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Ask HN: Has any progress been made on large format E-ink displays?

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Re: Ask HN: Has any progress been made on large format E-ink displays?

#91

Post by Godel_unicode »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #79
lolryan wrote: post #54

The technology is there, but E Ink (the company) is steadfastly refusing to lower prices because they believe there's a market for this. Now go to Alibaba and find that you can get a flexible, full-color OLED sheet for the same price as a given size E Ink panel. Go on eBay and buy an older NOOK device (they all ran Android) for $20, tape it to your wall, and point at your web page of choice.

A great example of patents strangling innovation. If anyone has more concrete details on the way this company is holding back this technology I’d love to read details. Thanks!

The pertinent patents were filed in '96, so it's almost certainly not that?

Re: Ask HN: Has any progress been made on large format E-ink displays?

#92

Post by riqbal »

agys wrote: post #89

In Shanghai they are used as timetables at bus stops. Almost A2 size in some stops and smaller ones, about A4 (vertical) at others... The small ones had a clock which updated every minute (windowed mode) while the passenger data updated in longer intervals, probably hourly.

Thank you for the info. I just searched and found this post https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2018/11/15/e-ink-fo...

Re: Ask HN: Has any progress been made on large format E-ink displays?

#93

Post by akiselev »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #91
SequoiaHope wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great example of patents strangling innovation. If anyone has more concrete details on the way this company is holding back this technology I’d love to read details. Thanks!

The pertinent patents were filed in '96, so it's almost certainly not that?

Last I checked there were over a dozen patents from the 1990s to the 2010s that cover everything from manufacturing to software. IIRC the most important patents actually cover some algorithms on the display controller that won't be public domain until the mid to late 2020s.

Re: Ask HN: Has any progress been made on large format E-ink displays?

#94

Post by diffeomorphism »

namibj wrote: post #52
beezle wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remarkable has a premium for the ability to write on the display with tactile feel and response time near identical to ordinary pen/pencil.

The Eink Carta generation (300dpi, 4-bit greyscale) has about 15Hz refresh rate when driven in 1bpp mode (black/white only). Combined with efficient partial refresh, this sounds like it'd not be more than a stylus sensor behind the display (as usual), and some software to properly translate this into partial refreshes. The premium is not really high just from them having to spend particularly much. Either they make v…

> this sounds like it'd not be more than a stylus sensor behind the display (as usual)

And that would be a wrong guess. Eink readers with wacom styluses are not particularly new (e.g. Hanvon, onyx etc.). The remarkable 1's "claim to fame" was a greatly improved latency compared to these, i.e. to be much better than what you describe.

Re: Ask HN: Has any progress been made on large format E-ink displays?

#95

Post by totetsu »

keanzu wrote: post #57

A Canvas Made of Pixels (claybavor.com) The most interesting problem to tackle was “the blue glowing screen problem”. One of the many ways that screens give themselves away as screens is by emitting light that is “out of character” with the surrounding environment. They can be too bright or too dark relative to the things around them, and indoors, displays often seem too blue. I solved these problems with what I call…

this digital-skylight could have renewed interest with people in lockdown. https://www.claybavor.com/blog/digital-skylight

Re: Ask HN: Has any progress been made on large format E-ink displays?

#96

Post by agys »

riqbal wrote: post #92
agys wrote: post #89

In Shanghai they are used as timetables at bus stops. Almost A2 size in some stops and smaller ones, about A4 (vertical) at others... The small ones had a clock which updated every minute (windowed mode) while the passenger data updated in longer intervals, probably hourly.

Thank you for the info. I just searched and found this post https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2018/11/15/e-ink-fo...

Yes. That's the bigger one!

It's strange that the list of buses is sorted by bus number and not by time…

Also: finally a display where advertisement is probably not so attractive.

Re: Ask HN: Has any progress been made on large format E-ink displays?

#97

Post by robocat »

I suspect you would be interested in this:

https://hackaday.com/2016/01/19/a-digital-canvas-thats-hard-...

It matches the LCD lighting to the ambient light, so that it doesn’t have that “glowing screen” look, but instead looks like a flat picture.

Something else irrelevant to your question, but trés cool: https://hackaday.com/2019/08/17/great-artificial-daylight-vi...

Re: Ask HN: Has any progress been made on large format E-ink displays?

#98

Post by amenod »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #79
lolryan wrote: post #54

The technology is there, but E Ink (the company) is steadfastly refusing to lower prices because they believe there's a market for this. Now go to Alibaba and find that you can get a flexible, full-color OLED sheet for the same price as a given size E Ink panel. Go on eBay and buy an older NOOK device (they all ran Android) for $20, tape it to your wall, and point at your web page of choice.

A great example of patents strangling innovation. If anyone has more concrete details on the way this company is holding back this technology I’d love to read details. Thanks!

The irony is that they are probably limiting their profit too. With lower prices the number of applications would skyrocket and they would get much bigger income.

The only reason I can think of is that scaling the production would be difficult for some reason?

Re: Ask HN: Has any progress been made on large format E-ink displays?

#99

Post by TaylorAlexander »

okatzzz2 wrote: post #84
SequoiaHope wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great example of patents strangling innovation. If anyone has more concrete details on the way this company is holding back this technology I’d love to read details. Thanks!

What makes you think it’s to do with patents? Maybe there’s just insufficient demand.

I am responding to a parent comment that suggested there was more demand but the company was holding it back. If that is true the only way one company could hold it back is patents.

Re: Ask HN: Has any progress been made on large format E-ink displays?

#100

Post by dingaling »

lostgame wrote: post #76
nitrogen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like a very large e-ink display for artwork, signage, and metrics. It doesn't have to refresh more than once every several seconds.

Then you are a niche case. In order to forward a new technology, the masses need to adapt it. Apple, for instance, had to upscale the manufacture of Retina displays by starting with a proven successful product - then moving it to the iPad, then moving it to MacBooks. We had e-book readers for e-ink, but they stayed at a super slow refresh rate. There was no reason to create a tablet sized e-ink display until the ReMa…

>There was no reason to create a tablet sized e-ink display

Of course there was; large-format publications like newspapers, magazines and technical documents. All requiring large display area and not needing fast refresh. But yet, all ignored by the manufacturers and so LCD tablets became the default for those despite their drawbacks.

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