My personal take: E-Ink screens have too many drawbacks for 99% of consumers to be at all interested in them.
Color e-ink has a killer app: Changeable photo display in homes. This is much harder to achieve with alternative technologies (any display emitting light is an immediate no-go for just hanging on your wall). In contrast, e-readers have a significantly smaller advantage over the alternative of just reading on your phone or tablet, yet that seems to have been enough of a market for them to become cheap. And unlike e-readers, where you only really need one per person, there is hardly any limit to the number of displays people would put in their home if they do not emit light, have nice UI, and are cheap.
Seems like the opinion of someone actually in the business of selling large eink panels should count for a lot more than speculation by an outsider.
Visionect sells some eInk signs for showing the status of meeting and conference rooms. I thought that was a clever application -- saves companies from having to run wires and mount a bunch of hardware.
Color photo displays could be cool, but I suspect it'd be hard to compete with the incredibly cheap Google Home and Alexa devices with screens.
Not really. That particular person’s entire business depends on eink being a high margin business product.
That claim doesn't seem to be very reasonable to me. Why would Visionect want eink to be a "high margin business product"? A Visionect panel is not a Veblen good as far as I can understand. Could you share your evidence for why you would think that?
But I can’t really find any other large format e-ink displays with the driving hardware (which can be even pricier than the display), so I’m inclined to believe him.
I agree it's certainly more authoritative than a random person (that's why I said "beyond"), but it's still just one man and we still don't know his incentives well.
People have tried changeable photo displays before, with LCD or whatever. Of course, these require more power, but they are plugged in devices and I'm not convinced non-technical people think about the power consumption of their devices outside of really niche situation where everyone knows they supposed to care (large appliances like washing machines). And, even the best e-ink screen looks kind of washed out when displaying color, right?
Like I'm all in for an E-ink terminal, latency be damned, if someone make a no-fuss one for less than a couple hundred dollars. But I can't imagine wanting an E-ink picture frame over (say) an OLED one (although I guess burn in would be a problem there).
I too would really dig an e-ink terminal. Just needs to do VT-100 sequences and let me run Emacs. But I think it's likely a niche product.
I haven't seen a color e-ink display in person so I can't speak confidently, but the demo videos don't look washed out to me.
Thank you for providing the link. I agree in general with that opinion as well.