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

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

#121

Post by acomjean »

IgorPartola wrote: post #21
coder543 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "too expensive". Is $20 really too much? https://www.adafruit.com/product/4687 The larger the display, the more expensive it is, but that's not unusual, and LCDs aren't much different in price until you start to get to really large e-ink panels. (Given the depth of the LCD market, I'm sure you can find unusually cheap panels somewhere... the point remains. The prices aren't that bad these days for e-ink.)

For that size screen, yes. I think roughly $1-3/screen for that size is good. That’s what a small OLED screen will run you at any kind of volume. For $20 I would want something on the order of 6x8”. For $35 a 20” diagonal panel. Granted you linked to Adafruit which is wonderful for their educational resources and easy to use high quality components, but that’s not where I would source parts for a project unless they…

I think you have a point, that Adafruit isn't trying to sell you the raw screen and compete with component suppliers.

I think of it more as a hobby screen kit. The $20 dollar one is on a custom board that interfaces with adafruits existing kits (Raspberry pi or "StemmaQT interfaces). They even supply "Circuit python" libraries to drive the thing, which is a their value add.

If you were mass manufacturing a screen for your custom board you'd order the part direct, but for a quick hobby project screen its not completely crazy.

Having worked for a company that had custom electronics hardware built with components, certainly we ordered direct from Chinese suppliers, it was much cheaper (with the associated lead times).

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

#122

Post by robocat »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #93
oezi wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is why patent duration should be tied to product lifecycle length. Pharma where you need 10 years to pull off clinical trials could keep 23 years, but consumer hardware where new generation of devices launch within 2 years should be limited to 10 years. Software should likely be limited to 5 years.

Alternatively, make the cost to renew a patent each year increase exponentially, with the base proportional to the worth of the individual/company filing the patent at the time of filing. That ties the duration of a patent directly to how much value it provides to the company over time, which is the rationale for having patents in the first place. A company could only afford to hold onto a patent for as long as it ca…

> That ties the duration of a patent directly to how much value it provides to the company over time

Actually I think that idea causes the opposite of what is wanted.

A high value monopoly patent will stay locked up for a long time, well after the development costs and risk have been paid off. The consumer is paying high economic rent and the product has less supply.

A low value product is where a longer patent makes sense: the patent gives the inventor time to recoup their costs which otherwise wouldn’t happen.

That said, the world runs at a much faster pace, and patent durations should be decreased.

Software patents should be discarded (because society doesn’t get any value from publishing software patents although society pays high costs for the economic monopoly, and because small startups cannot compete with software behemoths). Unlikely to happen becaus software powers have monopoly profits which can pay to influence legislation or regulators. Also the US is capturing monopoly payments from the rest of the world so the US loves software patents (ironically given some of the historic reasons for the US kicking the British in the nads for independence).

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

#123

Post by Groxx »

patothon wrote: post #114
qwerty456127 wrote: post #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.

how do you type with low refresh screen?

Most refresh times that are listed are for "full" refreshes, not specific state-to-state timings, specific color transitions can be MUCH faster. This is how the reMarkable achieves its low latency drawing (around 21ms for white to black), which it can do for the whole screen, not just a sub-section. Other specific shade transitions can also be quick, it depends on the details. But it's more than fast enough for typing purposes, your current keyboard-to-display latency stands a decent chance of being higher.

The tradeoff is that continually doing those faster transitions gradually accumulates errors, i.e. ghosting. Which is why e-readers tend to do a few pages of fast changes, then do a full refresh to clear things out (or before/after an image is shown). Fast-transition latency beyond something like 50-100ms from button-press to page-turn nowadays is almost exclusively due to software on the device, not the screen.

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

#124

Post by jmwilson »

> ACEP achieves a full color gamut, including all eight primary colors

Last I checked there are three primary colors, and what is a full color gamut? There are several standard choices of gamut.

What confuses me about color e-ink products is that it is a reflective display, yet none of them use a reflective color model (CMY) - all of them talk about RGB pigmented subpixels. Either what I learned about color reproduction for print media is wrong, or these devices are probably incapable of showing a large number of colors. Given the washed-out appearance of several photos of real products, I'm leaning toward the latter conclusion. I'd love to see magazine-quality color in a reflective display some day, but they don't seem to be starting from the right fundamentals. Has anyone benchmarked the color reproduction of these products?

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

#125

Post by jbotz »

amelius wrote: post #15

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

Although they don't give a number, they do actually mention refresh time in the penultimate paragraph: "it is rumored that E INK was able to integrate their Regal Waveform controllers in ACEP 2, resulting in faster page refresh speed and no ghosting."

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

#126

Post by TaylorAlexander »

z3t4 wrote: post #67
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There are so many people out there with crazy ideas, but they don't want to invest in it because they know they will be eaten by a bigger fish. Their only hope is to stay under the radar long enough so that they will have enough money to retire once their idea gets copied.

There are also a lot of people who would really like to improve upon existing products but are prevented from doing so due to patents. So patents promote some kinds of innovation while severely restricting other kinds. It may well be true that there is more potential innovation being blocked due to IP restrictions than there is being promoted by IP rights. People seem to take it as a given that the latter outweighs the former, but rarely have I encountered evidence for this claim. The implications of getting this wrong are staggering, and I worry that people rarely critique this idea.

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

#127

Post by TaylorAlexander »

est31 wrote: post #53
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 publis…

First, I would think that research would be more distributed - more smaller investments rather than centralized large developments. Second, I am not just advocating for abolishing intellectual property restrictions but also for promoting a culture of sharing. If we actually care about advancing human society, we should be willing to look at how to truly maximize innovation. It seems to be quite plausible that if we abandon IP restrictions as a notion and embrace sharing while also permitting reverse engineering of those who don't share, we would see a much higher rate of innovation. That has HUGE implications for society and I can't accept the idea that patents are good simply because most people believe it.

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

#128

Post by tra3 »

bmsleight_ wrote: post #96
elaus wrote: post #12

I'm still waiting for widely available and affordable e-ink displays for tinkerers. I'd love to put one onto a Raspberry Pi to show some information, but it's just too expensive right now.

An 2nd Hand Kindle paperwhite is £30. You can us it as a monitor https://barwap.com/projects/okmonitor/

That’s really cool.

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

#129

Post by lightdot »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #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.

reMarkable 2 has pogo pins for the second USB at the left side, and that one supports a keyboard just fine.

Terminal and emacs aren't there out of the box, but can be added.

A really nice and quite hackable writing/reading device...

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

#130

Post by sosuke »

ivegotnoaccount wrote: post #51
sosuke wrote: 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.

I saved the image and cut out everything but the flowers. Then used this online tool https://www.imgonline.com.ua/eng/unique-colors-number.php
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