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Comment by bananicorn | Hacker News Reader

This is the same type of screen used as in the pebble smartwatches[0], right?

Honestly, I wonder why that technology hasn't been used for anything like the Thinkpad in the video - I'd love to have such a device!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)#Hardware

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No, the Pebble used a Sharp Memory LCD, a different transflective technology. It can only do greyscale while pixelQi uses prisms to separate the colors. That's why you get color with backlight and greyscale out in the sun.

> It can only do greyscale

Eh? My Pebble Time has a color screen, and it sure is transflective.

"transflective" is just a broad description of displays which take in light and reflect it back, implementations and drawbacks vary.

The pebble time has a display like an old Game Boy Color

And so does Pixel Qi. They're both LCD, after all.

I can speak only for the Pebble Time Steel, but it is leaps and bounds better than the gameboy color.

I would kill for an equivalent display in a laptop - saturated colours and eink readability in direct sunlight with 30hz refresh

The most plausible explanation is that the tech is patented to such a degree that producing this kind of solutions is just not economically viable.

Considering how long ago the OLPC project was, hopefully the patents are running out soon.

Patents aren't the main problem here; the lower refresh rate and resolution mean not many people want it.

Fewer people wanting it means lower economy of scale and higher prices, which means even fewer still.

Always with this excuse, but I really doubt it. There's just a million manufacturers of this or technology similar to this. Many of them have failed and people usually would only notice and care _after_ they failed.

The most plausible explanation is that it's expensive because there's no economy economy of scale, and that there's no economy of scale because people don't want to pay extra for a worse quality screen even if it has a slightly better battery life.

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