discussing it further.

bigmattystyles 3y ago
One thing I don’t understand - why are the iPhone screens that can run in display mode run at 1hz a feature - what’s hard about driving a display typically driven at 120hz(?) at 1hz to save on power difficult? Or it’s not and the it’s a differentiating feature price.
- solardev 3y ago
  Is the refresh really a big power draw vs the backlight or even the pixels themselves? I think the thing about e-ink is that it's a chemical producing/retaining the pigment, rather than a light source. So even when it's off, it retains its current colors. When a LED is off, it's just... nothing. But you still have a point. Even if a LED display has "only" a 2 or 3 day battery life, that's still pretty huge to mere hours. How do smart watches (like the Garmins with 1-week batteries) do it?
  - pxeboot 3y ago
    The Garmin watches with 1+ week battery life have memory-in-pixel displays. Like E-Ink, this seems like another technology that could be amazing if they were available in larger sizes with lower prices.
  - adql 3y ago
    > How do smart watches (like the Garmins with 1-week batteries) do it? https://sharpdevices.com/memory-lcd/ https://sharpdevices.com/memory-lcd/
GuB-42 3y ago
> So I'm saying the truth and getting down voted for it? Don't worry about that. Posts that go against the general opinion always get downvoted at first. But if it is insightful and not demonstrably wrong, the upvotes will win.
dantheman 3y ago
You say that, but patents traditionally hold back progress. If you look at the amount of horse power generated by steam engines - it spiked after the patents expired. There are probably many techniques and processes that would be tried and developed if it wasn't locked up by patents.
- adql 3y ago
  The time period is asinine; 20 years is forever in most industries
  - kakwa_ 3y ago
    Not really. In a lot of industries, +20 years old tech and even +20 years old equipment are normal and competitive. In tech, yes, 20 years is a lot, but that's more of an exception. And imho, it's slowing down: A 20 years old computer, like an Athlon 64, today, could probably run most of the usual basic workloads (mail, text, word processing, browsing) with up to date software. It would be slow, but it would work. An 1983 years old computer in 2003 was just obsolete and completely unfit to run any of the usual 2003 software.
- kakwa_ 3y ago
  Devil's advocate, but one might argue patents actually incentivize progress. Without patents, there is far less incentive to seek progress. What's the point for a for-profit organization to spend resources on Research, just to see your innovation immediately copied? And if said for-profit organization still innovate, it has a strong incentive to keep its innovation as secret as possible. Patents by contrast, incentivize sharing, on one hand it makes the innovation public knowledge, and on the other licensing agreements usually exist. And in the end, 20 years is really short compared to human history. Are patents an ideal solution? Hell no, this system is too easily abused (patent trolling, patent thickets, etc), and feels really wrong at times (patents on life-saving drugs for example). But so far, that's the best compromise we manage to mostly agree on in terms of worldwide IP recognition.
solardev 3y ago
I didn't vote either way, but this is news to me. As long as e-ink has been around, all I've ever heard were the patent issues. If you're saying it's actually manufacturing difficulties, can you provide any links or additional info? I believe you, but as someone not familiar with the field, I'd love to learn more both to counteract the patent narrative and just for my own curiosity. What is hard about e-ink at scale that other products don't share?
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Low market interest
  - maushu 3y ago
    With those prices I'm not surprised.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      How many other markets are there for 1Hz refresh displays that haven't already been untapped by e-ink tech? Lower prices won't magically fix the major limitation of this technology that hinder its expansion.
    - wahnfrieden 3y ago
      Negative outlook on market interest at scale/investment needed for low unit cost Even niche early adopter users at current prices don’t love the tech
- Qwertious 3y ago
  >As long as e-ink has been around, all I've ever heard were the patent issues. If you're saying it's actually manufacturing difficulties, can you provide any links or additional info? For the record, the "patents" think has no links to back it up either. But to answer your question: E-ink screens are less than $100 (depending on the size), that's already pretty cheap. They're only expensive when compared to LCDs. LCDs are produced at a rate of billions per quarter*, with ~6 billion smartphone owners, and lots of them having multiple LCD devices e.g. laptop/desktop screen, work computer's screen, supermarket kiosk, tablet, smartwatch, car screen, etc. In contrast, e-ink screens have basically three applications: e-readers, e-notes (which is basically just an e-reader with a stylus), and supermarket pricetags. E-readers/e-notes are a luxury item that you don't need if you already have a smartphone/iPad. There's just no economy of scale for e-ink; not compared to LCDs. Because there's no economy scale or obvious new markets to expand into, there's not much budget for R&D, so the entire field moves slowly.
squigz 3y ago
> I don't know any company or shareholders that would say no to making more money so if this would actually be true then it would, but that's not the reality. I've never quite understood this sort of thinking. Companies aren't perfect omniscient systems - the people in charge of various companies make poor decisions all the time, based on the same human biases we all have. So yes, it's entirely possible they could make more money that way, but executives simply hear "Lower the price" and run away. I'm not saying that's certainly what's happening, but this implication that a company could possibly only do the thing that's most beneficial to it is... strange, and very common thinking.
- pseg134 3y ago
  [flagged]
simple10 3y ago
Sometimes patent holder enter into initial deals with manufacturers and then can't lower the royalty price for other manufacturers. Even if they'd make more from higher volume, the initial manufacture might be serving high-end customers and doesn't want other manufactures entering the market at a lower price. So they refuse to agree to a lower patent royalty even though it would save them money. It's counterintuitive, but rationale under certain circumstances. This is pure conjecture for the e-ink patent on my part, but I've seen it first hand for other products.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
Question for you. I always saw the problem as: only one company or limited companies can manufacture them. Those companies are having issues manufacturing them so the price is high. But if more companies were allowed to manufacture them, wouldn’t we see more people solving production problems and lowering prices? If there is one company with low yields and high prices, if everyone is allowed to make them then there is a monetary gain for new entrants willing to solve yield problems. But if things are heavily patent encumbered then the whole world is at the whim of one organization to succeed or fail - there is no competition. That is to say, it’s not that they’re charging high prices out of greed, but that there’s no competition forcing prices down.
- wayfinder 3y ago
  Not OP but what you’re saying is absolutely true. But first someone has to invent it. Nobody’s gonna spend a few thousand or million dollars to invent something unless they get their money and more back, so that’s the point of patents. And if they patent something and don’t capitalize on it enough, that’s their loss, because they had to detail their invention in their patent application and that’s public information. Patents last only 20 years and for most industries, that’s not very long. (That said, I think software patents are a different beast. Because 20 years in software engineering is like 100 years in civil engineering, for example, since software engineering is like a few thousand years younger discipline than civil.)
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    Actually I think patents do far more harm than good in our economy. In aggregate they slow down innovation significantly by carving a huge moat around every new advancement. Without patents, there’s still loads of natural incentives to innovate. The difference is that instead of fewer larger leaps, there would be many more smaller leaps. You can always make money if you develop a new technology in secret and then start selling it before your competitors have any chance of going in to production. And then there’s always reason to support public investment in research. But patents take new innovations and then legally prevent the hundreds of potential innovators who would have built on that idea and improved it from going anywhere near it. Most innovation is incremental and with patents, that innovation is blocked from the market. This is a huge loss for our economy. The only singular function of a patent is to prevent innovation. (Legally, that is all they do.) The idea that the follow on effect of this restriction is a net gain in innovation is always taken on faith. It’s a story told over and over again. But when you look at things like open source, you can see how many of the arguments for patents simply aren’t true.
xnx 3y ago
I didn't realize e-ink manufacturing was such a tricky process. I would think there would be a lot of applications for larger e-ink panels even if they had a number of stuck pixels.
bigfudge 3y ago
I think it would be interesting to hear from an insider (with examples/evidence etc) what the mechanism is for eink to be more expensive. I/e/ the fundamentals for why this is the case beyond economies of scale. Given this history of the patent it looks to the outsider like this probably isn't the case and short sighted rent seeking is the problem. Would love to be wrong though, so if you do have a good explanation then here would be a great place to air it. I've not seen anything elsewhere...
- LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
  I’m sure the ad-driven subsidy on TVs plays a huge part. TV prices have declined as “dumb” TVs have been phased out of the market. A more niche tool like a large e-ink display might not make as much sense from to price this way since ad systems need large networks of users to be relevant.
  - mikewarot 3y ago
    As a check against this, I looked for 42" computer monitors, which don't display ads. There are $600 4k 42" monitors in stock at CDW, for example. The same size 4k SmartTVs are about $300. So, yes... there appears to be about a 50% discount for TVs vs Computer Displays, part of which could be a subsidy, most of which I suspect is volume driving down the cost of production.
    - komali2 3y ago
      Double check the refresh rate, input latency, and color gamut for your comparisons. Computer monitor user concerns are quite different than tv screen users.
    - alwayslikethis 3y ago
      TVs also spy on you. That data offsets some of the cost. They also often have lots of other compromises, from chroma subsampling to overscanning, that make them unsuitable as computer monitors.
  - BoorishBears 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
BoorishBears 3y ago
I didn't downvote... but if you're being downvoted it's probably for ignoring the flywheel effect needed to scale novel tech in the market. Yes e-ink has high wastage, and yes demand is low, but having had a strong arming expensive patent holder didn't help the situation. The patents are actually expiring/expired but at some point the damage is already done. A great corollarly to e-ink is 3d printers: they were very expensive, very low volume products that needed to recoup expensive development costs... but when the 200 lbs gorilla sitting on the market in the form of patents started to die down, a lot more players start to iterate, which unlocked advancements, which made things cheaper and more accessible, which improved demand, which then incentivized more advancements... and now we have $400 printers that outperform $10,000 printers from not that long ago. Most display tech starts high wastage, low demand. Patents aren't a guaranteed death, but e-ink was just a bit too far off the path for absolutely required innovations to overcome the added resistance. In the mean time other technologies got better: sunlight performance of non-eink displays has improved dramatically for example. Now the moment has probably passed and e-ink is doomed to stay a niche sideline product as a result.
- rnk 3y ago
  Great points. Plus almost everyone always gets downvoted for everything, then it comes back. I always wonder why many of my "brilliant" comments get downvoted, but often come back by the next day.
  - mikewarot 3y ago
    Downvotes are emotionally driven, and limited to -4 (I think)... upvotes on the other hand, have no apparent limit.
- solardev 3y ago
  > sunlight performance of non-eink displays has improved dramatically for example. Can you talk more about this? My phones and laptops are still as bad as ever in direct sun. Did I miss some major development...?
  - 3y ago

bigmattystyles 3y ago

One thing I don’t understand - why are the iPhone screens that can run in display mode run at 1hz a feature - what’s hard about driving a display typically driven at 120hz(?) at 1hz to save on power difficult? Or it’s not and the it’s a differentiating feature price.

solardev 3y ago
Is the refresh really a big power draw vs the backlight or even the pixels themselves? I think the thing about e-ink is that it's a chemical producing/retaining the pigment, rather than a light source. So even when it's off, it retains its current colors. When a LED is off, it's just... nothing. But you still have a point. Even if a LED display has "only" a 2 or 3 day battery life, that's still pretty huge to mere hours. How do smart watches (like the Garmins with 1-week batteries) do it?
- pxeboot 3y ago
  The Garmin watches with 1+ week battery life have memory-in-pixel displays. Like E-Ink, this seems like another technology that could be amazing if they were available in larger sizes with lower prices.
- adql 3y ago
  > How do smart watches (like the Garmins with 1-week batteries) do it? https://sharpdevices.com/memory-lcd/ https://sharpdevices.com/memory-lcd/

GuB-42 3y ago

> So I'm saying the truth and getting down voted for it? Don't worry about that. Posts that go against the general opinion always get downvoted at first. But if it is insightful and not demonstrably wrong, the upvotes will win.

dantheman 3y ago

You say that, but patents traditionally hold back progress. If you look at the amount of horse power generated by steam engines - it spiked after the patents expired. There are probably many techniques and processes that would be tried and developed if it wasn't locked up by patents.

adql 3y ago
The time period is asinine; 20 years is forever in most industries
- kakwa_ 3y ago
  Not really. In a lot of industries, +20 years old tech and even +20 years old equipment are normal and competitive. In tech, yes, 20 years is a lot, but that's more of an exception. And imho, it's slowing down: A 20 years old computer, like an Athlon 64, today, could probably run most of the usual basic workloads (mail, text, word processing, browsing) with up to date software. It would be slow, but it would work. An 1983 years old computer in 2003 was just obsolete and completely unfit to run any of the usual 2003 software.
kakwa_ 3y ago
Devil's advocate, but one might argue patents actually incentivize progress. Without patents, there is far less incentive to seek progress. What's the point for a for-profit organization to spend resources on Research, just to see your innovation immediately copied? And if said for-profit organization still innovate, it has a strong incentive to keep its innovation as secret as possible. Patents by contrast, incentivize sharing, on one hand it makes the innovation public knowledge, and on the other licensing agreements usually exist. And in the end, 20 years is really short compared to human history. Are patents an ideal solution? Hell no, this system is too easily abused (patent trolling, patent thickets, etc), and feels really wrong at times (patents on life-saving drugs for example). But so far, that's the best compromise we manage to mostly agree on in terms of worldwide IP recognition.

solardev 3y ago

I didn't vote either way, but this is news to me. As long as e-ink has been around, all I've ever heard were the patent issues. If you're saying it's actually manufacturing difficulties, can you provide any links or additional info? I believe you, but as someone not familiar with the field, I'd love to learn more both to counteract the patent narrative and just for my own curiosity. What is hard about e-ink at scale that other products don't share?

wahnfrieden 3y ago
Low market interest
- maushu 3y ago
  With those prices I'm not surprised.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    How many other markets are there for 1Hz refresh displays that haven't already been untapped by e-ink tech? Lower prices won't magically fix the major limitation of this technology that hinder its expansion.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    Negative outlook on market interest at scale/investment needed for low unit cost Even niche early adopter users at current prices don’t love the tech
Qwertious 3y ago
>As long as e-ink has been around, all I've ever heard were the patent issues. If you're saying it's actually manufacturing difficulties, can you provide any links or additional info? For the record, the "patents" think has no links to back it up either. But to answer your question: E-ink screens are less than $100 (depending on the size), that's already pretty cheap. They're only expensive when compared to LCDs. LCDs are produced at a rate of billions per quarter*, with ~6 billion smartphone owners, and lots of them having multiple LCD devices e.g. laptop/desktop screen, work computer's screen, supermarket kiosk, tablet, smartwatch, car screen, etc. In contrast, e-ink screens have basically three applications: e-readers, e-notes (which is basically just an e-reader with a stylus), and supermarket pricetags. E-readers/e-notes are a luxury item that you don't need if you already have a smartphone/iPad. There's just no economy of scale for e-ink; not compared to LCDs. Because there's no economy scale or obvious new markets to expand into, there's not much budget for R&D, so the entire field moves slowly.

squigz 3y ago

> I don't know any company or shareholders that would say no to making more money so if this would actually be true then it would, but that's not the reality. I've never quite understood this sort of thinking. Companies aren't perfect omniscient systems - the people in charge of various companies make poor decisions all the time, based on the same human biases we all have. So yes, it's entirely possible they could make more money that way, but executives simply hear "Lower the price" and run away. I'm not saying that's certainly what's happening, but this implication that a company could possibly only do the thing that's most beneficial to it is... strange, and very common thinking.

pseg134 3y ago
[flagged]

simple10 3y ago

Sometimes patent holder enter into initial deals with manufacturers and then can't lower the royalty price for other manufacturers. Even if they'd make more from higher volume, the initial manufacture might be serving high-end customers and doesn't want other manufactures entering the market at a lower price. So they refuse to agree to a lower patent royalty even though it would save them money. It's counterintuitive, but rationale under certain circumstances. This is pure conjecture for the e-ink patent on my part, but I've seen it first hand for other products.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago

Question for you. I always saw the problem as: only one company or limited companies can manufacture them. Those companies are having issues manufacturing them so the price is high. But if more companies were allowed to manufacture them, wouldn’t we see more people solving production problems and lowering prices? If there is one company with low yields and high prices, if everyone is allowed to make them then there is a monetary gain for new entrants willing to solve yield problems. But if things are heavily patent encumbered then the whole world is at the whim of one organization to succeed or fail - there is no competition. That is to say, it’s not that they’re charging high prices out of greed, but that there’s no competition forcing prices down.

wayfinder 3y ago
Not OP but what you’re saying is absolutely true. But first someone has to invent it. Nobody’s gonna spend a few thousand or million dollars to invent something unless they get their money and more back, so that’s the point of patents. And if they patent something and don’t capitalize on it enough, that’s their loss, because they had to detail their invention in their patent application and that’s public information. Patents last only 20 years and for most industries, that’s not very long. (That said, I think software patents are a different beast. Because 20 years in software engineering is like 100 years in civil engineering, for example, since software engineering is like a few thousand years younger discipline than civil.)
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Actually I think patents do far more harm than good in our economy. In aggregate they slow down innovation significantly by carving a huge moat around every new advancement. Without patents, there’s still loads of natural incentives to innovate. The difference is that instead of fewer larger leaps, there would be many more smaller leaps. You can always make money if you develop a new technology in secret and then start selling it before your competitors have any chance of going in to production. And then there’s always reason to support public investment in research. But patents take new innovations and then legally prevent the hundreds of potential innovators who would have built on that idea and improved it from going anywhere near it. Most innovation is incremental and with patents, that innovation is blocked from the market. This is a huge loss for our economy. The only singular function of a patent is to prevent innovation. (Legally, that is all they do.) The idea that the follow on effect of this restriction is a net gain in innovation is always taken on faith. It’s a story told over and over again. But when you look at things like open source, you can see how many of the arguments for patents simply aren’t true.

xnx 3y ago

I didn't realize e-ink manufacturing was such a tricky process. I would think there would be a lot of applications for larger e-ink panels even if they had a number of stuck pixels.

bigfudge 3y ago

I think it would be interesting to hear from an insider (with examples/evidence etc) what the mechanism is for eink to be more expensive. I/e/ the fundamentals for why this is the case beyond economies of scale. Given this history of the patent it looks to the outsider like this probably isn't the case and short sighted rent seeking is the problem. Would love to be wrong though, so if you do have a good explanation then here would be a great place to air it. I've not seen anything elsewhere...

LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
I’m sure the ad-driven subsidy on TVs plays a huge part. TV prices have declined as “dumb” TVs have been phased out of the market. A more niche tool like a large e-ink display might not make as much sense from to price this way since ad systems need large networks of users to be relevant.
- mikewarot 3y ago
  As a check against this, I looked for 42" computer monitors, which don't display ads. There are $600 4k 42" monitors in stock at CDW, for example. The same size 4k SmartTVs are about $300. So, yes... there appears to be about a 50% discount for TVs vs Computer Displays, part of which could be a subsidy, most of which I suspect is volume driving down the cost of production.
  - komali2 3y ago
    Double check the refresh rate, input latency, and color gamut for your comparisons. Computer monitor user concerns are quite different than tv screen users.
  - alwayslikethis 3y ago
    TVs also spy on you. That data offsets some of the cost. They also often have lots of other compromises, from chroma subsampling to overscanning, that make them unsuitable as computer monitors.
- BoorishBears 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

BoorishBears 3y ago

I didn't downvote... but if you're being downvoted it's probably for ignoring the flywheel effect needed to scale novel tech in the market. Yes e-ink has high wastage, and yes demand is low, but having had a strong arming expensive patent holder didn't help the situation. The patents are actually expiring/expired but at some point the damage is already done. A great corollarly to e-ink is 3d printers: they were very expensive, very low volume products that needed to recoup expensive development costs... but when the 200 lbs gorilla sitting on the market in the form of patents started to die down, a lot more players start to iterate, which unlocked advancements, which made things cheaper and more accessible, which improved demand, which then incentivized more advancements... and now we have $400 printers that outperform $10,000 printers from not that long ago. Most display tech starts high wastage, low demand. Patents aren't a guaranteed death, but e-ink was just a bit too far off the path for absolutely required innovations to overcome the added resistance. In the mean time other technologies got better: sunlight performance of non-eink displays has improved dramatically for example. Now the moment has probably passed and e-ink is doomed to stay a niche sideline product as a result.

rnk 3y ago
Great points. Plus almost everyone always gets downvoted for everything, then it comes back. I always wonder why many of my "brilliant" comments get downvoted, but often come back by the next day.
- mikewarot 3y ago
  Downvotes are emotionally driven, and limited to -4 (I think)... upvotes on the other hand, have no apparent limit.
solardev 3y ago
> sunlight performance of non-eink displays has improved dramatically for example. Can you talk more about this? My phones and laptops are still as bad as ever in direct sun. Did I miss some major development...?
- 3y ago