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E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

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Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#111

Post by snaky »

dorfsmay wrote: post #85
zamadatix wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 1,000 dollars you can get a hell of a monitor setup instead.

That wouldn't work outside in bright light, and would send bad blue light though. Been waiting for an e-ink laptop specifically for working with it outside in the sunlight, and in the evening, since blue light is supposed to be really bad for humans at night.

For 1000 USD you can get a Boox Max 2, which is basically full-fledged Android tablet with a great stylus, and which is better as HDMI-capable display too.

"Dasung Paperlike PRO vs Onyx Boox Max2 Pro Extended Monitor" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pw-oCItgx8

Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#112

Post by jokoon »

I wonder if eink would be really useful to make a low powered smartphone. As long as you use software which doesn't burn a lot of power, like email and other stuff which is designed to run with fewer cycles.

At that point I would really care for software with a minimum amount of non fancy feature that doubles or triple battery life. If you make extensive use of text, and don't use high resolution image or set low limits, there are surely ways to make a more durable device.

Cheap androids are awesome, but I have no idea why they're becoming slow as they age, and I'm sure software is always to blame. I really crave minimalist designs when it comes to hardware and software.

Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#113

Post by Animats »

tlb wrote: post #90
userbinator wrote: post #3

Is it really "closely guarded", or "worst guarded"? Anyone with a logic analyser and a few hours can probably figure it out easily enough... and some have even gone beyond what the official controllers can do: https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calendar/... (previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284 ) More research from others: http://essentialscrap.com/eink/ https://news.y…

You can measure samples of the waveform, but the tricky part is how the waveform changes with temperature and aging of the e-ink panel to produce minimal ghosting under all conditions.

That's a good machine learning problem. Point a camera at the thing as you change conditions and the waveform and let hill-climbing do the tuning for you.

Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#114

Post by 1ris »

lozaning wrote: post #102
amelius wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it would be quite stupid to guard the secret and not patent it. So the title of the article doesn't make much sense.

There is a reason that Coke hasnt patented the Coke formula.

You can patent ideas. Parameter sets are not ideas.

Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#115

Post by kosievdmerwe »

antt wrote: post #82
wingspar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s done all the time. Called a trade secret. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret

A trade secret that can be reverse engineered by a tinkerer with an oscilloscope in an afternoon. This is more or less the type of situation patents were invented for: a simple invention anyone can copy once it's invented, but difficult (I assume) to invent in the first place.

Or expensive to invent.

It's why I don't like most software patents, but why I think codecs, especially the modern ones, should be patentable. They're complicated engineering challenges requiring you to make numerous tradeoffs and I feel that just because the result is an algorithm doesn't mean that it shouldn't be patentable.

Other software patents I'm more dubious of, but I feel comfortable saying H.264 should be patentable.

Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#116

Post by gh02t »

jokoon wrote: post #112

I wonder if eink would be really useful to make a low powered smartphone. As long as you use software which doesn't burn a lot of power, like email and other stuff which is designed to run with fewer cycles. At that point I would really care for software with a minimum amount of non fancy feature that doubles or triple battery life. If you make extensive use of text, and don't use high resolution image or set low lim…

The display is only part of the story. You could save some battery life with an e-paper display sure, but you still have the CPU and radio grinding away at the battery. The ultra power saving mode on my Samsung phone is a good example, it throttles the CPU, sleeps the radio aggressively, restricts the phone to only running a few basic apps, and turns off most of the OLED display. I can increase battery lifetime by almost a factor of 5 with that on.

An e-paper display would save a bit more, sure, but the type of display isn't the only limitation to a low-power smart phone. You need to design the whole thing to work together to save power; changing one component isn't gonna be enough.

Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#117

Post by romed »

toast0 wrote: post #91
coldtea wrote: post #63

Is E Ink anything more than a marketed technology with no real purpose? One can calibrate the brightness, white balance (e.g. Apple's True Tone), resolution, etc of a regular LCD or OLED display so that the same amount of photons hit your eye (and are more tightly controlled when you move the display around) as with an E Ink display, and get better resolution color, and saturation to boot. Besides the idea that it wa…

Screen persistance with zero power can be a pretty big deal. It's always nice (ish) when my Kindle has the 'your battery is dead' screen on when I go to use it, so I know what's going on even before I try to turn it on. Other than that, it's hard to compare because nobody makes large monochrome lcd displays. Monochrome is actually a feature for the intended use: newspapers and books use a pretty limited amount of col…

Eizo still makes monocrome LCD monitors. They are for medical diagnostic purposes. https://www.eizo.com/products/radiforce/gx550/

Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#119

Post by amelius »

kosievdmerwe wrote: post #115
antt wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A trade secret that can be reverse engineered by a tinkerer with an oscilloscope in an afternoon. This is more or less the type of situation patents were invented for: a simple invention anyone can copy once it's invented, but difficult (I assume) to invent in the first place.

Or expensive to invent. It's why I don't like most software patents, but why I think codecs, especially the modern ones, should be patentable. They're complicated engineering challenges requiring you to make numerous tradeoffs and I feel that just because the result is an algorithm doesn't mean that it shouldn't be patentable. Other software patents I'm more dubious of, but I feel comfortable saying H.264 should be p…

Totally agree. However in many cases, the main technology is invented at universities with public funding. Also, codecs are a means of communication, and I don't think it should be patentable because it can cause problems once everybody settles on a single standard. See the MPEG nightmare, where professional cameras have a license attached to any movie shot with them.

Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#120

Post by gammatrigono »

akvadrako wrote: post #98
akvadrako wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need brightness too. I have both e-ink and MBP screens - both work in the sun.

Just to give some numbers: e-ink has a contrast ratio of about 20:1 with 40% reflectance. A sunny day is 10000 - 30000 nits, giving at least 4000 nits of brightness. The 2018 MPB screen has a 1500:1 contrast ratio and about 500 nits of brightness. So if e-ink is really easier to read in the sun (which I think) then brightness is much more important.

The MPB has those characteristics in the dark.
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