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Comment by cyrusmg | Hacker News Reader

I have read somewhere here on HN that the E Ink scene (and price) is limited by patents. Can you share more on that ?

E Ink owns the majority of the patents, so direct clones of E Ink are being made under license. I do not think that the patents are the limiting factor - the specific applications are somewhat limited compared to widespread use of OLED.

For the applications that have mass apeal we saw that the price goes down to a comparable level of an LCD (eg in ebook readers and shelf labels).

There is also a bunch of innovation happening in the market - competitors like ClearInk are trying to build a better version of E paper, but it's always hard to scale some new technology and it will take some time before anything substantial comes along. E Ink was lucky that they found the killer app in ebook readers and that really helped them get to volumes that allow them to build these screens in commercial volumes.

What do you think of reflective screens like Qualcomm's Mirasol?

Looks like the technology didn't pan out. Not sure what the end reason was, but E Ink won that battle.

I would actually like to see combination of the two tested. Such as a greyscale high resolution e-ink base and a transparent layer of Mirasol like color pixels that can activate.

Kind of mimicking CMYK from print, and LED TV:s locally adjusting LED backlight to improve contrast ratios, and some high HDR screens. Except a very low energy use variant.

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