The Rise and Fall of Pixel QI
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The Rise and Fall of Pixel QI
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: The Rise and Fall of Pixel QI
#2Damnit.
This was one technology that just kills me never acheived any market success. I had bought an OLPC through the buy/give program and sent the OLPC to my neice (after I poked around at the device—I was VERY curious about the device).
The part that was truly flooring to me was the screen. It was much faster than e-ink and, for the time, quite high resolution in its grayscale mode.
As I read through this article, it’s like a graveyard of dreams past. Mirasol is another I’d forgotten about that I remember thinking would be ubiquitous.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Pixel QI
#3So this is the first I heard of DPL as a GPL equivalent for hardware but it doesn't appear any commercial manufacturers want to get behind it. How feasible is the usage of this technology from a non-commercial/ hobbyist perspective ? It would seem that manufacturing the displays would obviously require an advanced factory so it is probably not realistically something that people without capital and advanced knowledge could iterate on or improve. On a semi-related note does anyone know how one could retrofit a laptop or even raspberry pi to work with one of the still available pixel qi screens. I figure they are missing the interface to HDMI etc and so I've always been curious how one goes about building that sort of interface. I assume it involves a fair amount of electronics engineering and thus not something that could be easily learned by someone with a background mainly in software but perhaps I just don't know or haven't spent enough time researching this.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Pixel QI
#4Damnit. This was one technology that just kills me never acheived any market success. I had bought an OLPC through the buy/give program and sent the OLPC to my neice (after I poked around at the device—I was VERY curious about the device). The part that was truly flooring to me was the screen. It was much faster than e-ink and, for the time, quite high resolution in its grayscale mode. As I read through this article,…
I also hoped it would bring screens readable in solar light to the market. I still miss it regularly and am always surprised not more people want this!
Re: The Rise and Fall of Pixel QI
#5So this is the first I heard of DPL as a GPL equivalent for hardware but it doesn't appear any commercial manufacturers want to get behind it. How feasible is the usage of this technology from a non-commercial/ hobbyist perspective ? It would seem that manufacturing the displays would obviously require an advanced factory so it is probably not realistically something that people without capital and advanced knowledge…
This reminds me of the questions "back in the day" (2005 and earlier?) before LCD screens becames affordable. Lots of people wanted to know how to repurpose laptop screens as generic monitors when the laptop died.
Unfortunately I think the answer was always "it's complicated, non-standard and not worth it"
Things may have changed since then, I just wanted to share...
Re: The Rise and Fall of Pixel QI
#6The problem is that Amazon has a virtual monopoly on the e-reader market.
If Kindle doesn't adopt a given technology, it won't be commercially viable in the US.
With no competitive market place for e-reader products, consumers buy whatever good enough technology Amazon sells.
There might very well be a high end screen tech that people would pay for, much as how Apple discovered people are willing to pay for higher resolution LCDs on their laptops and smartphones
But without hardware diversity in the e-reader market, that higher price point may never be found, and as such many promising technologies will never have a chance to be further developed and come down in price.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Pixel QI
#7My biggest dream is a big epaper or pixel qi screen to do development on. The bazillion nits is killing my eyes...
Re: The Rise and Fall of Pixel QI
#8I think it was a mistake for them to market it as e-paper because it's clearly not as good as e-ink for the purpose "e-paper" evokes - reading books.
As a daylight-readable LCD it looks like it was great, but I guess not that many people need that.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Pixel QI
#9The problem is that Amazon has a virtual monopoly on the e-reader market. If Kindle doesn't adopt a given technology, it won't be commercially viable in the US. With no competitive market place for e-reader products, consumers buy whatever good enough technology Amazon sells. There might very well be a high end screen tech that people would pay for, much as how Apple discovered people are willing to pay for higher re…
This might be an anecdote, but I am an avid consumer of e-reader-like products, and me not having bought (even though having had researched thoroughly) any pixel QI products has nothing to do with Kindle. I have bought 8 e-readers during the years and none of them were Kindle. In this year it is so easy to do research about any available products, and order any available products, that it is hard to compete only by brand name.
You talk about price point, but Notion Ink was not even that expensive. If you compare it to other options at the time there was some small premium for the new screen, but it didn't even register for me as a factor when choosing what to buy.
The problem as I see it is: 1) Pixel QI has worse parameters (brightness/contrast levels) in the e-ink mode. The existing screens already have problems with brightness. They don't really look like good ink on good paper, the contrast is lower. This one looked (at least in all the marketing materials) like it has even lower brightness, it would be even harder to read from it. This might have been a quirk of bad marketing? Sure, I don't really care. If they can't show me why the screen would be better, how do they expect me to buy it?
If you buy an e-reader, you want the e-ink mode to be superior, not the other way around. That's the reason you buy the device, for e-ink mode. Pixel QI wanted me to buy an e-ink screen, but sacrificing e-ink experience...
1.2) As a consequence of the screen technology, any Pixel QI device would have a much worse battery time than an e-ink, so that's another advantage of an e-reader gone.
2) There is really no need/ no use cases (for the average consumer, but since we are taking big markets, that's what matters) - for the screen that can do both modes, but does the e-reader mode poorly. Do you want to read in poor lighting conditions? There are alreay e-readers with backlit displays or just lamps... Which is better for the eyes anyway, it's not even that comfortable to read from a brightly lit screen in a dark room.
3) Existing e-ink screen can already be used with for example android and other apps. IT doesn't just have to be books. They are monochrome ofcourse, and you have to be a little finicky in certain apps, and you can't watch videos, but aside from that they are actually quite useful. This is the setup I have right now. I can read books, but also use most other static-screen apps like calendar, browser, audiobook etc.
4) (minor one) The original product with this screen (notion ink) went too heavily on new untested software (they made a completely different type of interface, with completely new workflows, which to me looked really questionable in terms of usability at all - and even if they would show up as being useful - I would not trust such a small company, which already undertakes a huge task of delivering the first Pixel QI product, to also simultaneously focus on creating a new type of interface, supporting it, polishing it, etc. It's not an easy task.) Android was already under way back then, I just wanted an android box!
Basically they tried to position themselves as a "standard ereader killer" ("kindle killer"), but the most annoying feature of Kindle is its closed garden of apps and proprietary formats. And what would be the point of Notion Ink if it would be just another closed garden?
Re: The Rise and Fall of Pixel QI
#10My biggest dream is a big epaper or pixel qi screen to do development on. The bazillion nits is killing my eyes...
It sort of exists, if you can manage with some small screen (there is no 22 inch screens like that).
Here is a 13.3 inch e-reader which you can also setup as a secondary screen (HDMI input), and connect to any computer as an extra screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J3oemOfPlk or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCnPMKvXWas So you are getting both a fully-fledged e-reader and an extra screen.