31.2˝ Color EPaper Display
shopkits.eink.com
shopkits.eink.com
* Invented a novel, physical device[1]
* Granted monopoly from the government for 20 years to extract monopoly rent from sale of the product in exchange for making the design publicly available
Now, personally, I bite the bullet here and say "maybe we should come up with a better incentive system than patents". But I find it hard to fault eInk specifically since this is exactly how patents are supposed to work.
[1] I mention it's a physical device because there are other more controversial types of patents like software patents and patents on genes which are more widely understood to be bullshit.
What makes these displays so different?
(Edit: to be clear, I don't mean to sound snarky or rhetorical, I'm genuinely curious since these displays seem to be in a pretty unique situation)
Patents were created as an incentive not only to do research but to publish the results of the research. So that many companies would have access to the technology and can license the patents when producing products based on that technology. That is not quite aligned with a company reluctantly marketing their technology.
E Ink could have been the ARM of low-power display technology, raking in a billion dollars a year in royalties while the ecosystem flourished, but they couldn't let go of being the monopoly provider for their technology. What a waste.
Is there something commercial players realize about e-ink that the rest of us don't? Or do they lack vision (seems unlikely under current market conditions)?
> Is there something commercial players realize about e-ink that the rest of us don't? Or do they lack vision (seems unlikely under current market conditions)?
What I know is that their technology is limited by the physics of moving large particles. Their volumes are not high enough to achieve high scale. There was another post that explained this very well by showing the multi-billion cost of a typical LCD factory. I think E-ink can only re-purpose existing LCD factory lines and they can't get good yields on their products doing that.
With a battery and a gsm modem it could probably stay unattended for years as a billboard.
This has already been covered repeatedly. There's no "had they allowed". The problem is physics! Please read about electrophoresis. It is pigment particles moving physically in a fluid! If you make them move fast then they're not going to be stable. You can look at the past 20 years of electrophoretic products and you'll see that there's been pretty much 0 improvement in speed. Startups like Clearink even gave up on bistability meaning they decided we don't need the pigment to stick, we'll just continuously refresh it like LCD and look how the investor and consumer market treated them.
Again, this "had they allowed more innovation" seems to be coming from people who have little to no knowledge of the industry.
If eInk is really missing out on so much profit from the activities you describe, then a buyer might swoop in and put the company under new management. It's not the patent's fault.
Even the founders of modern capitalism warned us of rent-seeking behavior like this that is actually counter to the goals of markets.
It's perfectly fair to condemn this, as well as the patent system that enables and encourages it.
What they choose to do with it is up to them. It's a property right that they own. It's specifically mandated as a monopoly power that they have been granted.
After 20 years, anyone can make an eInk display.
You can argue that 20 years is too long, or that the patent is invalid, or that they aren't exploiting their idea in the most community oriented way, but calling this "rent seeking" and "counter to the goals of markets" is flat out wrong.
The "free market" is entirely about each individual making their own behavioral decisions, within the regulations of the market, to promote their own benefit.
You might not like the way the idea of patents has been reduced to practice, but that doesn't make the idea of patents a bad one.
Alternately, product designers and consumers seem to have a preference for LCD or OLED devices because they are better for common use cases and they have no need for the niche features that EInk provides.
Have anything to back that claim up, or is this your opinion? Because considering there’s only one major category of consumer devices with eInk displays and they are used in all the leading devices in that category, I’m not sure I personally agree. Without additional product categories available to purchase and because there is a pent up desire to buy them despite them not existing, I don’t feel your conclusion can be proven categorically.
"Kindle Sales – The E-Reader Device Is Dying A Rapid Death" https://justpublishingadvice.com/the-e-reader-device-is-dyin...
I'm aware that many people find reading on an E Ink display e-book reader preferable to reading on a tablet or phone. When consumers pull out their wallets to make a purchase, however, they prefer tablets and phones.
I don’t think there’s a conspiracy at EInk or among its shareholders to intentionally make less money or sell less products. Their annual report, which describes a strategy and goal of improving the technology and expanding sales, suggests the opposite. [0]
[0] https://www.ir-cloud.com/taiwan/8069/irwebsite/financials.ph...
That's correct, I do. Patents should protect the rights long enough to bring a product to market, not stop all competition in an entire field of technology for decades
They are indeed using patents as originally envisioned: They have an effective monopoly on epaper displays. However their poor business decision of ultra-high pricing has prevented a serious market for their product from forming. Had they lowered their price per display, or done some kind of affordable licensing scheme with manufacturers, it's totally possible for them to have made tons of money while still allowing epaper displays to flourish in the market.
But that's not what they did; who knows what kind of money they're actually making, but the fact that the epaper market is basically on Kindle life support isn't the patent's fault.
(Edit: Perhaps Amazon had a hand in preventing wide adoption of epaper, in order to more effectively squash Kindle competitors?)
I have seen contracts between large manufacturers where one pre-purchases exclusivity variants, like: 1) Exclusive licensing for x years 2) Exclusive licensing for x years after the first time buyer deploys tech not to exceed W years (usually 10) 3) Very limited sales/licensing to others
This smells like (3) + (2) here.
I work in the display industry and what I know for sure is that they can't make big 20", 32", 42" displays. Something about factory production issues so they're literally like hand making the big displays which to me seems like the reason why they cost so much. So I'm suspicious of your claim. Could you let us know which ultra-high prices you're referring to? What panel size? What DPI? What bin range and contrast range? Do you actually work in the industry and have knowledge of costs and pricing?
> Perhaps Amazon had a hand in preventing wide adoption of epaper, in order to more effectively squash Kindle competitors?
I'm sorry to be harsh but you sound ridiculous when you say that. And now I'm pretty certain you don't have industry knowledge. You do realize that Amazon spent hundreds of millions trying to scale up Liquavista to produce fast colour displays for the Kindle. It failed because again physics of electrowetting is complex especially when you go from handmaking 100 demo displays to trying to produce 1000 on a rolling production line. Maybe a billion and maybe then they could have succeeded but I guess Jeff had other cost issues or personal reasons that ended that.
But yes I agree that patent reform is sorely needed, for this reason amongst others. There has to be a middle ground where ideas can flourish while their creators can still extract profit.
What in the world? So I can't agree that the patent system is net positive, and disagree with a company's specific business decisions under that system?
What a blatant false dichotomy.
Patents are on ideas. Does anybody in this planet actually believe that, without an artificial incentive, ideas won't happen?
The biggest thing wrong with patents are the logistics (lengthy, expensive filings and 20y monopolies are ridiculous today) and the lack of oversight in identitying prior art or vague, overreaching scopes.
Or the holder can charge so much for their idea that yours, which depends on theirs, is effectively worth nothing because it's priced above its value.
That they "might", "maybe", be an incentive to creativity is not exactly a strong justification.
It is highly likely patents are doing more damage than good.
“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
You can argue the meaning of "limited times" and "discoveries" and the interpretation of all that, but the justification is that by providing a limited monopoly, the inventor gets a period to make money uncontested, after which the invention is available to the community.
The alternative, a "trade secret", means that the invention may die with the death of the inventor and be lost to the community.
>That they "might", "maybe", be an incentive to creativity is not exactly a strong justification.
Whereas your constitution quote does express intent, but does not provide justification. It's not backed on hard science, but just a guess.
Also countries without strong rigorous patent protections are swiftly outmanoeuvring those with protections.
When copyrights were extended in 1976 and 1998 for example, there was no measurable effect to the amount of copyrighted works being produced. If the incentivize hypothesis held, there should be a measurable increase in the velocity of copyrighted works pivoting on the dates of those extensions. No such increase was observed. Where is the data to back up the claim? There is none.
So the incentivization hypothesis is not only disputed by evidence but also lacks any supporting evidence, so it's incorrect. It's a testable hypothesis that's been tested.
It doesn't exist, no matter how much you close your eyes and think it's true, it's simply not real. Patents and protections simply do not incentivize innovation, the evidence suggests they stifle and hamper it.
No amount of fundamentalist dogma of desperately clutching wrong answers can change this reality.
[1] I'm just judging on the reaction here and on how competitive the prices are
It is generally not. Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory licensing terms are often contractually required from holders of standards-essential parents that are participants in standards-setting organizations responsible for the relevant standards, but are generally not required by law outside of such contracts.
I can imagine alternate patent systems that would better encourage innovation. I can also imagine that no patent system at all could work fairly well.
Could you explain this? Because which patent is discouraging useful innovation? I'm actively working in the display industry and have no idea what you are referring to. I've asked this question before and I only get conspiracy theory answers like "secret consortium", or lazy answers like patent thicket. If you aren't actually working in the display industry, then how exactly do you know what is blocking useful innovation? Because if you were to ask me what's blocking useful innovation, it is the fact that investors are much more willing to put billions into AI/ML or an internet service startup than they are into scaling up a niche display technology or improving yields so that the price can come down.
And yes, if I were an investor in display technology, I would be quite hesitant to touch electronic ink style displays due to patents.
Here’s a fascinating paper on the usefulness of patents:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-03...
Yes, I've read that as well from magazines but I must admit I've never checked the journalist claims or seen what critical patent expired that made the 3d printing industry flourish. Because it could just have well been access to open source designs that only flourished in the 2000s but I know nothing about 3d printing so I'm just speculating and making it clear that I'm doing that. So when it comes to posts here about my own industry which I feel I know pretty well, I see claims that seem farcical to me so I've been asking, which critical patent does EInk have? So far, I've not had any answer.
> And yes, if I were an investor in display technology, I would be quite hesitant to touch electronic ink style displays due to patents.
If I was your boss, I'd again ask a simple question. Which patent? If you can't identify it, then do you think it is possible it is an incorrect belief based on perhaps a lack of understanding of the display industry?
They reward deep pockets, those who have enough money to fight a long, expensive, court battle.
They do not reward innovation. I know startups who have failed to get a patent because their invention was not "specific enough", and some who have failed to protect their invention because their patent was too specific to defend.
They maintain the status quo, which is entirely antithetical to their purpose.
They maybe work in biotech, and other industries where the capital investment is colossal and needs protecting. In most other industries, especially web tech, they're a net negative and need to be abolished.
>They do not reward innovation.
I suppose, although I think an eink display is reasonably innovative, and I don't think the company has particularly deep pockets in comparison to the companies we generally complain about around here.
As others have said, they're chasing a monopoly on these types of displays, aided by their use of patents. That's not something we should be encouraging. The point of patents was to give a limited window for the inventor of a thing to exclusively capitalise on the thing, in return for making the details of the thing public so that others could in turn expand and improve on the thing. This is not what's happening here.
You have just described the legal system as a whole.
Not necessarily; having a problem with the way someone uses a legal property right is not the same thing as having a problem with them having the legal right to do what they are doing, i.e., the property right itself.
The problem with eink is that patents are not sufficient to produce the desired tech, there is some secret ingredient which is not open, rendering all benefits useless
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometric_modulator_di...
I think they are mostly focused on Micro LED or Mini LED these days. Mirasol is abandoned.
Most other competitors to eInk (e.g. Qualcomm/Mirasol, Gyricon, etc.) had viable products and have completely failed in the market.
Is this really "einks abusive practices" or is it just complete consumer disinterest in the technology outside of these extremely niche markets?
can you add some links to back up this claim? asking for a friend.
Nick Sheridon, inventor of the first ePaper display, suggested the watershed moment for ePaper would be in 2012 where it would gain mass adoption. It's been almost a decade and that watershed has yet to occur.
Many believe that the difficulty in dealing with them and their licensing requirements are stifling the widespread adoption of the technology.
That appears to be nonsense as far as I know. And I'm actively involved in the display industry. I keep seeing this kind of comment in HN which is surprising and each time I always ask give us some evidence or links we can read to verify and I get no answer. Same when I ask what patents are apparently blocking innovation or keeping EInk displays expensive, no answer or non-verifiable answers like patent thicket, secret conspiracy. As a person actually involved with displays, the biggest problem with E-Ink displays is they can't get to the next level of scale because they can't solve yield issues and they can't solve those because they can't get higher volumes. If someone like Apple suddenly put in a pre-paid order for 10 million E Ink displays, I bet you they could get to the next level.
I really doubt that theory, either. This world has just way too much money completely idle waiting. It would be extremely easy for them to get really big money if they really had anything that would be world-changing.
The problem is that, once you really look into it, there is absolutely nothing in eInk that is world changing.
Consumers have problems distinguishing the supposedly better contrast from cheap reflective+monochrome LCD displays (like the Pebble or stuff sold in amazon for $10 these days). But they can easily recognize it the moment the slow refresh comes in. So your average customer only sees disadvantages and high price. They will choose reflective LCD any day over pure eInk. And thus all use cases where eInk might have succeeded are perfectly covered with plain old reflective LCDs (e.g. week-long battery life, primarily outside use such as smartwatches).
So your only other benefit about eInk is the passive power usage when not refreshing. Which is why they are making some in-roads into this type of market, e.g. sales price tags, signs, etc.
But consumer market? There is just no interest whatsoever from consumers. None whatsoever. Only a handful of geeks know what benefits eInk brings over reflective LCDs (angles, polarity), and out of them only a handful care enough about them to buy.
> Many believe that the difficulty in dealing with them
I already mentioned that... but is there any actual evidence? It's very easy to claim "oh but they're evil! they're so evil they hide their evil actions behind NDAs!". It's a textbook example of non-falsifiability.
But what I see from my side is a shitton of chinese manufacturers (not very well known for their respect of NDAs or trade secrets overall whatsoever). So I have a hard time believing such an accusation.
I wasn't aware Mirasol ever made it out of handmade demo units. Maybe they did manage to produce some production level small displays like 4" but I heard from a fab guy in Longtan that they just couldn't get the process to work reliably.
> consumer disinterest in the technology outside of these extremely niche markets?
Consumers would be interested if they could be cheap and fast like LCD. But E-Ink is probably never going to get fast because you can't bypass physics unless they find a different way to get pigment particles to move. It won't get cheap either because you need huge volumes to get there. So unless someone with Applesque bank account makes that order, E-Ink will always be more expensive than LCDs.
I still have my Qualcomm Toq watch. So yes, they did manage.
A recurring meme from people who meet one or more of the following conditions:
a) Don't understand business
b) Don't know anything about the display industry
c) Don't know anything about manufacturing anything at scale
d) Don't have any real information other than repeating something someone said
e) Never take the time to do enough research and gather enough data with which to support their opinions
f) Don't seem to care about the truth
As someone who worked in the display industry for over ten years, conducted seminars for thousands of engineers and business professionals on the design and manufacturing of display systems (down to pixel-level electronics) and, generally speaking, considered myself an expert in the domain...these kinds of comments come off as --to be kind-- terribly misplaced.
It would behoove HN commenters to at least exercise enough restraint to only comment in domains they have either researched profusely or understand to a good level of proficiency. That is, if they care about HN signal-to-noise ratio not degrading to Twitter/FB food fight levels.
Why hasn't E-Ink display tech gone mass-market? lots of other commenters are arguing the reasons for and against.
There's been a bunch of comments making really strong claims. Here's some examples just from this post.
"They're famous for patent-trolling and disrupting anyone elses effort's to do anything with the tech".
When asked for proof of this, there was no reply.
"E Ink is part of a consortium that owns all the patents around the technology used in their ePaper displays."
When asked for proof of this, there was no reply.
"Because there's no real market, the only company "innovating" on the original technology is E-Ink. With a 20-year head start locking down iterative improvements, the technology may never get out of the tarpit. "
When asked to back up the claim, at least the response was better in that they accepted it was an assumption based on other comments rather than actually being based on facts.
" It is all just an assumption, and I don't have any evidence. Thank you for pointing that out, challenging me, and forcing me to take reconsider my opinion. "
So his/her point is that people are alleging a company is a patent troll, even perhaps part of a consortium seeking to control the market and when challenged, they are unable to defend their claims. So your question appears to be asking him for reasons to backup his questioning of other people making claims. Eg, you are acting as Dan in the following itemized list.
Alice: We are making a product at price X and volume Y with features Z
Bob: Alice is preventing anyone else from making similar products using your patents. Alice is part of a consortium that is evil. A is making enormous profits. A is a patent troll. A is an example of patents gone wild.
Charles: Uhm, Bob and buddies? Why are you saying that about Alice? I work in Alice's industry and see nothing like that. You guys shouldn't make such baseless comments as it brings down the quality of our technology forum and level of discussion.
Dan: Charles, you're making ad-hominem attacks and appealing to self-authority.
> Why hasn't E-Ink display tech gone mass-market?
Because their technology (ie: the physics they're reliant on) can't do what competing products like LCD, OLED are able to do. You can't magically make electrophoretic particles that stay in a stable position AND move fast. You can't magically fit millions of color pigments in a pixel when there is NO backlight. Until they can switch to a different technology or physics, they can't compete against LCD/OLED and will never reach high enough volumes to scale to a lower cost structure.
You got that wrong. Listing the many ways in which someone doesn't know what they are talking about is a statement of fact, not a personal attack.
If I argued a bunch of nonsense on HN about an article on biology and someone called me for not having a clue, that would not be a personal attack, they would be factually accurate. Biology is not my thing.
Sometimes we just need the truth.
The entire fucking world of government and business runs on paper. I have to print out literally reams of shit for regulatory requirements, shit that could be easily stored in multiple locations, on tiny ass microSD cards that could be filed away into a single filing cabinet, potentially holding billions of records, damn near indefinitely, and near-immediately accessed on ePaper displays, with the color documents being displayed on color ones and the black & whites being displayed on greyscale displays... instead we have an enormous off-site filing warehouse to retain documentation for up to seven years. Hell, my corporation probably has several of these.
And it sure as shit isn't the legal framework holding all this up... everyone I deal with in government and business hates having to shuffle all this shit around, and would much rather be tossed an 8.5" x 11" eInk display with all relevant documents than having to shuffle through manila folder after manila folder of printed pages, and they'd all gladly lobby to have these laws and regulations changed and revised to allow for that.
I guaran-goddamn-tee you the market for eInk is there.
If there's a fetish for a "this document is an actual physical object" somewhere (with all the usual security theater about security from theft and alteration), it's not going to be helped by taping eInk to a disk.
About thirty years ago I worked on a sizeable archival project. Technology deemed "modern" at the time was very hard to justify. Why? Because nobody could truthfully answer a simple question: What happens when the hardware/readers go obsolete?
Well, the first thing that happens is that you have to migrate ALL of your data from the old medium to a new medium before the old one goes out of style.
That's all the bean counters had to hear to know they'd rather keep things on film. Film, as the argument went, is good for a long time if stored properly and all you have to do is shine a light through it.
The started a slow transition to digital some 20 to 25 years after that conversation. Guess what? They were right. The film was --and still is-- in pristine condition.
4096 colours seems limited though.. the 13.3 linked in January [discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21996326) looks much more impressive - although the NDA and lack of definitive numbers makes it hard to compare.
I'm not really sure how they measure resolution with this, that could still just be a mistake. But I do know e-ink displays sacrifice resolution for that colour with current technology.
It reminds me of the LCDs on digital cameras, some of which use the same trick to reduce costs --- natural photos don't look any different, which is why it gets a pass, but text has a noticeable graininess to it as a result.
They can! Not frequently, I'll grant. Once I was using Lightroom and was very confused by a pixelated looking edge of a yellow flower against a blue sky, the edge of which moved diagonally across the pixels. Eventually I realized it was the mosaicing! I actually ended up switching to RawTherapee for that picture, the AMaZE demosaicing algorithm handled it much better in that particular case. Lightroom in the last few years added a high quality demosaicing mode that you can selectively enable, and it handles the picture correctly. It's pretty slow though.
In any case, reporting resolution using the single-color "pixels" is probably more justified for an image sensor (with its array of square light detecting sensors), than it is for an LCD screen, which is usually a square array of non-square sub-pixels.
When we apply that work to screens, our eyes can't really post-process and correct for these errors.
But calling subpixels pixels would be borderline fraudulent.
That's what the original Amiga chipset had. 4bit/RGBchannel definitely is not as good as 12bit/ch but it isn't bad. DPI can make up for it, that's how print works.
But at 31.2" and those resolutions, the DPI isn't great.
How to fail at business.
Not a surprise that I've never seen any of these e-Ink large or color screens anywhere.
Kind of like Halloween Document era Microsoft, but for e-ink display's instead of PC's.
I work in the display industry and have never heard of this. I don't see any data showing this either. Could you show us what you are basing your claims on? Am I missing something?
I was inaccurate with my wording, my apologies.
I'll repeat my request for evidence again. " Wow, that is a very serious allegation. But I googled and googled and googled, and found not even one such lawsuit. I also see competing tech like Clearink. Could you show us proof that what you claimed about "buried by their lawyers" is actually occurring? "
When I stated "Kind of like Halloween Document era Microsoft", I was referring to their apparent willingness to use the legal system to shut down competition.
As for evidence of "one such lawsuit", there is this link. The only source provided 404's, but given that it's a government website that appears to have gone through a redesign, that's not shocking: https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2015/03/02/german-court-fi...
Most of my information on the topic so far has come from HN and reddit. That being said, what is being said on HN/reddit does appear to match up with what's going on, at least from the consumers perspective.
Edit: Add apparent
Sigh.... I give up. Please read my post history if you genuinely want an industry perspective on these matters.
Patent abuse sounds like a fair description though, at least in my mind.
I'll be more precise with my words next time.
From my understanding, the technology is still limited to extremely low-saturation colors with extremely low contrast as well, see [1] for example photos and how the tech works.
It's certainly not ready for advertising -- instead of a vibrant color image, it looks like something printed on newspaper and left to fade in the sun for 5 years.
And color e-readers have significantly worse contrast than black & white ones, which already aren't great.
So if you truly need usable color, it seems like you're still always going to choose a traditional LCD/OLED display. Based on the fundamental limitations of the color filters used with eInk, I don't really see a future for it. At least not unless a new technology emerges that doesn't rely on using color filters on top of traditional black-and-white eInk?
[1] https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/color-e-pape...
The product page doesn't advertise it, but the books are huge. I can't actually read my PDFs because my kindle display is much smaller than that.
And yet the market for a reader with a bigger screen seems to be negligible. :(
Eg for the case you mention, the display ppi is simply nowhere near good enough for minute study of details.
Can't get to the page; I assume the price is ridiculous though.
It seems like a terrible tradeoff to make, for colors that are still terrible.
Reading a graphic novel on a color e-ink reader will be so washed out... if you really want the color, it seems like you still have to just read it on an iPad etc.
New artistic styles often come from the limitations of their mediums. I expect the limitations of color e-ink to be no different.
The whole point I'm making is that no advertiser or restaurant is going to use color eInk because the contrast and saturation are so terrible.
This isn't like working around the limitations of a medium to develop pixel art, or black-and-white drawings, etc.
Color e-ink is just a worse medium in every way. It's worse contrast at black-and-white (B&W e-ink is far better), and it's terrible contrast and saturation at color.
I don't see it working for signs, ads, or menus at all.
Color e-ink feels like a cool prototype, a proof-of-concept, but that basically demonstrates its limitations don't make it commercially viable for any general purpose.
In this application I see the use of e-ink as being:
- Maybe more readable if you're really fussy.
- Lowers overall power use.
The prior is super weak, LCDs do fine as long as they're not in direct sun.
The second is a good reason, but not a very compelling one in terms of economics yet.
The place these make sense is battery powered devices. If it's plugged in it is a gimmick or someone really dedicated to energy efficiency.
Years ago, the cafeterias at Microsoft switched from using regular signage for their menus to giant plasma TVs that showed a static image of the menu that had been there. The menu at some of the stations (but not all) did change daily, so there was some, slim, benefit, perhaps.
After awhile, they moved over to having a slide show on the screens that alternated between glamour shots of the food, and the menu. Now you could only see the actual menu for a fraction of the time, and despite being a speed reader, I'd often have to wait for the menu to come back around multiple times before I could read it all and decide what I wanted to eat that day.
But it sure did look modern!
Further irony, IIRC that was around the same time I volunteered to be part of a campus wide partnership with the local power company and I stood at a desk in the cafeteria handing out free CFLs bulbs.
The tl;dr is that companies will invest in expensive, less useful, signage, if it is perceived as being cooler.
Heck it isn't like menus carved/painted on wood have particularly good contrast ratios, but they still pop up now and then.
I've seen this problem elsewhere. I don't get why you wouldn't display the menu on some of the screens and the photos on other screens.
Me: 3 Big Macs and 2 large Fries
McD: What?
Me: 3 Big Macs and 2 large Fries
McD: 4 Quarterpounders?
Me: T-h-r-e-e B-i-g M-a-c-s
McD: 3 Quarterpounders?
Me: Yes, and fries
I would be so thrilled for an e-ink phone to get rid of my current one with. I don't play movies, the refresh rate doesn't need to be great, it does need to be color, and if the battery lasts a week again... well worth it.
Alas, I've got the whole "phone needs to be small enough to use one handed" due to disability stuff so https://www.gsmchoice.com/en/catalogue/hisense/a5c/ is their smaller one and it's a bit big but close...
Might be a wait until there's enough market for a niche of both not huge and also e-ink. There was a bar e-ink phone though! I'm surprised they can't just put a more complex OS on it given the resolution...
> It's certainly not ready for advertising -- instead of a vibrant color image, it looks like something printed on newspaper and left to fade in the sun for 5 years.
This is still a big improvement over black and white if you're displaying, say, a math textbook.
edit: speaking of which I am looking to purchase high quality retro gaming magazines (PC, Playstation 1 in particular). anybody wants to get in touch please reply.
$20 total cost per device
= $1.2m to outfit a store.
/$15 employee gross costs per hour
= 38 years of labour for one store....
Either the # SKUs would have to be lower, or the BOM smaller to justify this.
On the flipside consider the material cost of paper pricing tags, reduced risk of pricing error, ability to change pricing more rapidly, increased customer marketing/attraction.
I'd also imagine that removing this function from individual stores and centralising it would save a considerable amount of store management time.
Or maybe they are already doing that ... I said to call me paranoid.
I'm not a fan of it, but that will certainly recoup that cost much faster.
Only change the prices over night? (but unlike with employees you can reprice the entire store every night without any particular cost)
If this doesn't exist already, it will soon.
But customers are so used to confusing pricing labels you could just make the old (cheaper) price say: "Discount: $x".
Also if you hook up the change to motion detectors where you know no one is in the aisle, then you can skip it altogether.
The eventual outcome will possibly be a class action law suit and in a few years the customers can sign up to receive a gift card.
You can see similar behavior with the same company here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/loblaws-25-gift-card-class-...
That said, I know some people that work in the grocery industry, and my impression is that the margins are tight enough that they do the math on EVERYTHING
Feel free to visit my website and send an email if you think you've got something that we could work together to get into some of my clients' projects. If it makes the final product more compelling I'm definitely open to it, especially if it runs on trivial drivers that a low power microcontroller can handle.
I'd basically expect a display that works with a chip like a STM32WB (wireless integrated so makes sense to pair with a low power design). https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/microcontrolle...
Of course fancy people have access to Qualcomm parts, so I understand if that's what you're aiming for. But if it's suitable for a bit less fancy of microcontroller chips and has a reasonable price I'd love to replace the literal LCD displays we're still stuck on because I guess it's 1996 in the realm of equipment prototyping.
But I am by no means an EE.
That's nothing, even after markup and multiplying it around all the shelves, consider the wages you have to pay for people to go around continuously re-stickering everything. I'm pretty sure it would pay off in under a month and reduce errors... freeing staff to do more useful things. What i'm sure will _not_ be paid off in a month is the cost of integrating it into existing pricing systems.
However I think there is a more practical reason why it's not suited to most supermarkets: they are constantly moving things around due to different products coming and going and different parts shrinking and growing, so why bother with digital labels when you have to keep physically moving them anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loblaws
they operate with other brand names for non-superstore-sized regular grocery stores, and the T&T markets which are their own market niche: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_%26_T_Supermarket
From observing the behavior of my local superstore it also appears they're using the eink price tags on shelf in conjunction with some sort of software for planning shelf space and inventory, so it has some value to them other than just the manual labor to change paper price tags.
- it was battery powered and needed a display with infrequent updates but super low power
- the display was otherwise a large part of the power (i.e. otherwise it was a LCD display)
- the color was useful in indicating an error or clarifying the menu items
If it did those things it would be worth upwards of $10 a unit to me if the resolution was over 720p for sure, and likely even for lower resolutions if it worked reliably with a slow microcontroller.
CI and monitoring dashboards. These tend to have large relatively static areas for long periods. Every regular LCD I've seen gets horrific burn-in after a month or three and then burns a lot of wasted electricity for bonus points.
This page implements its own custom scrolling behavior that tries (but fails) to mimic the smooth scrolling behavior that is default in most web browsers.
It probably feels like something is slightly off if you have smooth scrolling enabled, but it's extremely and obviously jarring if you have it disabled.
Why do people keep doing this?
This page is made much nicer by disabling JavaScript and removing the nice-scroll class from the root element (they did that part badly too—without JavaScript, you can’t scroll at all until you remove that class).
- It looks really good
- It can be updated quickly
- Black is produced with particles attaching to tiny lenses
- The faster you want to update ("video mode"), the slightly higher power consumption will be
- It's cheap and easy to make with mostly LCD processes
- It was supposed to launch in 2020
Unfortunately I haven't seen any update since then. Does anyone know what's holding them back?
- e-ink is optimizing for maximum profits, using classic monopoly pricing
- because they are optimizing for profits, their volumes are necessarily small, so their per-unit costs are actually relatively high
To me, it would make sense to invent in capturing a larger market if e-ink believed that they could compete at scale.
Because there's no real market, the only company "innovating" on the original technology is E-Ink. With a 20-year head start locking down iterative improvements, the technology may never get out of the tarpit.
This dynamic would only be compounded by E Ink apparently spending considerable effort securing its patent position for the indefinite future. There's little potential to achieve a demanding, independent market position short of buying E Ink.
The software industry is a great example. It doesn't matter how nominally low commercial software license prices are (and were); the amount of innovation and productivity unleashed by gratis FOSS is incalculably greater than would have ever been possible otherwise. And it inured to commercial products and services just as much as to users directly using FOSS. Even the smallest amount of friction at various points can turn interest away given how transactional costs can multiply, and given opportunity costs. An explosion of diversity and emergence of a rich ecosystem is often a prerequisite to creating even the most speculative market potential.
That said, I take your point. It is all just an assumption, and I don't have any evidence. Thank you for pointing that out, challenging me, and forcing me to take reconsider my opinion.
Say you were getting a million dollars a year totally passively and I offered you an option where your income would temporarily drop to 1% of that but had an 80% chance of recovering to 1.2 million per year after a couple years and a 20% chance of recovering to only 100k/yr. Would you take it?
And what if the whole income stream had fair odds of drying up after a couple more years regardless?
Sometimes issues like this are solved by finding a risk seeking buyer to take most of the upside in exchange for giving the owner a more secure position. But when the maximum payoff of the high-risk-route isn't high enough it won't attract risk seekers.
(Their demo video shows the display reflecting ambient light sources like glass does, which is definitely a bad thing. I don't want it to look like glass and I don't want a glass panel in front of it. I want a matte surface that I can touch without smudging it.)
A comparable high-brightness 1080p display is about the same price [1], but uses a lot more electricity and from my experience with them, they have definite lifespan (2-4yrs, despite the 100k hours light lifetime claim) if they're running 24/7.
https://displaysolutions.samsung.com/digital-signage/detail/...
Watts are a unit of power, energy per time. Joules are a unit of energy. One watt is precisely one joule per second.
"Watts [per] hour" would be a change in power per time which is equivalent to an acceleration of energy and not an amount of energy.
To get an amount of energy, you multiply the power (watts) by an amount of time. If you want the energy in units of joules, you multiple the watts by the number of seconds in which the power was consumed. That's why kilowatt-hour a is a unit of energy; it's equivalent to one watt applied for one hour. One hour is 3600 seconds, so one kilowatt-hour is equal to 3600 kilojoules.
I believe you meant that the screens consume 200+ watts.
Some on-street transit stops have displays with live schedules displayed. I wonder if there are use cases where you'd want that sort of kiosk somewhere you couldn't run power (and would power by solar).
https://shopkits.eink.com/product/10-3%CB%9D-epaper-display-...
> PLEASE NOTE:
> (I) THE PRODUCTS ARE NOT CONSUMER PRODUCTS INTENDED FOR PERSONAL, FAMILY OR HOUSEHOLD PURPOSES; AND
> (II) PURCHASER IS PURCHASING THE PRODUCTS FOR COMMERCIAL USE AND/OR IN A BUSINESS CAPACITY. ORDERS PLACED BY CONSUMERS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED.
Edit: subaquamille raises great points about battery life and obsolescence which strengthen the argument for E-Ink.
Yes, you're right if you're looking at update time of the display, which I have. There's pretty much no improvement. That's due to the physics of pigment particles. I don't see a way for them to improve that. They have improved contrast ratios. The whites of their carter displays are much better than the previous gen pearl and vizplex before that.