If the e-ink people ever overcome their cost problem, we'll see many more products.
I saw this recurring theme on HN that electrophoretic panels were expensive due to patents and evil misdeeds by that most evil corporation called E-Corp.
I thought, hey, I work in this bloody display industry myself where everything is about volume, volume and more volume, and I hangout with their guys at conferences and events, and I've never heard such a thing as them using patents to attack other industry players. Are they really attacking people and hurting customers that want to use their technology as alleged?
So I asked a simple question each time I saw that claim that E Ink uses patents to attack startups or similar claims. What's the evidence?
And guess what. Now it turns back to people like you who ask what is my evidence that there's no evil misdeeds. And to which I just feign shock, oh no, it must be true then, since a lack of evidence for them being innocent of the alllegations must mean they are guilty.
So we're left back at square 1. I hope people with a smarter mind than mine can arrive at whatever the correct conclusions are.
LCD/OLED displays were also very expensive initially, but because they're so much appealing universally, loads of money got poured into the industry to make them better and cheaper (mostly due to volume demand).
There's no such amount of money/interest in making E-ink better and cheaper :(
As for the comment about "money/interest", see my comments about why a venture capitalist would have little interest in spending billions trying to create new display tech and fighting hard expensive physics problems when they could get higher rate of return by investing in another software service or ML/AI company. That said, Jeff Bezos spent hundred million or more on trying to get Liquavista working, Qualcomm spent lord knows how much on Mirasol. Great demos, but just couldn't get the process scaled or reliable enough to commercialize. Physics is hard. Physics is expensive.
Seems to be a meaty thread if anyone else is curious.
VC money is unlikely the source for this kinda of industrial research and bumpy road to scalability.
LCD/OLED panels got so cheap largely due to Korean/Japanese/Chinese government subsides. I doubt any of them will do so for e-ink.
[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171220005895/en/E-I...
Huh, I see non tri-color version is still available in my country (Poland): https://kamami.pl/en/displays-for-raspberry-pi/577635-1248in... but forget the "less money" part...
This project is really cool, but I would prefer to have "a new picture every morning" in a frame than a calendar. For my purposes the e-ink displays are still a bit too small....
I just made a simple weather web app which connects to a free service. This works great. I could have written a little Android app to do the same, but my memory of Android UI is that I never ‘got’ it so this seemed easier.