How E Ink developed full-color e-paper
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Of particular note with all Onyx readers is that they run Android, opening up the ecosystem of the Play store and particularly your note-taking app of choice.
Unfortunately, color eink are roughly 100 dpi compared to the 300 of b&w, although it's a layer over the b&w display so normal black and white content is still much crisper. The color layer does make it all appear darker though.
Also, ghosting can be a problem. Onyx has a few refresh settings that minimize it at the cost of refresh time. It looks like note taking is usually done on a faster refresh rate with occasional full screen refreshes to clean things up.
I'm not sure the tech is fully there yet, but it looks like it works well enough for things like color PDFs and comics. For heavy note taking color is probably not a requirement for most. I like the idea of the other larger b&w Onyx readers running android though. The Play store apps would add a lot of options over the Remarkable.
[0] https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=335605
I'm not a lawyer though.
It's true that Onyx violates the GPL and has some privacy concerns around it, but on the upside the bootloader is unlocked by default and you can root the system fairly easily, allowing you to install a firewall restricting some of the phoning home (https://blog.tho.ms/hacks/2021/03/27/hacking-onyx-boox-note-...).
I'm beginning to use it as a general purpose Android tablet. The low refresh rate takes a bit of time to get used to, but I find that it causes you to interact with the device more slowly and carefully at points, which reduces the chance for distractions a bit (it's not that low though, you can actually watch the occasional video, the ghosting isn't actually even that bad).
I don't think the note capability is very good with the default app (I think it's unusable, in fact), but a new mode adds compatibility with OneNote (which I also don't like, but is probably less buggy). It's still a brilliant device for reading using Koreader, browsing the Web using Fennec/EinkBro and taking notes using a pen on GBoard's swipe input functionality. Just mind that the battery doesn't last as ridiculously long as you may be used to with this usage pattern. I get through about a day with fairly heavy usage.
A color display would be a welcome addition, but the gigantic oversight the Nova 3 Color's developers have made is not adding a warm light. It's what I exclusively use on my device.
Yes that looks like a strange choice. In videos it looks like that distorts the colors, shifting toward blue. It looks like battery is reasonable on all the Onyx devices if you're not on wifi though, despite the overhead of Android. Probably some heavy throttling if background app activity too. Otherwise, backlights on Kindle ereaders still allow for very long battery life-- how does the Nova 2 fare? A week of battery would still be pretty great for a tablet note taking tablet w/ Android if it can manage that with occasional wifi use to sync notes or check email.
Having tried the Onenote mode it's a bit of a hack and doesn't feel great to use.
It glitches more than I can list within the comment length limit. The highlights are:
- Glitchy panning and zooming (they're extremely glitchy by themselves and can't be done together)
- Ineffective palm rejection. No matter whether with or without a sleeve between hand and display, it always wants to zoom or pan, which takes forever to settle down. I am aware of the touch lock, but find it too cumbersome to be acceptable. Well, maybe if that was the only issue.
- Slow eraser. You have to rub around forever for it to register all strokes you want to erase. I don't know what kind of galaxy brain shit they're doing to manage this because Squid, a different note app, registers it perfectly on the same device.
- Limited canvas. You can have the canvas be something like 2x the height of the device. Well great.
- All kinds of issues with rotation and zoom (kind of important on the smaller models, no?). The right half of the canvas not being usable, strokes being misaligned with strokes, rotation being wrong after switching apps ... I finally went all Bill O'Reilly ("Fuck it, fuckin' thing sucks") when it permanently misaligned my content from the template.
There have also been instances in which it just wouldn't register any strokes until after restarting the app. The app also can't be started without using the official Onyx Launcher, which I don't (there's not only no icon for it, as far as I found there's no Activity you could call).
What a disappointment. I have watched reviews and read opinions online and apparently nobody thought to mention how terrible that app is (thanks for the latency measurements, though). I've considered having a faulty device, but really, all the strokes register fine, all the other apps work perfectly.
> Having tried the Onenote mode it's a bit of a hack and doesn't feel great to use
Hard to be worse than the Boox Note app :-)
I dislike OneNote enough that I'm probably not going to use it (notebooks metaphor, weird cloud stuff), but wow, what a difference. At least it doesn't have any of these show-stopper bugs. It's like they've actually started it and used it once.
The way Onyx implemented the scribble mode indeed looks a bit on the low-effort side regarding the stroke thickness and style, but for how much of a hack it is (I assume they can't actually properly hook into the app itself), how reliably it works is pretty impressive.
Fun fact about that scribble mode (what enables the low-latency pen input): It keeps working until the app that enabled it also disables it again, so if you exit an app using it in the right way, it stays on and you can draw anywhere. The downside is that the screen doesn't refresh by itself anymore, so you better have a manual refresh gesture set up or you'll probably have to reboot to fix it.
Apps can also enable and disable the mode from the background. This means that you can basically enable scribble mode for all apps without even needing any special privileges. The issue is, however, that the screen stops refreshing after a stroke after a few minutes (responsibility of the app controlling scribble mode. Presumably it eventually gets suspended ("allow running in background" is enabled). I would be happy about suggestions for how this could be solved (I haven't been able to transfer the logic to a background service presumably because of surface/context issues).
If you've read this far, you may be interested in joining a Discord community of (more technical) Boox users: https://discord.gg/h6yVpkDd
Stroke eraser also works fine. Touch a stroke and the stroke erases. A stroke is 1 line drawn continously, if you lift the pen the stroke ends. Works exactly how I'd expect. It also has a regular eraser and an area eraser that also work fine? Trying Squid for the first time in years I'm not sure what the fuck they are calling a stroke eraser there. I even double checked and it's just as retarded on an LCD tablet. Why would I want a stroke eraser to erase more than the 1 stroke it touched?
I've taken a lot of class notes on the thing and my Note Air and really other than the occasional accidental back outs haven't had the problems you describe. I don't even turn off touch. Besides the bad text recognition I think the Boox Note app works well.
Things get a bit more complicated with PDFs on the 8" screen due to their fixed layout. KOReader has settings and accomodations to comfortably deal with many of them, but it usually requires a little tinkering. Typical A4 PDFs are just about readable with basic cropping in vertical mode and become quite easily readable in horizontally mode. There are some modes to navigate multi-column PDFs and reflow text blocks. But there can definitely be PDFs that are not comfortably readable. The situation is better the larger the screen is, so people tend to prefer 10" (Boox Note) or 13" (Boox Max) devices for heavy PDF consumption.
I would personally prefer it if people stopped publishing great looking but hard to consume PDFs as the only way to consume content.
I wonder why they have avoided Android certification. It is the only thing holding me back at this point.
It is very easy to set up Google Play on the Onyx Boox tablets. You just press a button in settings, enter your login details, click another button and that's it.
The wacom stylus (I love that the touchscreen isn't sensitive to my palm) is the best feature of my boox n96ml though. It's got a nice big screen for scribbling notes on and appears to be pressure sensitive as well. That alone sold it to me and I still don't regret it because having a wacom-type stylus is just /that good of a feature/.
Like most, I wanted an ereader for consuming books without an LCD/OLED screen. I liked the idea of a color reader for the syntactic highlighting of code snippets. I further leaned into color once I realized there was a market for Android based ereaders. This means I can more easily treat it as a second phone to browse books, manga, github, HN, Pocket, Medium etc.
As other commenters pointed out, you probably do want to lock down the device and enable Google play store. I have NetGuard installed since it's constantly phoning home to China.
If you are comfortable with the price and understand the limitations (DPI, ghosting, darker screen) then it's a pretty great device.
The pen is great and responsive but it doesn't replace pen/paper. I primarily use the pen to mark up books/PDFs. The native library app it ships with is pretty great and beats out Moon+ Reader and other apps I've tried.
OneNote is particularly great for note taking and worth calling out. However, I can't find myself integrating it into my work flow.
You can set different options to negate ghosting. It's nice to be able to save these options to a specific app.
My biggest wishes would be higher DPI, brighter screen, and a warmlight option.
I'm not optimistic we will see any drastic innovation in the next few years. Kaleido/Plus isn't anything groundbreaking. I do hope that I'm wrong. There's a clear demand for this technology to improve.
Frankly, I’m quite sick of straining my eyes and circadian rhythm for 8hrs+ a day
Skimming the uspto’s documentation, identifying the term does not appear to be a straightforward process [0]. Someone with more experience in the matter might be able to say.
[0] https://www.uspto.gov/patents/laws/patent-term-calculator
ten years. so just after the world collapses. it's so great that we are blocking the development of vital tech /s. i mean, imagine a world without today's level of production of laptop screens/OLED TVs/LCD TVs/phone/tablet screens. all those toxic chemicals. there's so many things we don't need a flashlight being shone in our faces for, and (as someone else in this thread already mentioned) our circadian rhythm being disrupted for.
of course e-ink tech and the health of our eyes and sleep is just the tip of the iceberg. in the larger perspective capitalist firms are suffocating the earth with their single-use, non-modular, non-upgradeable, black box e-waste. they're not even 'tools' to me because the living and breathing Silicon Valley AI is using and abusing us (the workers) through these 'products'.
i abhor the intellectual property system and monopolized vital technologies, it means capitalism makes the worst technological tools.
Communist countries are the most polluted countries in the world.
https://kafkadesk.org/2020/08/12/poland-stands-out-as-the-mo...
what world economic system is committing mass ecocide and crossing our planetary boundaries by exhausting natural resources?
Technology seems to move a lot faster than paradigm shifts in government.
While it is most certainly a good idea to do that, you don't need to wait until the process is complete to include these items in your diet.
1. Doesn't hit E-ink's patents 2. Is colour 3. Has fast lcd-like refresh rates
The reviews of the few devices that were made were excellent. The main problem seemed to be the quality of other aspects of the devices that featured them. I find it incredibly frustrating that this hasn't made it into the mainstream.
"As of 2015, the IMOD Mirasol display laboratory in Longtan, Taiwan, formerly run by Qualcomm, is now apparently run by Apple."
So even if something comes out of it - it would be probably just locked into apples garden.
I think they tried to ramp things up before it was ready, and nobody was interested by the time they got it to work.
Please watch makers, put a little eink-style screen on a watch! Even if it looks like 1st Generation Kindle screens, and is only black/white, it will still be an upgrade!
No doubt there are manufacturers around the world who are exploring quality general-purpose reflective displays for consumer applications, the tech has been around for some time. I could be mistaken but it seems more a question of commercial viability rather than technical capability
Moderna is US based
https://enwikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna
We're you maybe thinking of BioNTech? (Makers of corminanty vaccine aka BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine against Covid)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioNTech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-...
https://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper/des-display-electronic-...
As is, it's competing against 120hz, mass-produced LED/LCD panels that can scale in price from tablets to TV screens.
It's hard for a "new" tech to have enough of an economic use case, so as to fund its own R&D, so at to become the best version of itself.
Clearink 2.0 looks amazing but apparently it was sold to a Chinese company and they haven't had any public announcements since 2019.
Here, we go again. I've only read that here (repeatedly!) on HN and blogs that then cited throwaway HN posts which never respond to my requests for at least some verifiable evidence. Have a look through my comment history.
> that wouldn’t fall within the scope of E Ink’s defensible moat, or, if their parents are simply so broad
what moat? please tell me, I keep asking. To me, it looks like all of the people making these claims have no clue about the display industry. It would be the equivalent of me coming on a search engine forum and then alleging Microsoft of using a patent moat to prevent progress in operating systems, is that true? I have no clue but it sure sounds good even though I have 0 evidence. I hope my point is clear.
History of full of example of patents slowing the deployment to technology, the latest clear example is 3d Printing which really only became affordable to the home user, and abel to be hackable by people doing novel things with it after the patents expired
I would assume the same thing would happen with eink
Normally, the person making a claim or allegation supplies some evidence. You know like if I accused Microsoft of using patents for holding back operating system development, then you as presumably a software expert would rightly ask me for evidence. Is my point somehow unclear? Commenters on HN repeatedly make this claim and if you look at my comment history, each time I ask for evidence I get exactly your kind of reply or the link to that throwaway post (also on HN) and a blog article (that refers to that same throwaway post! infinite loop!) or best of all patents.google.com/search?q=eink . That suggests to me that these comments have no basis in evidence and the authors of the comments aren't even involved at any level of the display industry to understand what they're talking about.
> I would assume the same thing would happen with eink
Evidence?
You deny a general chilling effect that patents have on the market overall? That people will, companies, and insterors will simply avoid patent encumbered technology
You simply refuse to acknowledge that generally accepted reality
//Sidenote. Stop asking me and others to look through your comment history. I am not going to do that. Make your points here and now
So I can just simply say Microsoft has patents and therefore operating systems are not progressing because of that? You realize that's what you're claiming.
> You simply refuse to acknowledge that generally accepted reality
Your reality doesn't match mine. I work in the display industry.
> Stop asking me and others to look through your comment history.
I'm not going to spend my time educating you repeatedly.
In part yes... Look at the suppression of UNIX do to SCO.. I mean hell this is recorded history. I am honestly surprised I need to even debate this. SCO effectively killed Unix, and harmed Linux and BSD
Software patents have a long history of suppression innovation in software
>Your reality doesn't match mine. I work in the display industry.
This new age of dueling realities is a false. There is only one reality, and mine is based on recorded historical fact, your is based on personal experience and anecdote
Mine is actual reality, yours is a belief
>I'm not going to spend my time educating you repeatedly.
Nor am I
I'm confused. What "recorded historical facts" were provided for this claim that E Ink is using patents to prevent progress in the display industry?
> Mine is actual reality, yours is a belief
Ok. Good for you then.
A 600 dpi A4 sized tablet would be lovely. It would be a lot harder to get to that effective dot pitch with colour displays.
300 dpi should be the entry level.
(The original K&R style had the opening brace on a separate line for functions, but I believe this is due to the original syntax for declaring argument types - if you declare them on separate lines, like variables, a distinct { clearly ends the argument block and starts the function body.)
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/report/Al...
http://www.algol60.org/reports/algol60_rr.pdf
(Although technically this was actually syntax, not just syntax highlighting, since that's how the reference language distinguished between keywords and identically spelled identifiers.)
Response time is a pretty critical metric for me when it comes to coding. I don’t want to have to wait a couple hundred milliseconds to scroll or switch files, so I’m not convinced coding is a great fit for the existing tech. Code isn’t read top to bottom like a novel.
That said, hell yes I want less eye strain when coding. I’m sure we can all relate to that.
I should probably try something radically different again in another different direction soon. There are generally somewhat better options available for semantic highlighting now than there were five or ten years ago.
The current typical resolution for 10–13″ tablets (A4 is about 14.3″) is 1404×1872, which is 2,628,288 pixels. You’re asking for 13× as many pixels, and 3× as an entry level. However you arrange it, it’s going to use a lot more power and probably need more memory and a more powerful CPU/GPU.
Call it 400 dpi? 450, maybe? It doesn’t seem too farfetched to me.
Also, there's a huge difference in bandwidth requirements if the display is monochrome. Consider the framebuffer needed for a conventional 8-bit colour depth display at 5000 by 7000 versus a monochrome, two colour, or a grayscale 16 shade e-ink panel.
24 bit RGB: 105 MB
5 bit grayscale: 21.875 MB
2 bit: 8.75 MB
mono: 4.375 MB
Partial screen updates can go much faster than that; reMarkable 2’s total latency from marker to screen update is around 23ms if I recall correctly, and I suspect (without confirmation) that it’s updating the screen at 200Hz, the sample rate of the marker.
In theory, yes, you can go down to 1- or 4-bit colour (and at 600dpi I think going hard monochrome and depending on dithering would be quite acceptable), but in practice software stacks are rather attached to 24-bit and don’t tend to like going below 8-bit. Especially general-purpose stacks—if you build something yourself from the ground up (whatever that means), then sure, you can generally choose your own path. There are certainly paths that make better use of meagre resources, but experience says they’re seldom taken.
I think you’re probably underestimating how much power pushing that many pixels and that much screen bandwidth takes. Such a device is feasible (provided they can manufacture a large enough panel with a tiny enough dot pitch), but not straightforward, and will have some significant tradeoffs. I’m not surprised no one’s trying anything even close to it.
You’re talking about a general purpose monitor attached to a PC. How is bandwidth an issue there? The very same computer can push 120 Hz (or more) to higher res screens than the Dasung. It seems very clear to me that the problem is that the e-ink cells physically can’t react in time to show the next frame. The ghosting means they’re pushing it to the limit. If you’re talking about the controller within the display, well that argument doesn’t track. Controllers capable of pushing pixels that quickly work perfectly fine in conventional LCDs, even power constrained ones like an iPad Pro’s. Why not use those?
E-readers have been monochrome for over 20 years, not to mention every other limited-colour piece of hardware. Has that not been enough time for software to adapt and libraries to mature? To be clear, I’m not dreaming of a device to run X11, Firefox, and Doom (like the PineNote people seem to want). I want self-rewriting paper. Of course I want software tailored to that experience, not something off the shelf.
If I am making any ridiculous requests, it’s 600 dpi screens at that size. I’m sure there are a thousand reasons why that’s a hard engineering problem.
Even high-quality refresh is fast, though there is a prominent transition.
With e-ink, there's a distinct difference between paginated navigation and scroll-based, with pagination being strongly preferred.
For web browsing, I recommend EInkBro, which provides paginated navigation as a default. For any longer-form Web reading, that's my preference. It's superior even to Pocket's exceedingly poorly-considered pagination mode.
The other alternative is to print-to-PDF and display that within an e-book reader. Unfortunately, many websites format poorly in that mode, with text being cut at pagination breaks, or omitted entirely.
That's already as good as a mid-grade laserprinter output, and for text is pretty much entirely sufficient, especially in monochrome.
Other issues still remain: some ghosting (at higher refresh / lower quality), limited greyscale (4--16 shades in most cases), and generally far lower refresh rates than emissive displays (1--8 Hz seems fairly typical). Yes, you can watch monochrome video, if you want. It's in the "sufficient for a general overview", but not high quality.
The place this shows up most especially isn't in video, per se, but on web pages with animations, whether of icons, graphics/charts, or embedded videos. The result is exceedingly distracting at high display quality settings, with a slow, flashing refresh behaviour.
My biggest worry is that they'll fold at some point, leaving all the e-ink patents in the hand of a troll that will hold tech back for 20 years.
But yeah, it was a sad day for me when I learned why e-ink isn't ubiquitous.
Do you have any source?
Here's an example of E-Ink defending their patents [2]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779
[2] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171220005895/en/E-I...
It means that someone probably could make screens now, but they would be lower resolution, slower refresh and have less contrast than your typical Kindle. Probably good for some uses but probably not enough of a volume to bring prices down.
It also means that someone could advance the basic tech in directions that haven't been patented.
They have an extremely limited selection of products, and the ones they do have are priced unreasonably high. They seem to be reluctant to enter into bulk OEM agreements with anyone, and they charge exorbitant license fees for anyone who wants to manufacture displays themselves.
In short, they are considered to be terrible stewards of the technology.
Three of these are designed and made by Chinese companies. Only the PocketBook is designed by a Swiss company.
Why has the West lost the ability to innovate?
No, creepy adtech from Silicon Valley is not useful innovation.
Might have been a long time the west had real competition, but I personally feel they still have the upper hand in the innovation sector.
Maybe not in the future, who knows.
A lot of example from China I'm seeing are good looking and impressing demo (Xiaomi Alpha Mix) but are impractical for general consumers.
I think I recall reading that they were delayed into 2022, but I haven't heard anything about them recently.
1: https://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper/e-ink-plans-on-adding-a...
How E Ink Failed to Bring Their Product to Consumers
I wish I knew how to take that output (a really annoying table format) and process it into an outline, though. That would be a real game-changer for me!
E-ink tech is great, but patents and other paper-limitations are slowing down developments of cheap e-ink devices devices, and e-ink will become "great again", when patents expire.
I personally see many, many usecases of e-ink all around me, but the prices are way too high for anything that is not either really small or a repurposed old existing device (eg. jailbroken kindle)
I'm still waiting.
This is the panel you'll find in the Dasung and Mira monitors: https://shopkits.eink.com/product/25-3%cb%9d-spectra-3100-ep...
New devices are available for < $200.
Used or displays are in the $50--$100 range, quite possibly less.
Pricing depends on size, resolution, greyscale ranges (1--16 bits, 4 is common for many smaller isplays), and refresh rates.
I was expecting 2022 to have $10 e-ink displays I could use to replace the 2x16 and 4x16 LCD screens in my Arduino projects.
But nope, anything over 2" is tens of dollars still - as it was 10 years ago.
https://www.amazon.com/Ingcool-4-2inch-Display-Module-Resolu...
https://www.amazon.com/waveshare-7-5inch-HAT-Raspberry-Consu...
For a 4x16 LCD, the 2" displays are probably most comparable, and are in the same price-range as the equivalent LCD (about $8--$12).
https://www.amazon.com/HiLetgo-Backlight-Display-Arduino-MEG...
2" e-ink multi-colour displays with far higher resolution ... are about $20.
https://www.amazon.com/2-13inch-HAT-Raspberry-Three-Color-In...
I'm no fan of E-ink's patent monopoly, but you're being ever so slightly disingenous / unreasonable here.
I would be in DIY heaven, if one could buy such foil by the meter, for a sensible price. Just imagine, what kind of displays for DIY devices one could accomplish!
Source: Own an Onyx BOOX Max Lumi and use it in this mode frequently.
This isn't an essential technology - it's a nice addition to our display options. There's every reason to believe that new tech has actual new costs associated with it and that inventions might require elevated rates to make developing new tech economical. I don't like everything about patents - but they give companies a premium for new tech and the companies reveal how to make the tech in return.
It seems to me that if we eliminated patents w/o a new system, investing in technology would simply have a lower rate of return, and so it would happen less. I actually think that's ok - but I think people who bemoan the legal exclusivity that companies say enables them to invest in research should consider how much longer they would wait for the tech they like.
By them owning the patents to e-ink, others that might contribute and advance the technology are blocked out all together.
To me, it's reasonable to simply cut the tech patent timeframe. Rather than 20 years, what if we moved it back to 15, 10, or 5 years?
For the single screen, wouldn't the overall effect be mostly the same?
The killer for me is mostly the size. As a portable I guess it's fine, but not what I want to use for full workdays.
As neat as it sounded, I don't think it was very useful.
Once you're use to your custom keyboard layers, you don't really look down at the keyboard.
I can imagine a few people on here interested in such a device for calendar, home automation, surf updates, whatever. Or does it already exist?
In artificial light a lot depends on the specifics of the environment. Trying one out in warmer light, somewhat indirectly (light overhead, screen partly vertical for reading) it was a little dark, and needed the backlight. It was a cool backlight, so the warm overhead light combined with it to counteract a bit of the shift toward blue. In the dark w/o external light, the cool backlight very much shifted color towards blue.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pW6QZ0TMgIU/T5t2xpQjrfI/AAAAAAAAAM...
So that's a big no on e-ink displays unless they manage get them to 60Hz+ somehow
The display is absolutely stable with no flicker while you’re reading as there is no refresh. If you trigger a page change the page redraws the new image in a fraction of a second. It looks a bit like a fast cross-fade. If you are updating smaller regions of the screen it is fast enough not to notice. Scrolling would still be a problem as that requires a much faster refresh rate. Such fast refresh would eliminate one of the major benefits of e-ink which is the low power. If you were to refresh e-ink at 30-60Hz it would likely use as much or more power than an LCD.
The trade-off is of pixel ghosting vs. flash. The more frequently the screen is fully refreshed, the less ghosting.
In practice, I tend to set this value to about 20 refreshes for reading texts, and will frequently manually refresh the display when reading Web content in a browser where scrolling is more prevalent.
For monospace (terminal) displays, the fact that each character tends to update in the same screen cell makes the ghosting issue less significant and noticeable. What happens is that the background gets somewhat greyer as text is read or scrolled, but there isn't the effect of strong imprints under the text as with graphic or typeset content. A refresh largely has the effect of brightening the background.
Noticeable, yes. Annoying? Largely not.
Monochrome. It has "turbo refresh tech" but unclear what that really means; with e-readers, similar verbiage just means it's less bad. The resolution and pixel density is very nice. The prices would have to come down by at least a factor of 3 though, IMO. I'd take the under.
Actually if they're pigments... we're looking forward for CMYK. That's 4 separate pigments stuffed thrice into a pixel, that need to rotate separately! Possible? Difficult.
I suppose with intensive R&D they might figure out how to have acceptable refresh and saturation at competitive resolution, but absent a really big shift in how people view emissive displays, I think they will always be niche.
By acceptable, I mean: can I watch a movie on it and it not feel like a flipbook or slideshow; can I game on it. The article talks about how (at least initially) the pigment transition typically took less than half a second. Is this similar to the response time on an LCD? Those are typically 5ms or less now, roughly 100x faster.
500ms = half a second.
"Less than half a second" is probably something like 450 ms, based on my assumption that if it was closer to 1/3 or 1/4s they would have said that instead.
Film is traditionally 24 frames/second, or about 41.6ms/frame. A lot of animation is "on twos", which means one drawing is exposed twice for an effective frame rate of 12 fps, 83.3ms/frame. Which is very close to the minimum frame rate; my experience as a former animator is that things start to break down into fast slideshow instead of a moving image around 10 fps.
(Video is faster, about 50 or 60 fields a second for PAL and NTSC; your computer may have a higher refresh rate. I'm mostly concerned with the minimum viable speeds for "this is a moving image" here.)
If you chase the links near the end there is a review of one of the devices using the first version of their technology; full-screen refreshes are the usual very visible flash of white-black-new page to reset every pixel.
Another thing I pulled from the article that I forgot earlier - they talked about their current-gen color E-Ink being able to represent 50k colors. Not quite a 16 bit color palette. We're getting to where LCDs commonly advertise support for a billion colors (10 bit panels). They have a long way to go before people will consider the color reproduction acceptable for general use.
If and when E-Ink gets to the point where color LCDs are today, we're probably going to be able to make "8K" high-refresh microled or self-emissive quantum dot displays. The reflective low-power nature of E-Ink will always have a place IMO but it's just hard to see people in volume valuing that over the speed, resolution, and color reproduction of a contemporary emissive display.
I would be pretty happy with an e-ink display that's about as reflective as nice ink on glossy paper even if it's not 300dpi, I've been waiting to be able to sit out in the sun and work without my screen's light having to try to overpower the sun for a long time.
“BMW’s color-changing concept vehicle” https://news.yahoo.com/bmw-color-changing-concept-vehicle-16...
I've described e-ink this way:
- Persistence is free. Once set, the display will show that content indefinitely without power.
- Pixels are cheap. Display resolutions are in the 200--300 DPI range (effectively competitive with laserprint), and could be pushed higher at a cost. Line-art and halftone images render beautifully. Gradient-shaded images are limited by greyscale ranges (1--16), and require dithering for best effect.
- Paints are expensive. Both in terms of energy, it's changing the display which costs. These costs are fairly modest, though for mobile devices that's a concern.
- Refreshes are slow. And dependent on display quality: higher quality -> slower refresh. Rates tend to be 1--16Hz for most present devices. Screen animations and even video are possible, though generally strongly discouraged.
- Colour is limited, often nonexistent. Most devices are monochrome with limited greyscale ranges (as noted above). Where colour does exist, it is low-saturation and low-fidelity --- useful for distinguishing elements, but not a faithful high-saturation reproduction. Any graphic design dependent on colour will tend to fail badly on e-ink. Foreground/background contrast is also somewhat limited --- constrained more in the dark "white" value than the by a lighter "black".
- Pagination is strongly preferred to scroll for navigation. Changing the entire screen at once is both faster and much less confusing than scrolling with many repeat updates.
- Display is reflective rather than emissive. On-device lighting is possible, but best effects are with external illumination. Devices perform far better under bright and full sunlight than emissive technology. This is in fact their preferred use mode. This affects both where devices are used and usable (generally increasing options), and the specific qualities of typographic and graphic designs.
These are ultimately properites of the medium, and both designers and users should work with them.
For text and data use, with limited animations, and limited lo-fidelity use of colour, e-ink is very well suited. Large-ish displays (up to 13" and larger) can be hand-held, or fit to a stand rather than permanently mounted on a desk. They're available as external displays for desktop and laptop computers. Power draw is quite low. Outdoor use is excellent. Use as incidental informational displays is also well-suited, e.g., news and weather wall-mount, information, messages, or notifications.
As tools for image, video, or video-based gaming, e-ink is far less suitable.
Back in the day, a frequent refrain of Linux enthusiasts was "Linux is not Windows" --- the two operating systems have different capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses.
In the same vein, e-ink is not emissive. There are strengths and weaknesses. Attempting to use e-ink for tasks to which it is poorly suited will end badly. On the other hand, it has capabilities which emissive displays cannot hope to match. Play to its strengths.
The displays will last and function for years. Long enough that other components are generally long obsolete.
E ink readers will fail later because of a very low refresh rate, but as a screen monitor it may be a poor match.
Pixel-Qi full sun display mode may be a better match for what most want.
For anything networked, not having access to the latest and greatest ciphers, or CA certificates, eventually causes problems. It's possible that mobile formats won't be supported. And a decade or so out, what was once a generous provisioning of storage and memory will frequently come to seem small. Android-based devices such as the Onyx BOOX line probably won't be able to get newer OS updates even if the vendor was willing to support them as Android itself seems to have a moving hardware baseline (I'm typing this on ... an older Android device).
That said, the displays themselves should still function, yes.