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How E Ink developed full-color e-paper

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

#161
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…

> Every time an E Ink article is posted the patent defeatism is inevitable Here, we go again. I've only read that here (repeatedly!) on HN and blogs that then cited throwaway HN posts which never respond to my requests for at least some verifiable evidence. Have a look through my comment history. > that wouldn’t fall within the scope of E Ink’s defensible moat, or, if their parents are simply so broad what moat? plea…

What kind of evidence are you looking for?

History of full of example of patents slowing the deployment to technology, the latest clear example is 3d Printing which really only became affordable to the home user, and abel to be hackable by people doing novel things with it after the patents expired

I would assume the same thing would happen with eink

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

#162
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've been wondering for a while whether syntax highlighting had a role in certain code style changes. Like the one where open curly brackets were placed at the start of a new line but nowadays are just appended to the end. Without syntax highlighting the older style seems to make more sense as it makes scope delimiters more visible without using colors.

Putting braces on the same line is the K&R style, which predates Allman style with braces on separate lines.

(The original K&R style had the opening brace on a separate line for functions, but I believe this is due to the original syntax for declaring argument types - if you declare them on separate lines, like variables, a distinct { clearly ends the argument block and starts the function body.)

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

#163

>These include the Guoyue Smartbook V5 Color, the HiSense A5C Color Smartphone, the Onyx Boox Poke 2 Color, and the PocketBook Color. Three of these are designed and made by Chinese companies. Only the PocketBook is designed by a Swiss company. Why has the West lost the ability to innovate? No, creepy adtech from Silicon Valley is not useful innovation.

AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia and Apple are all American companies that are innovating in the CPU and GPU market designed in the US. Except maybe Samsung with their Exynos chip, who has better innovation in this sphere?

Might have been a long time the west had real competition, but I personally feel they still have the upper hand in the innovation sector.

Maybe not in the future, who knows.

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

#164

>These include the Guoyue Smartbook V5 Color, the HiSense A5C Color Smartphone, the Onyx Boox Poke 2 Color, and the PocketBook Color. Three of these are designed and made by Chinese companies. Only the PocketBook is designed by a Swiss company. Why has the West lost the ability to innovate? No, creepy adtech from Silicon Valley is not useful innovation.

AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia and Apple are all American companies that are innovating in the CPU and GPU market designed in the US. Except maybe Samsung with their Exynos chip, who has better innovation in this sphere? Might have been a long time the west had real competition, but I personally feel they still have the upper hand in the innovation sector. Maybe not in the future, who knows.

I think GP’s point was about revolutionary vs evolutionary tech.

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

#165

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.

Why eInk though rather than OLED? Given that keyboards usually come with a backlight these days, why make an effort to be purely reflective?

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

#166
post #9

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

https://dasung-tech.myshopify.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink... Monochrome. It has "turbo refresh tech" but unclear what that really means; with e-readers, similar verbiage just means it's less bad. The resolution and pixel density is very nice. The prices would have to come down by at least a factor of 3 though, IMO. I'd take the under.

I have a different Dasung product with fast refresh, and it is fast enough to play videos. However, the power consumption in this mode is substantial - much more than the equivalent-sized LCD would use.

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't at least Moderna and maybe others publicly state they would not litigate any patents related to covid vaccines for the duration of the pandemic? Or am I completely misremembering this?

Lots of things have been said - and I vaguely remember something too, but also a dispute that US pushing for relaxing of the patents and the EU not, because Moderna is german based .. in any case it is not so easy, as it is not just about the vaccines, but for the production of the vaccines to set up, you need to licence or buy a lot of other stuff ... which is why my joke was obviously a oversimplification.

>because Moderna is german based

Moderna is US based

https://enwikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna

We're you maybe thinking of BioNTech? (Makers of corminanty vaccine aka BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine against Covid)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioNTech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-...

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia and Apple are all American companies that are innovating in the CPU and GPU market designed in the US. Except maybe Samsung with their Exynos chip, who has better innovation in this sphere? Might have been a long time the west had real competition, but I personally feel they still have the upper hand in the innovation sector. Maybe not in the future, who knows.

I think GP’s point was about revolutionary vs evolutionary tech.

Right. Oculus Rift has been developed in the US, and seeing all the companies that have followed the trend of VR (Valve, Sony, HTC, HP), I guess this could be an example of a revolutionary tech. Tesla while not revolutionary (electric vehicles as an idea and some demo has been around for a long time) has been the first to democratized the vehicle to the masses. Now every car makers are making an electric model. That's revolutionary.

A lot of example from China I'm seeing are good looking and impressing demo (Xiaomi Alpha Mix) but are impractical for general consumers.

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

#169

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…

Having no official play store also means you aren't getting the silent security updates today are a critical aspect of Android security. I wonder why they have avoided Android certification. It is the only thing holding me back at this point.

No eInk tablet has Android certification. As far as I understand, one of the issues is that the screen refresh rate is too low to get certified.

It is very easy to set up Google Play on the Onyx Boox tablets. You just press a button in settings, enter your login details, click another button and that's it.

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

#170

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 really enjoy my Onyx Nova 3. It's a fairly novel device. Your comment is a great summary.

Like most, I wanted an ereader for consuming books without an LCD/OLED screen. I liked the idea of a color reader for the syntactic highlighting of code snippets. I further leaned into color once I realized there was a market for Android based ereaders. This means I can more easily treat it as a second phone to browse books, manga, github, HN, Pocket, Medium etc.

As other commenters pointed out, you probably do want to lock down the device and enable Google play store. I have NetGuard installed since it's constantly phoning home to China.

If you are comfortable with the price and understand the limitations (DPI, ghosting, darker screen) then it's a pretty great device.

The pen is great and responsive but it doesn't replace pen/paper. I primarily use the pen to mark up books/PDFs. The native library app it ships with is pretty great and beats out Moon+ Reader and other apps I've tried.

OneNote is particularly great for note taking and worth calling out. However, I can't find myself integrating it into my work flow.

You can set different options to negate ghosting. It's nice to be able to save these options to a specific app.

My biggest wishes would be higher DPI, brighter screen, and a warmlight option.

I'm not optimistic we will see any drastic innovation in the next few years. Kaleido/Plus isn't anything groundbreaking. I do hope that I'm wrong. There's a clear demand for this technology to improve.

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