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How E Ink developed full-color e-paper

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: How E Ink developed full-color e-paper

#41

Post by salamandersauce »

empalms wrote: post #20

Every time an E Ink article is posted the patent defeatism is inevitable. I’m curious if there are other techniques to implement reflective(?) displays being explored that wouldn’t fall within the scope of E Ink’s defensible moat, or, if their parents are simply so broad as to stifle most hopes of accessible solutions and broader consumer/professional adoption. Frankly, I’m quite sick of straining my eyes and circadi…

Yes there is. Sharp has their memory-in-pixel LCDs which are reflective and have less power consumption than traditional LCDs for some tasks. They've been used in stuff like the Pebble watches and the current Garmin Fenix line. I think a few of their denshi note devices have also used them. I don't think they make them in sizes big enough for stuff like monitors though.

Re: How E Ink developed full-color e-paper

#43

Post by emteycz »

Kuinox wrote: post #35
jagger27 wrote: post #29

For most reading and writing tasks I think I’d rather have a a monochrome display with much higher DPI with extremely crisp high contrast edges. I hope that keeps improving too. Colour is something I’m willing to go without for this type of device. Maybe a single highlight colour would be nice to have as long as the red or yellow pigment occupies the same cell as black, not an adjacent one. A 600 dpi A4 sized tablet…

I want color, to read code, I can't give up on syntax highlighting

I found out that text styling (bold, underline, italic, and different fonts) are more than enough.

Re: How E Ink developed full-color e-paper

#44

Post by mannschott »

Kuinox wrote: post #35
jagger27 wrote: post #29

For most reading and writing tasks I think I’d rather have a a monochrome display with much higher DPI with extremely crisp high contrast edges. I hope that keeps improving too. Colour is something I’m willing to go without for this type of device. Maybe a single highlight colour would be nice to have as long as the red or yellow pigment occupies the same cell as black, not an adjacent one. A 600 dpi A4 sized tablet…

I want color, to read code, I can't give up on syntax highlighting

Back in the day™ Think’s Pascal used bold, italics and underlining to do syntax highlighting because the Mac’s screen was black-and-white. It would be a compromise: you can’t encode as much information into the text’s appearance without access to color, but it could be sufficient depending on your requirements.

Re: How E Ink developed full-color e-paper

#45

Post by smasher164 »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #2

This is second hand info, so sorry if it's totally wrong, I'll edit this: E-ink tech is great, but patents and other paper-limitations are slowing down developments of cheap e-ink devices devices, and e-ink will become "great again", when patents expire. I personally see many, many usecases of e-ink all around me, but the prices are way too high for anything that is not either really small or a repurposed old existin…

Yeah, I'd love a mechanical keyboard where each individual keycap was its own E-ink display. This would let you change layouts on the fly and have it reflected on the keys.

Re: How E Ink developed full-color e-paper

#46

Post by solarkraft »

ineedasername wrote: post #38

The article misses a significant device: Onyx Nova 3. The major difference between its prior color offering (poke 2) is the integration of a Wacom layer that makes this very good for note taking. The other hardware and software improvements appear to be incremental. Of particular note with all Onyx readers is that they run Android, opening up the ecosystem of the Play store and particularly your note-taking app of ch…

I have a Boox Nova 2 and can mostly recommend it.

It's true that Onyx violates the GPL and has some privacy concerns around it, but on the upside the bootloader is unlocked by default and you can root the system fairly easily, allowing you to install a firewall restricting some of the phoning home (https://blog.tho.ms/hacks/2021/03/27/hacking-onyx-boox-note-...).

I'm beginning to use it as a general purpose Android tablet. The low refresh rate takes a bit of time to get used to, but I find that it causes you to interact with the device more slowly and carefully at points, which reduces the chance for distractions a bit (it's not that low though, you can actually watch the occasional video, the ghosting isn't actually even that bad).

I don't think the note capability is very good with the default app (I think it's unusable, in fact), but a new mode adds compatibility with OneNote (which I also don't like, but is probably less buggy). It's still a brilliant device for reading using Koreader, browsing the Web using Fennec/EinkBro and taking notes using a pen on GBoard's swipe input functionality. Just mind that the battery doesn't last as ridiculously long as you may be used to with this usage pattern. I get through about a day with fairly heavy usage.

A color display would be a welcome addition, but the gigantic oversight the Nova 3 Color's developers have made is not adding a warm light. It's what I exclusively use on my device.

Re: How E Ink developed full-color e-paper

#47

Post by mmastrac »

E-ink is the coolest tech with the worst business practices. The availability of affordable e-ink tech is just not there. I understand the research-intensive nature of these displays, but the company itself has been holding back the e-ink market by just operating poorly in so many ways.

My biggest worry is that they'll fold at some point, leaving all the e-ink patents in the hand of a troll that will hold tech back for 20 years.

Re: How E Ink developed full-color e-paper

#48

Post by egypturnash »

saxonww wrote: post #28
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E-inks screens don't have to be monochrome. I have one with black, white, and yellow. The hard part is fitting a range of color pigments in the pixel units, so the first e-inks so far have had 2-3. At only three colors, black, white, and one shade makes most sense for information contrast. But nothing says it can't be red, green, and blue... and as the technology miniaturizes, we can fit three in the space of one, ma…

The article details where they're at now. They do have a product using a CMYW scheme, but the refresh and saturation are not good enough. The consumer-acceptable product is a standard monochrome with color filters and a front light, which is better, but has lower resolution. I suppose with intensive R&D they might figure out how to have acceptable refresh and saturation at competitive resolution, but absent a really…

1 ms = 1/1000 of a second.

500ms = half a second.

"Less than half a second" is probably something like 450 ms, based on my assumption that if it was closer to 1/3 or 1/4s they would have said that instead.

Film is traditionally 24 frames/second, or about 41.6ms/frame. A lot of animation is "on twos", which means one drawing is exposed twice for an effective frame rate of 12 fps, 83.3ms/frame. Which is very close to the minimum frame rate; my experience as a former animator is that things start to break down into fast slideshow instead of a moving image around 10 fps.

(Video is faster, about 50 or 60 fields a second for PAL and NTSC; your computer may have a higher refresh rate. I'm mostly concerned with the minimum viable speeds for "this is a moving image" here.)

If you chase the links near the end there is a review of one of the devices using the first version of their technology; full-screen refreshes are the usual very visible flash of white-black-new page to reset every pixel.

Re: How E Ink developed full-color e-paper

#50

Post by sroussey »

kadoban wrote: post #10
jszymborski wrote: post #3

So what's the over-under on E-ink replacing our current computer monitors much like we've come to replace cathode ray tubes.

Basically impossible. They could be great niche monitors, for reading text or viewing mostly static content. At best maybe for kind of general web browsing, but even that is asking a _lot_ of the tech.

Or eInk body for your car
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