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E Ink has developed a 2nd generation Advanced Color E-Paper

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51–60 of 194 posts

Re: E Ink has developed a 2nd generation Advanced Color E-Paper

#51
post #24

The picture presented has 133134 colors in it from my very rough calculation. That is not at all how the display will look.

How did you get to this result ? (I'm not claiming this is the real look it will have, simply wanted to check the metodology) Simply counting the number of colors in the image does not seem a good idea since even with a real photo, a screen with all pixels outputing the same will not give you a single-color image when captured with a camera. The issue is even worse with e-ink due to their technology.

Re: E Ink has developed a 2nd generation Advanced Color E-Paper

#52
I really want an e-ink (I mean an e-ink-only, not a dual-screen Lenovo ThinkBook) laptop. And I want it monochrome, low-refresh, no-clutter lo-fi. Rich colour, high refresh rates? No, thank you, I appreciate the mental silence classic e-ink devices provide. Just give me a reMarkable with a keyboard, capable to run a terminal and something like Emacs with org-roam.

Re: E Ink has developed a 2nd generation Advanced Color E-Paper

#53
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to innovate when the bigger competitor can just copy you without paying you anything? This current situation is unfortunate, but I think it's an imperfection of the market. If the patent owning company had been a bit less greedy, they could have made far more money with it.

> Why would you want to innovate when the bigger competitor can just copy you without paying you anything? Because they can't begin to copy you until you've released your product to market, so you have profit potential for being the first mover. This happens all the time as only a small percentage of the innovation that occurs actually gets patented. In some cases it would be possible for a big company to take your i…

Sure there is a tiny reward in that you offer something earlier than your competitors, but it might not be enough to offset the investments into the research that made it possible in the first place. Yes, a lot of innovation is not patented, but that's usually the stuff that requires little investments.

Also don't forget the disclosure part of patents. If you want something be protected by patents, you need to publish a description of how you do it. You can't just keep the engineers isolated on an island or whatever. A no patent world would make manufacturers build in even more measures to prevent reverse engineering, engineers sharing secrets, etc.

Re: E Ink has developed a 2nd generation Advanced Color E-Paper

#54
post #4

I've heard people argue that e-ink displays would be in much wider use if the patent-holding company weren't so protective of the technology. So the news I'm waiting to hear is when E-Ink the company decides to loosen up its business practices.

If the patent holding company hadn’t bothered, e-ink would barely exist though.

[deleted]

Re: E Ink has developed a 2nd generation Advanced Color E-Paper

#55
post #4

I've heard people argue that e-ink displays would be in much wider use if the patent-holding company weren't so protective of the technology. So the news I'm waiting to hear is when E-Ink the company decides to loosen up its business practices.

If the patent holding company hadn’t bothered, e-ink would barely exist though.

If they'd been less strict with their patents then lots of other companies would've been able to innovate in the space.

See comments about 3D printer from above in the thread:

> Don’t forget 3D printing that also only really started when patents expired.

> Between 2007-2009, 80+ Stratasys patents expired. Think about this - a single company holding back the world in advancing forward in 3D printing.

Re: E Ink has developed a 2nd generation Advanced Color E-Paper

#56
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the memory pricing?

Here's an article from 2011 doing Moore's Law extrapolation of RAM and disk prices: https://antranik.org/using-moores-law-to-predict-future-memo... RAM, 2011: "A single 8GB stick of RAM is about $80 right now. In 2021, you’d be able to buy a single stick of RAM that contains 64GB for the same price." Disks, 2011: "The price of a 1-terabyte hard drive is $80 now... In 2013, a 2TB drive will be $80. In 2015, a 4TB driv…

I don’t think it’s fair to expect hard drive capacity/$ to grow exponentially forever.

Certainly for consumer hard drives, there’s a cost of getting the drive to the customer (transport, shop rent, employee salaries, etc) which is, at best, fixed.

If manufacturing costs drop to zero, price will approach that fixed cost (plus any markup sellers manage to extract, for example by marketing their drives as better/more hip/etc.)

Re: E Ink has developed a 2nd generation Advanced Color E-Paper

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between 2007-2009, 80+ Stratasys patents expired. Think about this - a single company holding back the world in advancing forward in 3D printing. Orthogonally, ever wondered why memory on your PC is so expensive? Thanks to Micron, Hynix and Samsung triopoly.

But isn’t it those same companies that are the reason that memory isn’t $1000/megabyte?

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say here. Are you implying that they could price gouge even more than they already are and are keeping prices relatively low out of the goodness of their hearts?

Re: E Ink has developed a 2nd generation Advanced Color E-Paper

#59
post #15

Why does every article on e-paper omit the most interesting bit of information? I.e. the refresh time.

Because it’s bad compared to every other digital display. They’re always on the order of seconds , and get even worse the more colors there are. Tri-color displays (red, white, and black) are sometimes up to a dozen seconds or worse. For example, [0] has a refresh time of fifteen seconds ! I’d be surprised if this isn’t an order of magnitude worse than that. [0]: https://www.good-display.com/product/223.html

Bad yes. But that makes improvements even more important!

Especially linked with partial refresh could make this really feasible for stuff with small text updates happening etc.

Re: E Ink has developed a 2nd generation Advanced Color E-Paper

#60
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the memory pricing?

Here's an article from 2011 doing Moore's Law extrapolation of RAM and disk prices: https://antranik.org/using-moores-law-to-predict-future-memo... RAM, 2011: "A single 8GB stick of RAM is about $80 right now. In 2021, you’d be able to buy a single stick of RAM that contains 64GB for the same price." Disks, 2011: "The price of a 1-terabyte hard drive is $80 now... In 2013, a 2TB drive will be $80. In 2015, a 4TB driv…

For the record, it's 2021 and the cheapest 16tb hard drive on pcpartpicker is $335. For $80 you can get a cheap 4tb hard drive.
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