51–60 of 160 posts
$1000 for the screen. These E-ink patents can’t expire soon enough.
Has anybody tried to retrofit a transflector into a laptop LCD screen? I've got no idea if this is even possible but I'd love to be able to just trigger a brightness=0 and see a smartwatch-type display that doesn't strain my eyes.
Sadly doesn’t look like the spin off company producing the displays went anywhere :(
$1000 for the screen. These E-ink patents can’t expire soon enough.
When does the patent actually end? I see it noted here that the invention was 1997 and a typical patent is 20 years? What's the missing variable? (I know nothing about patents nor e-ink besides my paperwhite)
I'll paste what I last commented about this because I'm already giving up trying to get any form of sane discussion on it.
" As I have stated, I was looking for evidence or proof for OP's claim about patents and did not find it, nor does OP appear to be able or willing to back up his/her claim. My opinion is that display pricing is driven primarily by volume, and secondarily by a lot of other rapidly fluctuating variables related to ITO/TFT manufacturing costs. I'm sure patents has some effect on the industry, but most likely negligible as I've never heard companies being impacted by it. At least not in my corner of the industry.
To be frank, I believe OP's claim about patents is wrong and is just some kind of worldview that for some reason has caught on recently in HN and is getting repeated without being challenged.
The simplest evidence I can give that volume is the main driver of pricing is to compare EPD 6" matrix display pricing between 2007 where it was 100x more expensive than it is today. Patents haven't changed. Volume has. That was driven by large scale buyers like Sony, Amazon, and others.
"
Hey folks, I've recently had the idea of building an e-ink laptop from the devices I had at home. I decided to document the process and share each step of the way: Some of the posts planned for the series are: Dasung Paperlike HD-FT teardown, Thinkpad T480 teardown, Creating the prototype, Installing and configuring NixOS, M-x e-ink-laptop-mode If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out.
Ha, this is a good write-up on a very interesting topic I’ve been thinking about a lot myself recently. The setup I’ve been thinking of putting together is similar, except I’ve been wanting to pair an e-ink monitor with something like a Raspberry Pi 400 ( https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-400 ) for a kind of deliberately-slow, ultra-low-wattage dev and writing environment. End result would be extremel…
Thank you for your kind words! The Raspberry Pi 400 is a fantastic computer, and I came close to purchasing one and using it for this project. Sadly, the classic style keyboard of a Thinkpad and a trackpoint won. I love your idea for creating "a deliberately-slow, ultra-low-wattage dev and writing environment." Keep me posted on it! It sounds like it would rock!
$1000 for the screen. These E-ink patents can’t expire soon enough.
The PixelQi display spun from the OLPC project was really good and clearly affordable, considering the original target market. Granted, E-ink is superior in many aspects, but I'd settle for a sunlight readable, low power monochrome LCD display. As an added benefit it updates much faster than E-ink.
I am curious if you work in the display industry. Do you know what the pricing for PQi displays actually was? Did you actually use a PixelQi display on a daily basis yourself? To be clear, I'm not attempting to be negative, but I actually work in the display industry and found the PixelQi display on the OLPC-XO-1 to be unusable. My perception of the display was one with very low quality color with backlight; and terrible viewing angle and unreadable contrast levels in bright sunlight. It also had low resolution. The XO-1 display I had access to had lots of pixel defects. If I am not mistaken (as I do not know actual pricing that Quanta got for the PixelQi displays) they were more expensive than LCDs and required additional parts that made managing their supply chain overall difficult. Most experts in my industry that I talked to expressed the opinion that it was a reality-distortion field type charismatic executive who managed to convince people at OLPC to try that idea. It was funded by UN and money from developing countries budgets who were excited by the promise of being able to educate their masses. Sadly it looks as if those countries were taken for a ride, rather than benefiting from a genuinely merit based idea.
So I am very interested to hear what details you will share to back up the "really good" and "clearly affordable" parts of your claim. If your claim is true then it would suggest that my whole industry ought to abandon our current design and architectural roadmaps and switch to Jepsen's design! :-D I say that in a humourous context because last I heard in 2019 Jepsen abandoned badmouthing the entire display industry and switched to talking about telepathy and VR.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The truth is that most real consumers (as apposed to us technologists) don't want e-ink technology. It is monochrome, can't do video, limited interactive due to refresh rate and ghosting... the only real thing it has going for it is low power usage. And that pairs well with applications where you spend a long time staring at the screen, and periodically initiating a compute burst to change the screen contents. In oth…
Power consumption is not the only thing going for e-ink. The major win for e-ink IMO is readability in direct sunlight. If it's a nice day outside I have to stay indoors (or at least in shade) in order to do work. The only reason is that I can't see my display well. As noted, we already have e-ink phones that can do both colour and video[1], while there is some ghosting it's getting to the point of usable. Just need…
https://www.engadget.com/lenovo-thinkbook-plus-gen-2-i-e-ink...
$1000 for the screen. These E-ink patents can’t expire soon enough.
What's next, people will continue to repeat this bullshit while citing this article as source? Will we go full circle?