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Comment by sparker72678 | Hacker News Reader

There're a few things going on that contribute to this.

1) The rumors are that some of the display manufacturers have contracts with big device makers to not sell panels direct to consumer. I don't have evidence to verify this, though.

2) There aren't a lot of displays that exist _at all_ outside of the small/eReader/Big Sign categories. So there probably just aren't the production lines out there to push those out.

3) Since refresh rates in even the best cases aren't great, it's unlikely to get a lot of traction in most markets, so I don't think anyone is pursuing it heavily.

4) eInk (the company) seems very uninterested in the hobby market at all. They seem to want a few big contracts, and that's all they're interested in.

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For point 4, that could be a pretty smart move on their part and the reason they're able to keep going. Selling directly to consumers/setting up the distribution and marketing for that etc would be really difficult and a lot of D2C hardware companies have not done too well recently. It's unfortunate that it results in it being difficult to access for hobby markets, but relying on large, stable contracts from a lot of big manufacturers that already built up marketing and distribution over decades of operations is probably one of the better ways to commercialize a hardware innovation today.

I feel eInk’s marketing strategy has really held the technology back. They seem to want to force the technology into a few well-defined verticals that they came up with themselves instead of letting an army of smaller companies innovate rapidly.

They were founded in 1997, so their earliest patents have probably expired. I wonder when the clones will arrive. Maybe they’ll have a better marketing and sales strategy.

Those don't seem like valid reasons not to offer for sale to consumers. Distribution is a non-issue. Literally ship in a case of them to FBA or one of the countless other fulfillment operations and put up a listing. Amazon handles the customer service.

As for the marketing, just don't do any. Let the hobby market find it on their own and then just set a minimum order for anyone that wants to work directly with the company for their small project.

I think getting into the hobby market would amount to a huge long tail market of kickstarter style projects and other small products with potential to blow up.

I really don't see how their current strategy could be that great considering how rare it is to see products out there that are e-ink.

> I think getting into the hobby market would amount to a huge long tail market of kickstarter style projects and other small products with potential to blow up.

I'm trying to think of a single kickstarter-style project that generated a volume above even 100K units let alone a million. I can't think of any.

BeatBuddy is probably the most successful by unit volume project I can think of, and they're probably under 10,000 units.

So, the evidence is that the hobbyist market is completely useless to manufacturers.

Well yeah, but that's not where the money is in selling to hobbyists.

If you want someone to invent something that uses them, you'll have to have them in the hands of people that invent stuff. Maybe you only break even on your small scale sales to hobbyists, but eventually one of those hobbyists will be the one to invent the next big thing.

My point was that over the last 5-10 years, we have seen ZERO hobbyists create the Next Big Thing(tm) out of a kickstarter-like.

And, I would argue, for two good reasons.

1) When you think about things like the Homebrew Computer Club or the Tech Model Railroad Club, the point is that the membership were engineers. Yes, they were hobbyists, but they were already professionals in the field. Kickstarters don't seem to attract that engineering crowd.

2) Anybody with actual knowledge of hardware laughs at the amounts that kickstarters raise. Most engineering professionals can personally move the amounts of money that most kickstarters can raise.

The combination of the two is death for the Next Big Thing(tm) coming out of a kickstarter.

Oculus and Pebble maybe aren't "Next Big Thing", but both were major hardware Kickstarter projects. Pebble was the first mainstream smartwatch, and the VR landscape would be significantly different if not for Oculus. It's probably fair to say that neither was iPhone level of industry revolutionary, but it's a mistake to discount them entirely.

My comment wasn't about Kickstarters, I think they're irrelevant in this discussion. I'm talking about making your stuff accessible to people outside of large corporations. The world isn't two perfectly non-intersecting groups labeled "hobbyists" and "professionals". There's enormous overlap. Hell, a very large portion of HN falls into both categories.

Let's say XYZ software is only available to businesses. As a professional software engineer, if I asked to buy XYZ, it'd get bought. But since I can't use XYZ in my personal life, I've never even heard of it, and as a result when we're deciding on software to buy at the company I have no familiarity with it and it doesn't get bought.

Perhaps somewhere out there there are some 100x hardware developers, but every hardware developer I've met likes what they know, and a lot of what they know from a combination of personal tinkering and university. It's hard to explain how powerful familiarity is with designing hardware. So if you're sitting down and designing something and you need component A or B, and B uses less power and looks cool and all kinds of stuff, but you have experience with A and it works fine, well, you'll go with A. And for good reason! Things have weird quirks and spec sheets lie and all kinds of stuff happens.

So yeah, I think that having some kind of community connection can pay absolutely massive dividends. At the end of the day, if it's only accessible to large corporations, then it's not even accessible to those large corporations - because the engineers at them won't have familiarity with your thing and they'll just pick what they know.

Furthermore, it's not even that hard to sell to hobbyists. You make the spec sheet public, you make some example code public, you mail some units to Digikey and you're done. You wanna go REALLY crazy, you can mail a few free units to some well known tinkerers. It's not like you're personally offering 24 hour phone support to everyone with an Arduino. The investment of a couple of hours to deign to mail Digikey a box is quickly recovered by the first engineer that plays with your widget at home and then suggests it at $bigco.

Kickstarters don't seem to attract that engineering crowd.

As an engineer whose project proposal (with proof of feasibility in the form of working and one-at-a-time manufacturable fully functional prototypes) was rejected by Kickstarter back in 2017, maybe their selection criteria are the reason.

Interesting. I didn't even know kickstarter had selection criteria given the amount of pure slop I've seen on there.

But, yeah, if they do, that's simply going to kill the feedthrough as nobody can predict what's going to become big.

For the sake of accuracy: that 2017 was a typo and should have been 2012 or 2013.

Why would only the initial kickstarter matter? There are several major brands/companies that started on kickstarter and then went on to sell quite a bit. Pebble raised millions. Oculus started out on kickstarter and sold to facebook for a couple billion and are currently selling units faster than they can make.

Pebble raised $10.3M in Kickstarter. I didn't find how many units that was, but with retail price of $99 that should fit your criteria. Also, was using eink.

IMO, Point 3 is not really a problem, at least in the e-reader usecase. Even typing isn't too bad when partial refresh is enabled. Something like VIM on a black&white panel with kindle-grade refresh options seems quite reasonable.

Now then, with the linked screen's 15 second refresh time, this is obviously not the case. But it (naively) seems like a compromise to keep the cost low, since the added tech and software to enable partial refreshes would add to both price and complexity.

I've been wanting to get some dev kits to play around with, but they're pretty expensive and not custom enough for my intended use case.

What do you mean by 2? Monitors and TV screens fit that range, no?

Why would you want a monitor or a tv screen with a refresh rate of 7 fps? And that's monochrome. For actual RGB output, you need three refreshes, and the RGB ones are slower, so you might get a frame per second.

Because I use that monitor to read and write text. Lots and lots of text, very little video. 7 fps is abundantly adequate for reading text if you only interact with it by hitting 'page down' every 30 seconds, and if your typing is accurate enough that 150ms delay between hitting the key and seeing the character doesn't cause errors it's fine for writing text.

I don't need 30, 60, 120, or 144 Hz refresh rates to work with text. It would probably be impossible to see the difference. What I need is contrast and brightness settings to limit eye fatigue, and that's where e-ink would be great.

I'd be ecstatic with a monochrome 20"+ eink monitor for use after 8:00PM or so. With the F.lux settings I use on my normal monitor it's practically monochrome anyway.

7FPS is probably not quite high enough, but I've seen 10-13" displays with 15-20FPS, and that would be fine for normal computing.

I'd probably swap my scrollwheel for PageUp/PageDown to make full page refreshes a little more pleasant though.

There was a brief interest in transflective LCD technology in the 2000s and early 2010s but it seems to have died off (at least for consumer products), which means sunlight-readable (or candle-readable, for the evenings) LCD with high refresh rates.

There was even one company (edit: Pixel Qi) putting solar cells in the displays themselves, so the device recharged while being used in sunlight.

YouTube video comparing Pixel Qi in sunlight with normal backlit LCD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1mD6vhp3U8#t=1m45s (around 01:45)

7 pfs are not a showstopper for a console

I don't know why one would want a huge daylight visible console, but it's one of those things where I'm just not creative enough.

I don't know why one would want a huge daylight visible console, but it's one of those things where I'm just not creative enough.

Not exactly a command line terminal, but there was an ambient signage project on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22831323

Also https://onezero.medium.com/meet-accent-352cfa95813a

A monitor sized e-ink display would be unusable as, say, a PC display. E-ink refresh rates makes e-ink useless for video, scrolling, etc. I have a feeling one's really come up with applications where a monitor/TV sized very slowly refreshing screen was useful so there's no demand.

> E-ink refresh rates makes e-ink useless for video, scrolling, etc.

Or even simpler -- a mouse cursor is essentially unusable on an e-ink display. Much like an old passive-matrix LCD, you'd need to implement nasty workarounds like cursor trails to restore any semblance of usability.

I use Dasung's e-ink monitor (Paperlike Pro) daily. A mouse cursor is fully usable. You can even watch videos on that thing. Of course, the refresh rate is far from perfect, but its performance is acceptable. I code on it, mainly.

I use a tilling window manager and would love to just pop a window into an external eink display.

Works for other types of wms too, just use a main display to browse and the eink to read.

I meant no one is currently making E-ink displays of those sizes in bulk. Sorry for the confusion.

I believe the question you were answering was asking why that is.

My point was that there's no current wide-spread use of low-refresh displays in that size category, because all the obvious use cases slide around it, so there isn't going to be spillover into a new use-case when there's nothing there to spill out of.

I'm probably just muddying the waters at this point.

> The rumors are that some of the display manufacturers have contracts with big device makers to not sell panels direct to consumer.

Would that be legal?

How would it be illegal?

Some otherwise fine anti-competitive behaviors are illegal when committed by monopolies.

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