E Ink has developed a 2nd generation Advanced Color E-Paper
goodereader.com
goodereader.com
RAM, 2011: "A single 8GB stick of RAM is about $80 right now. In 2021, you’d be able to buy a single stick of RAM that contains 64GB for the same price."
Disks, 2011: "The price of a 1-terabyte hard drive is $80 now...
In 2013, a 2TB drive will be $80.
In 2015, a 4TB drive will be $80.
After that the doubling rate may lengthen to 3 years instead of 2 years so..
In 2018, an 8TB drive will be $80. And finally in 2021, for $80, you’d be able to buy a 16 terabyte hard drive"
Certainly for consumer hard drives, there’s a cost of getting the drive to the customer (transport, shop rent, employee salaries, etc) which is, at best, fixed.
If manufacturing costs drop to zero, price will approach that fixed cost (plus any markup sellers manage to extract, for example by marketing their drives as better/more hip/etc.)
We couldn’t imagine how anyone would ever need so much space.
I can think of a few that can’t be disrupted soon enough.
Should have mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing. It's not just speculative.
As such we as a society need to look hard at those laws and policies to reform them
Sadly the large corporations have a huge amounts of lobby money and are rapidly attempting to get the terrible IP laws codified into complex international treaties to ensure no nation can do any reform at all
I agree about copyright, though. Copyright has been expanded to cover software and even APIs. Copyright is a giant drag on innovation. A single company can tie up a space for life of the author plus 70 years, which is absurd. Copyright should never have applied to most forms of software, which clearly fall into the exceptions of 17 USC § 102(b). But we are where we are.
Now that is not to say I would advocate for complete removal of the patent systems but I do think Compulsory FRAND style licensing should be a requirement of obtaining a patent
Your distinction between Copyright and Patent is also strang as the suffer from the same flaw so it seems your only justification is that you believe 20 years is "reasonable" but Life is not
I think both are unreasonable, I would personally like to see both dropped to 10 years, or some compromise where you get 2-3 years exclusive use of the creation then have some kind of compulsory license where the creator is compensated but can not with hold the creation for 20 years (with some kind of scheme that the license be fair and equitable)
Patents can be useful as an incentive, but their length need to correspond with the pace of progress in a given field. Otherwise, they end up slowing down everyone.
Once you have proven the need for an exclusivity grant, You also need to prove that 5, 10, 15 years of exclusivity via a patent would be unable provide enough incentive, that it had to be 20 years to strike the proper balance
In today's fast moving society, I think 5 years would provide more than enough incentive even for expensive technology that requires lots of capital investment though I would favor a shorter exclusivity grant, and then may be longer required licensing grant. like 2-3 years of exclusive use, and then 10 years of licensing but the patent holder is required to treat all uses of the patent in the same manner with fair and non-discriminatory pricing.
20 years ago, Nokia 3310 was released.
For consumer hardware, that's still a very very long time to hold a patent on something.
Specialized scientific/industrial hardware, maybe... consumer goods... way too long.
But that's just my personal opinion.
Nokia probably had a gajillion GSM patents that they used to make the phone, and a bunch of other companies had to pay them money for many years to build 2g/GSM phones.
Qualcomm and a few other companies have a bunch of patent for 4g tech, so even now (when we're rolling out 5G), it's practically impossible to make a modern...ish modem without giving atleast some money to one of those companies, and 4G is "old tech" already.
FRAND is not with out its own problems, but it is alot better than the situation with eINK or 3-d Printers where there is not FRAND agreement
20 years is an absurdly long time in tech
On other hand, America had more fibre than any other nation, but its hyperregulated telecom industry only managed to cross 10mbps averages 10-8 years ago.
Anyone know of any major expirations in the next few years?
That ties the duration of a patent directly to how much value it provides to the company over time, which is the rationale for having patents in the first place. A company could only afford to hold onto a patent for as long as it causes the company’s revenue to grow exponentially. Once the patented technology matures and growth plateaus, keeping the patent would become prohibitively expensive. This would completely eliminate patent trolls and patent squatting/speculative patents.
Another idea I think worth exploring is mandatory licensing at fixed rates which decline over years and/or are tied to revenue the patent holder generates with the patent. The goal really should be to increase utility of the patent for the public.
But that’s fine. If a company can rake in so much money off of one product it’s still providing an obscene amount of value.
It doesn’t matter if Google is paying or Widget firm X. Google isn’t going to keep paying if the patent isn’t sustaining itself anymore than Widget X.
Why not do that in the straightforward way of simply decreasing the patent protection duration? Or as other people have suggestion: make it contingent on the type of thing being patented.
Actually I think that idea causes the opposite of what is wanted.
A high value monopoly patent will stay locked up for a long time, well after the development costs and risk have been paid off. The consumer is paying high economic rent and the product has less supply.
A low value product is where a longer patent makes sense: the patent gives the inventor time to recoup their costs which otherwise wouldn’t happen.
That said, the world runs at a much faster pace, and patent durations should be decreased.
Software patents should be discarded (because society doesn’t get any value from publishing software patents although society pays high costs for the economic monopoly, and because small startups cannot compete with software behemoths). Unlikely to happen becaus software powers have monopoly profits which can pay to influence legislation or regulators. Also the US is capturing monopoly payments from the rest of the world so the US loves software patents (ironically given some of the historic reasons for the US kicking the British in the nads for independence).
Yes, but this rewards you for inventing something high-value, which is the whole point of patents.
Patents on low-value products largely exist to generate lawsuits against productive entities.
> In accordance with the original definition of the term "patent", patents are intended to facilitate and encourage disclosure of innovations into the public domain for the common good
The idea is that to avoid companies keeping the details of inventions hidden indefinitely using trade secrets, the embargo period is set up as an incentive to disclose the idea. This is an incredibly important part of the entire social contract of patents. Maintaining a complicated legal apparatus (courts, patent offices, etc.) to defend and enforce these legal monopolies is expensive and is paid through public funds. Thus a public good is expected in return. A system that allows the most important inventions to stay locked up forever seems to go against the spirit of this entirely. Perhaps you think that this has its own merit, but it is certainly not the intended purpose of the patent system.
For example, if you increment the exponent every three years, a $20 initial fee would cost half a billion dollars annually after 20 years. That buys a lot of school supplies.
Why do you think patents can be renewed?
Would be nice to see increasing annual maintenance fee. 1K for first year 3K for second, 10K for third and so on. After 6 years or so you either make/pay millions of give it up.
Should drastically reduce the amount of junk patents. It it's not worth at least a few million not worth applying.
[1] http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
That has not stopped the more creative and resourceful individuals, however:
On the other hand, the gain is that E Ink Corporation decided it was worth investing in developing and commercializing the technology knowing they'd have exclusive rights for 20 years, and quite possible only because of that. If they didn't have that guarantee, it might not have been worth any company developing it in the first place.
Now I'm not familiar with the history of investment in e-ink specifically. But I'm curious if there's anyone here who is: if patent protection wasn't available, would it have been worth it for any company to develop it, knowing it might be copied a year later by a competitor who would then undercut the original inventors (not having to pay for the expensive R&D)?
The main problem is "temporary", as patents have a flat duration but fields innovate and turn over at different speeds - compare web software to aeronautics/NASA software. The former could potentially he outdated within months, the latter likely won't be used until it's been tested for decades.
So obviously a 30-year patent is potentially paralyzing in webdev, yet might even be too short in space tech!
The problem is there simply isn't any duration that can satisfy both fields.
Meanwhile, often patents don't benefit anyone because they're 1) more trouble than they're worth to actually enforce, and only serve to reinforce the incumbents who don't need them, and 2) are in some cases deliberately written to be meaningless and uncommunicative, which defeats the purpose of open publishing in the first place.
Every law might have upsides, but that doesn't change the fact that patents are fundamentally flawed.
Agreed, patents are flawed. But so is basically every law in the United States. However, laws can change and we have influence on that so rather than chalking the idea of patent law as “fundamentally flawed” let’s look at ways we can tweak the existing system to work better for everyone.
For example, one commenter had an interesting suggestion of increasing the patent fees exponentially over time incentivizing only orgs that are using the technology and disincentivizing trolls long term.
It that tweak perfect? of course not, but rather than viewing it as an all of or nothing game of us vs them let’s keep working together to make it “more perfect”.
Not really. The "societal" purpose of patents is to promote innovation. That's really the yardstick by which most of the conversation around patents needs to be measured - does this help or hinder overall innovation.
There are also moral/philosophical arguments for or against patents, but I think the majority consider the societal impact to be the most important.
The mechanism by which patents achieve this is by giving a temporary monopoly to the inventor. It also requires the inventor to disclose, in detail, how their innovation works ; that's part of the tradeoff - the innovator gets a temporary monopoly, but society benefits by the innovator not hoarding it as a secret. This should actually encourage progress by others, in the long run.
I don't really understand how this is true. If I google, I don't see any evidence that any patent or block of patents is blocking the "tech". Could you specify which specific patent is blocking?
> tied up the tech stack in so many patents, NDA's, and exorbitant prices that no one wants to touch it.
But... you do realize there's lots of startups that enter the bistable display space? eg: ClearInk. https://www.clearinkdisplays.com/ They even use the exact same underlying principle which is electrophoresis.
If you go to any display conference you'll easily see that most of what you're saying comes across as highly inaccurate or even ridiculous.
I checked their website to see what their technology looks like. I wanted to see how their product compare to a eInk screen use in many devices (such as Kindle/Kobo/ReMarkable), as this is the kind of products that interests me. It turns out that all the pictures shows the back of what I expect to be tablets/phone prototypes (or maybe it's just stock photos), and not a single time the screen.
It's almost comical : you advertise for a screen tech, but you carefully avoid to show how such screen looks like. Definitely a red flag.
Are you an E Ink employee or something trying to badmouth clearink? Because you can just go to youtube and search clearink and find clear videos of their products from various conferences.
I've highlighted something that makes no sense. Do you expect a car manufacturer not showing one of its cars on its website ? Apple not to how its iPhone ? A SaaS company not showing screen captures of its product ? I don't. Those images should be easily available without having to browse YouTube, or do a search on google.
FWIW, I would actually welcome any concurrent to eInk and its monopoly. I totally share the point of view of the top comment, as I've seen this tech stagnate for years. Most of the supposed alternatives 10 years ago(PlasticLogic, Liquavista, Mirasol, etc.) either never produced something relevant, either failed the expectations.
I actually find your comment quite disrespectful: if you want to promote a product, you can do that without having to resort to ad hominem attacks.
Anyway, thanks for the YouTube tip: I was able to see what I wanted to see.
Edit: if some employee of ClearInk see this message, do yourself a favor and update your website with some pictures of your product, or even a embedded Youtube video. It will speak more than stock photos.
A patent deadlock.
They also seem to think their market is digital signage and aren't that interested in licensing for other mass market consumer products despite the fact the market it has been adopted most in is e-readers
This current situation is unfortunate, but I think it's an imperfection of the market. If the patent owning company had been a bit less greedy, they could have made far more money with it.
Because they can't begin to copy you until you've released your product to market, so you have profit potential for being the first mover.
This happens all the time as only a small percentage of the innovation that occurs actually gets patented.
In some cases it would be possible for a big company to take your innovation out from under you but if they can do a better job then we're all better off for that. If as an inventor you've only got one idea, you're screwed. You need to be able to innovate repeatedly.
But the concise way of responding to this is: markets already reward innovation. We do not need state controls on information to "stimulate innovation". The incentive exists as a natural effect of markets.
Also don't forget the disclosure part of patents. If you want something be protected by patents, you need to publish a description of how you do it. You can't just keep the engineers isolated on an island or whatever. A no patent world would make manufacturers build in even more measures to prevent reverse engineering, engineers sharing secrets, etc.
I think it was developed by MIT and not by E INK, is that right?
Many software patents written today cover average work done by average engineers to solve average problems in a way that if you asked 100 engineers to solve said problem, the majority of them would could up with exactly the method in the patent.
Software patents are just a truncheon for incumbent companies to wield against other companies unlucky enough to try to enter the same space as patent-holding incumbent.
Supermarkets alone use each thousands of e-ink displays for shelf price labels for example, I wouldn't be surprised if that was a more profitable market than e-readers for e-ink, and also much easier to cater to.
>This technology is not going to be employed for digital signage, but instead will be marketed towards e-reader companies who want a high resolution alternative to E INK Kaleido 2.
I believe this was because of the limitations of the previous generations. I saw some color e-paper that was super slow to refresh and had terrible ghosting. No one would buy a color e-reader if it takes 15 seconds to turn a page, especially if it costs more than grayscale ereaders due to the 'new technology'.
OTOH, store signage is a use case where refresh and ghosting is relatively unimportant.
No the solution is to incentivize patent licensing and in the case of software make it simply not patentable. The corporate overlords won’t save us from themselves. If they had their way patents would simply never expire.
Medium Corp will license their patent (at extreme rates) to other companies MegaCorp will not.
Medium Corp is better than MegaCorp for consumers most of the time. FRAND licensing even batter, and No Patents at all even better
Big corp probably isn't as devoted to milking one IP asset to the detriment of its adoption. And they may have the resources to make more products in-house that utilize the tech.
I agree that the patent system needs modification in the long run, though.
Duke Nukem Forever... actually happened.
See comments about 3D printer from above in the thread:
> Don’t forget 3D printing that also only really started when patents expired.
> Between 2007-2009, 80+ Stratasys patents expired. Think about this - a single company holding back the world in advancing forward in 3D printing.
The tradeoff is that continually doing those faster transitions gradually accumulates errors, i.e. ghosting. Which is why e-readers tend to do a few pages of fast changes, then do a full refresh to clear things out (or before/after an image is shown). Fast-transition latency beyond something like 50-100ms from button-press to page-turn nowadays is almost exclusively due to software on the device, not the screen.
Terminal and emacs aren't there out of the box, but can be added.
A really nice and quite hackable writing/reading device...
https://blog.rot13.org/2011/12/liberate-your-kindle-3-and-ge...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/astrohaus/hemingwrite-a...
Edit: oops! They have a new website and a new product that fits your request more closely.
https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-traveler
But that's really a typewriter. Which is somehow good if you just want text, not code. And here's the problem: these things belong to consumer segments so narrow that I don't see them getting the attention I'd like.
I’m going to guess that’s 15-bit colour (32,768 colours) in the form of RGB channels, 5 bits per channel (32 possible values).
For full colour imagery, I imagine you’d still want dithering to simulate higher bit depths. 300dpi is fine enough that I believe you could make it very subtle indeed, so that you could well have to examine it quite closely to notice.
> It will be able to display over 40,000 different colors
… but then again, maybe it’s not done as RGB data in this way. I have no idea what array of inputs a range of 40,000 would correspond to. I’m not familiar with this sort of hardware.
There are also ongoing discoveries in pigments, for example YInMn Blue which still has very limited availability.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YInMn_Blue
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/yinmn-blue-comes-market-19...
It would be nice if they provided some detailed gradient color wheel images on the device.
Last I checked there are three primary colors, and what is a full color gamut? There are several standard choices of gamut.
What confuses me about color e-ink products is that it is a reflective display, yet none of them use a reflective color model (CMY) - all of them talk about RGB pigmented subpixels. Either what I learned about color reproduction for print media is wrong, or these devices are probably incapable of showing a large number of colors. Given the washed-out appearance of several photos of real products, I'm leaning toward the latter conclusion. I'd love to see magazine-quality color in a reflective display some day, but they don't seem to be starting from the right fundamentals. Has anyone benchmarked the color reproduction of these products?
For E-ink the colours don't actually mix with each other, so some basic maths shows that you would have even worse contrast with only three colours in a subtractive model:
Each ink colour absorbs only a single RGB channel, eg. cyan absorbs red. This means that at each location on the display, 2/3 of the light is reflected even when CMY channels are all at their maximum.
I think E-ink is neither an additive nor a subtractive colour model: it can only produce colours that exist somewhere between the extreme primary colours, ie. it's more of an "interpolating" colour model.
The inks probably come in pairs: black/white, red/cyan, green/magenta, blue/yellow. This gives the expected eight primary colours. For each pair, you would be able to pick any mix, eg. 30% black, 70% white.
For the darkest black you would have 100% black, red, green and blue. For lightest white you would have 100% white, cyan, magenta and yellow.
(This would reflect (1/3) * 3/4 + 0/4 = 25%, and (2/3) * 3/4 + 1/4 = 75% of the light respectively assuming perfect inks and equal coverage for the channels, which is pretty decent contrast)
Especially linked with partial refresh could make this really feasible for stuff with small text updates happening etc.
DASUNG seems to have a very fast refresh rate on their e-paper displays, enough so that they’re marketing an e-paper monitor.[0]
https://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper/e-ink-waveforms-are-a-c...
The larger the display, the more expensive it is, but that's not unusual, and LCDs aren't much different in price until you start to get to really large e-ink panels. (Given the depth of the LCD market, I'm sure you can find unusually cheap panels somewhere... the point remains. The prices aren't that bad these days for e-ink.)
Granted you linked to Adafruit which is wonderful for their educational resources and easy to use high quality components, but that’s not where I would source parts for a project unless they had something truly unique or I was buying it for a newbie who could use the support they provide (bought some Arduino stuff from them recently for my kids).
That's just unrealistic. Similar LCD screen is also $20: https://www.adafruit.com/product/358
If you negotiate directly with manufacturers, or order direct from china, I'm certain both of these would be much cheaper, but I'm talking about US retail prices and how LCD and E-Ink are very similarly priced at this level.
> but that’s not where I would source parts for a project unless they had something truly unique
I can link you to other retailers who charge very similar prices. Direct from china is different, and similarly, you can find these e-ink displays for cheaper on aliexpress and similar. That's irrelevant to the discussion.
$20 is fine for this. We're not (as far as I'm aware) talking about someone making a product to sell in bulk on kickstarter. We're talking about buying one to use at home.
This is the price you’d pay if you are willing to wait. I rarely need just one component and 5 displays at $20 is serious. If you want to sell a device, a $20 can easily kill your profit margin.
I am talking about direct from China and potentially selling products because if you just limit the discussion to single component hobby use then no amount is really too high. Why not $40? $80? You only need one, right?
If you're making a point, I can't figure out what it is. This is way off topic.
EDIT: you have edited in some more relevant points, but there definitely is a price that's too high. If you had to pair a $35 computer with a $100 display, most people would absolutely find that to be too much in this hobby context. They would have to either have a lot of money, or a lot of passion for a particular project in order to justify that. Most people will find $20 to be reasonable.
I think of it more as a hobby screen kit. The $20 dollar one is on a custom board that interfaces with adafruits existing kits (Raspberry pi or "StemmaQT interfaces). They even supply "Circuit python" libraries to drive the thing, which is a their value add.
If you were mass manufacturing a screen for your custom board you'd order the part direct, but for a quick hobby project screen its not completely crazy.
Having worked for a company that had custom electronics hardware built with components, certainly we ordered direct from Chinese suppliers, it was much cheaper (with the associated lead times).
Also, this is really cool: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-impression
Those are 6" 800x600 displays for ~$20-30.
Edit: here's a whole list of related models: https://github.com/vroland/epdiy
It's very cool, about $100. https://inkplate.io
Unless there has really been a huge improvement recently but I doubt it.
I am trying to find a basic e-reader.
I have a simple want: I want a built in browser that will let me download ePub and pdf etc from the browser.
I’m not interested in bundled bookstores. I’m not keen on having to load books onto it via a pc app nor emailing them nor having an Amazon account neither. I just want to be able to browse and download FanFiction and stuff like that from a basic browser.
I am guessing I want an android tablet with an e-ink screen? What choices do I have and what do people recommend?
More often than not though I just hook it up to my Linux laptop and transfer books via usb.
But from the “I don’t want to depend on proprietary software and/or require a privacy breaching login account” point of view, a Kobo is just fine. If you so desire, it’s just a USB drive with an e-ink screen attached. Connect - drop files - eject - read files.
Googling suggests the “beta” browser has been beta forever; does the software never update?
And does the beta browser support multiple tabs and copy+pasting urls? (FanFiction doesn’t do ePub, but there are several helper websites that provide it if you can copy paste the FanFiction URLs)
Thanks awfully for helping me with my research!
I love the little guy. Lighter than any paperback I've ever owned. Fits in a large pocket. Displays in color! Which lets me highlight in color! And runs Android 9.0 with Google Play Services (though activating this is a bit hacky). Can install whatever Android browser you want. It's the "Gameboy Color" stage of color vibrancy, but it's color.
Problem is, to my knowledge, this was a limited run. I got mine from Good eReader, but they sold out of this model, and I don't know when or if there will be more.
I haven't tested, but I think the Onyx Boox Poke 3 (not color) might be able to install GPS too.
[0] https://goodereader.com/blog/reviews/hands-on-review-of-the-...
ETA: Note about quality of colors.
The screen isn't as nice to write on, but the software works better for me (I hate to say that; it's Android (4.4!)) and it has a backlight.
There's the option to sideload apps, but there is a browser installed when you buy it. Downloading books and apps can be done over WiFi.
I have to say I like it. The option to replace the reader gives you flexibility, as did the community offerings on the ReMarkable.
MobiScribe costs less, and is smaller.
I suspect it's partially due to bad coding that scales up poorly (the .note files have to re-render their vectors every time you turn the page, including completely erased parts), and it didn't pop up until I'd owned it for a while.
The hardware resources needed for "basic e-reader" and the ones for, basically, a modern browsing machine are very different. Something gotta give there, you will either have an overpowered and overpriced reader, or a clumsy browser. Additionally, having to type on a virtual keyboard on a e-ink screen is not a top-notch experience.
Kobo looks like a good direction for me, I can have my reading matter formatted exactly as I wish and USB-transfer it over. For my parents who are not tech-savvy, Kindle is great, as I can prepare books and email them to their kindle.
the idea i had was to mostly manage adding and removing books/articles from my laptop or phone and then have them sync across to the ereader using syncthing. (mainly because its slower to do any of that from an eink)
im using a firefox extension that saves articles to epub. i think there are android apps where you can do something similar through the share menu. but i might just try out wallabag next which is like pocket/read-it-later and then install the wallabag app on my ereader
anyway, I've only messed around with it for a few days but I'm liking it so far, i just have to figure out why syncthing isnt syncing in the background. resilio sync or others like dropbox, google drive might work either. for the moment i just need to open them syncthing app to activate a sync
But counting unique pixel colors in a photo of a display tells you nothing about the display.
Find a picture of a gameboy screen (10 colors) or gameboy color (56 colors) and send the jpg through that tool. You should be able to realize the problem from simple intuition about what a photo is.
In fact there are so much more content nowadays are developed/created beyond text format isn't good news for E-Ink. They are risking solving a problem that people would soon forget why it worthy solving in the first place.
We’ve sort of seen this before with websites showing different prices to PC and Macintosh users; based on the analytics that people who own a Macintosh would pay more
Saturation, contrast and refresh are still the main weaknesses though. Especially because a full-color display uses numerous full-page refreshes to achieve all colours which are really jarring.
Can confirm - I have a Kaleido based e-reader and whilst I do like that book covers are in colour, scrolling through even a small library is jank central due to the multiple refreshes.
Kaleido is effectively an RGB LCD in front of an E-Ink screen - you get color at 1/3 the resolution of black and white, but "normal" refresh rates. This accounts for all of the multi-color e-ink readers on the market now.
AcEP is 4 pigments per cell, so you get full resolution and better saturation and contrast, but terrible refresh rates. Last I saw for ACeP it was something like 15 seconds. Presumably this 2nd generation is much faster, but I haven't seen anything that actually says how fast.
It might be "normal" refresh rates but it takes multiple refreshes to generate colour output compared with mono. It is an awful janky experience.
Go to about 3:57 on this video and watch the book covers flash on and off as they do multiple refreshes - easier at 0.25x but still visible in real time.
https://goodereader.com/blog/product/pocketbook-color-e-read...
- easier on the eyes - hammock driven development
What do you think the refresh rates would need to be to do that?
Also almost all of the full color eink screens I have been able to find details on are actually just normal TFT LCD displays with some matte film over the top. The core eink tech seems to be fairly easily changed to get 3 colours at the cost of 15 second refresh times but any more colurs seems unlikely.
https://goodereader.com/blog/uploads/images/2021/01/1-75sD-q...
Still not as good as printed ink but this is good enough for many applications.