Electrochromic nanostructures with high chromaticity and superior brightness

Firstly, no damn heat from the screen. This is my pet peeve. I can't even stand the heat coming from the good old 17 inch LCDs, let alone the giant ones these days.

Secondly, less energy consumption. Well maybe this comes in hand to hand with the first.

And finally, no direct light coming from the monitor, no headaches! I hope everyone has a significant other who looks at them like I'd look at a giant e-ink display.

Kidding! You do make some interesting points re: licensing and patents and such.

I think the complaint I hear leveled, is that there is a patent, and it is licensed, but at exhobrinant cost.

Thus, eink is "too expensive" for true derivative innovation, and even widespread sale.

You might do better to speak to that accusation directly.

In high school economics, we learned of min/max pricing theory.

If you price your widgets at 100 dollars profit per unit, you'll sell 10 of them a year. If you price them at 1 buck per, you'll sell 1000.

But... you'll have additional support costs, returns, other ancillary costs when selling 1000 units compared to 10. So at the 1 profit price point, you need additional staff, larger facilities, more manufacturing capability, etc.

Sometimes, licensing is like this. Fewer units sold, but better profit.

Maybe the eink lads believe the tech can never scale beyond niche, won't take off, so are just milking the market at the highest licensing fees they can get?

Maybe even raw licensing, without per unit sale fees? Thus, higher up front costs, as no confidence i sales numbers? Plus no internal audit costs with licensing, sales, compliance?

Just thoughts on why the high licensing costs, may be true.

isn't the founder of Remarkable an HN user? I am interested to knoww for sure if this is a fact. Is EInk is violating on infringing upon the GPL?

> Basically people are upset (understandably) that they're holding this amazing technology in their hands but are not free to use it to its full potential,

I think my understanding of the technology and its potential is different than what marketing people may be saying. Let me paste what I wrote before about it.

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I work in the display industry. My take is neither will happen. Lets start with B.

> B) Color e-ink displays get good enough for interactive use, movie watching, etc.

There is no commercially sold genuine color e-ink today. Kaleido is a grayscale e-ink with a color filter laminated on top. Kaleido Plus is just the same with a light guide.

E Ink did show off a genuine color display back in 2018 called Advanced Color and marketed as "Gallery". But it would take 30s to display an image and it was 32 colors or 16 colors. Not 16-bit color. I mean only 16 colors. E Ink tried to get the industry to buy in and start making products using this technology but nobody really signed on. They revamped their production to then start producing 7 color panels in much smaller sizes like 5" for signage. I heard that hasn't hit the numbers they needed to even cover their RnD costs. I doubt it will be a commercial success.

When you say "good enough for movie watching", I'll say that'll never ever happen with electrophoresis. You can't violate physics. Either a pigment particle moves slowly and stably or it moves fast and is unstable. You'll never be able to get both. That's why newer technologies by various startups like ClearInk sacrifice the bi-stability in order to get fast video speeds. But look at the market response, the market isn't exactly embracing that either. Venture capitalists aren't exactly eager to fund the billions needed to create new display tech when they could invest in some new internet services startup or AI/ML startup instead.

As for A), these are all emissive technologies. They will by their physics always be distinguishable from paper. As to whether you'll care or not, that is something I can't predict.

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There are quite a number very alike electrochromic display technologies. Google viologen display.