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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Me too my friend, me too.

E-ink usage has been underwhelming/disappointing. When the technology was first announced I thought it would take the world by storm, but all we wound up with was eBook Readers and little else.

I really hope that color is the missing piece of the pie, and we'll wind up with color e-ink photo frames, LCDs in adverts displaced by color e-ink, and even secondary screens which are e-ink based.

It is such a cool technology, almost zero energy use between updates, that has been ignored and under-used. It legitimately makes me sad.

I guess nobody wanted to be that "dated" manufacturer who used a black & white screen on something in 2016, no matter what the benefits.

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For academia, a decent A5 or A4 b&w eink would be good enough and probably a game changer. It's very disappointing Kindle DX was discontinued and nothing replaced it. Now we have a Sony and an Onyx. Let's see if things improve...

We're changing that and helping E Ink to break through into digital signage and there's actually a lot happening in this segment.

You have bus stops, buses, traffic signs, museum labels, room booking signage, smart digital prices, buildings, queueing systems, outdoor ad panels,...

Check our blog for some examples: http://blog.visionect.com

Great and all.

But

> smart digital prices

End consumer will hate you. One of the worst ideas ever.

"Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

Even with color, it just won't be anywhere as good as the screens we're used to now.

There are two things holding E-Ink back: 1) Battery life alone is not worth the tradeoff for the consumer market. 2) The flexibility of the form factor could've taken E-Ink places that others couldn't go, but: a. The company makes it very difficult for startups to work with them on non-stock sizes/shapes. b. The manufacturing process hasn't improved enough to bring the promised cost within reach.

All the R&D money in the display industry is being invested elsewhere, and people will get affordable, flexible, and high-contrast OLED screens sooner than E-Ink can check off two of those boxes.

OLED has several downsides as well like burn in problems, limiting lifetime, higher power usage, doesn't work that well outside in bright sunlight, etc. I always avoided OLED and choose either IPS or e-ink.

I think the best use case is overlay screens particularly for backpacking or travel--really anytime battery is a concern.

I suspect that color isn't the main limiter, money is. Once (if) it gets down to $1 per A5-size-screen, they'll be plastered everywhere.

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