Hacker News Reader

Comment by thimabi | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they did not add color e-ink to the Kindle Scribe. Maybe they thought the price would be prohibitively expensive?

View on HN

Color e-ink (both versions) isn't yet fast enough to be used for writing. Boox and Remarkable had to do a lot of hacky things to make the experiences usable on their color e-ink devices. (Boox currently uses the older color technology, Remarkable uses the newer one.)

That makes sense. Another comment pointed out that even the resolution of colored content (150 ppi) is half that of black-and-white content (300 ppi). Trying to take notes with bad refresh rates and lower resolution would not make for a good experience.

It's only Kaleido that halves the resolution of colored content. The RM Pro is Gallery 3 and offers full-resolution color.

Though, the RM Pro has 229 ppi vs. the 300ppi for the scribe. So for black and white text, the scribe still has a small edge. But it would of course be cool, if the scribe eventually gets color at 300ppi.

In practice the resolution doesn't make a huge difference. (I've got both 300ppi and 207ppi BW e-ink devices and the antialiasing/gamma strategy makes more of a difference than the resolution.)

But a bigger difference is that Gallery 3 uses CMYW pigments; there's no black pigment, rather the microcapsules themselves are tinted black on one end, so the black ultimately ends up a little impure. Also there are only 4 shades of grey for antialiasing rather than 16.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com