A competent company would have pursued the signage market aggressively many years ago and would have had a massive revenue stream from that by now.
E Ink displays have recently started showing up as price tags on grocery shelves, which is promising for the future of low cost, low power displays. I am not sure if these are supplied by Eink or if patents are expiring and competitors are moving into the market.
price tags: https://eink.com/electronic-shelf-label.html
more: https://eink.com/application.html
Are you sure you know EInk/PVI's business better than they do?
Maybe they're more popular elsewhere, but outside of warehouse store price labels I haven't seen the technology.
Certainly not in large format.
Never said that I do, and, yes they are NOW finally starting to pursue the signage / label markets. My point was that they could and should have done so 10 or more years ago.
> They have been a terrible steward of the technology, limiting
> themselves to a tiny fraction of the addressable market (ebook
> readers) while shutting out a vast potential low power display
> market by pricing their panels far too high.
I would pay any reasonable - and even a slightly unreasonable - price for a full E-ink phone, because I am a business user and do not care about consuming media. Likewise for a laptop or desktop screen. Yet they are all but unavailable!
They are still very niche devices, though. Onyx made a similar thing back in 2013, but they never followed up because it didn't sell well.
FWIW, I do have a Kingrow K1, and I like it for what it is, which is a 5" Kindle that can also run the occasional Android app (like, say, OsmAnd or Kiwix). It's an excellent off-the-grid device due to battery life, which is precisely what I got it for. But for business use, I don't see much point - a dedicated business device to me would be something like Cosmo Communicator or Unihertz Titan.
As an engineer my immediate thought was whether they update these on-the-fly with different prices depending on who walks in the door (they don't).
This severely limits dynamic pricing.
I wonder if there are any noticeable economical effects of being able to update prices live on the fly with those price tags, or if it's purely a matter of convenience.
Please share your evidence for this.
I was in a meeting with an eInk marketing person and saw a prototype of this display 2 years ago (the refresh time was hellish, 10-15 seconds IIRC, and their suggested applications suggest the refresh rate hasn't been brought down since then). He was relatively new to the company then, and mentioned that he'd reviewed their CRM contacts going way back, and found, among other things, an inquiry about a small eInk display from (my NDA probably prevents me being too specific) a little silicon valley tech start-up making an IoT wall-mounting thermostat, circa 2012. eInk failed completely to respond to that inquiry at all. What a massive lost opportunity.
I looked at their display range and had an idea for a demonstrator product - which is why we had the meeting, they wanted 3rd parties to help them develop novel applications for eInk displays - so I asked for data sheets on a few of them. I can't remember if we ultimately had to sign an NDA to get the data sheets, or if there was sufficient behind-the-scenes conversation between him and their Taiwanese owners to pull their fucking head in, but 2 weeks just to get data sheets wasn't a good start.
Along with the displays I looked at several of their dev-kits to drive them (before you design your own driver in your own product & get working hardware, so that s/w people can dev code for it before then). They had at least 3 completely different dev-kits for displays in the 1.5 to 4" range. Not only did they have quite different interfaces (signalling, pin-outs, connectors), but all the dev-kits were all based on different microcontroller brands, AND you had to have your own device-programmer for each of those microcontrollers to be able to update the dev-kit's firmware - as recommended by their own instructions before you start work. IOW, they ship dev-kits with outdated firmware, so you have to update them yourself at your own cost.
So I had a follow-up conf-call with this guy & someone new in the tech area and basically gave him the "srslywtf?" conversation about this appalling experience. They were appreciative of the feedback, but I never heard from them again. That marketing guy was in a new job less than a year later.
I found eInk displays from several other sources and moved on, never to bother with eInk Inc again.
The price-tag application has been around a long time now, 5 maybe 10 years, but precious few other applications (San Diego Airport's car-park comes to mind, tho that's ePaper, not eInk (i.e. whole panels, not dot-matrix displays)), but eInk have been completely wrong-headed about how to get eInk to go beyond the near-captive-audience of eBook Readers (which is mostly the Kindle), and the writing was on the wall for that product line to expand way beyond just eInk-based readers a LONG time ago. Sad.
For the single color ones you can get sub-500ms latency for updating, at the cost of extreme ghosting. You need to do a lot of changes to the way you think about graphics to make this a reality. Think of an IRC program for example, normally every one of them scrolls up text from the bottom but this is completely a worst case solution for e-ink. To make it work you have to fill half the screen with text, then add new lines sequentially at the end and only scroll when you've run out of space. Additions can reasonably be done without a full refresh, scrolling text just causes it to mud out.
Seems like a similar dynamic to what these displays offered.
I got to work on one in the mid 80's
No scrolling, and multi-column output made sense.
My understanding is that if you simply turn the brightness on an LCD display down to whatever the ambient brightness is (hold a piece of white paper next to the screen to compare), that there is zero eyestrain over what paper or e-ink would be.
Have you tried that? It feels strange at first -- as if the screen feels "dim" -- but then once you realize the contrast is just fine, you get used to it within minutes.
(And in case you have a problem with glare, just get a matte screen covering, easy peasy.)
I have a feeling that the contrast is also better under dim light, but no evidence, so I might be full of shit. And LED/LCD tech is obviously getting better in this regard.
Still, if there was a good implementation of an E-ink monitor with a refresh rate good enough for text editing, I'd easily drop 10k on it. I spend hours every day writing and reading and my preference for staring at E-ink displays over all other technologies is no contest.
LCDs do not inherently cause eye strain. Specific implementations of any display technology can, but not in general.
Some LCDs have backlights that flicker to reduce motion blur, and some people can be sensitive to this. Most panels do not have this technology. Avoid low-lag 144 Hz gaming displays if you're affected.
Low resolution LCDs can cause eyestrain due to the apparent blurriness of the image making the lens of the eye "hunt" back and forth looking for the ideal focal distance. Simply upgrading to a 4K or better fixes this. It did wonders for me, and now I refuse to use anything else.
People tend to sit at different distances from screens depending on the technology. People sit meters away from their TV, approximately 50-100cm from PC monitors, and within arms-length for handheld displays such as phones or eInk displays. For anyone with vision problems such as myopia, the displays that are held closer tend to cause less strain, but this has nothing to do with the panel technology.
Brighter displays cause the pupil to shrink, which improves the effective focus sharpness for people with astigmatism. There is an actual benefit of eInk displays in that they can be used with high-lux external illumination such as daylight. However, HDR LCD panels can hit an eye-searing 1000 nits sustained, and even the default 300 nits of a good quality panel is more than sufficient to reduce the pupil size to the minimum. Just turn the brightness up and sit in a reasonably well-lit room instead of darkness. The new hotness of dark themes flies in the face of the science of this. My eyes start to hurt within minutes from reading text on a dark background!
Glare from screen coatings also reduces contrast and the glass layer is often 1-2mm closer than the image surface. This can also cause "hunting" of the focus and eye strain. Avoid glossy screens, and clean your monitor regularly to get rid of smudges.
Most of the above is technology-independent. You can simply turn the brightness up on you LCD screen and sit closer or further depending on whether you have myopia or hyperopia.
I once had the pleasure of working with an 8K Dell monitor, and I can tell you from first-hand experience that it's amazing. It's like looking at an animated glossy magazine. Zero eye strain. Unfortunately, it strains the wallet, but the new 8K video "push" might bring some competition and lower prices...
My motivation was being able to work outside and I still plan on using it for that. This reminds me that I should check to see if they have driver updates...
For use in their main computing device, people would like an e-ink display that could reliably pull 30+ FPS while not costing a fortune, and preferably with some color capacity. They don't want a display from Kindle. Until the gap between that and what we have today is closed, the demand signal won't register.
FWIW, there was a huge initial demand back in the Kindle era; the e-reader use case was absolutely perfect for these screens. Nowadays, from what I can tell, the main demand for e-ink is in retail, for cheap electronic price displays. But that doesn't drive the progress of e-ink much, if in any way at all.
Two things I think it's done really well- it has the ability to easily disable the touch screen so you can pass it around and work with it like it's a real piece of paper. Additionally, you can change the refresh rate to your preference, and set it per-app. Higher refresh rates lead to ghosting, but if I turn the refresh rate high enough, I can watch a YouTube video on ePaper (!!!) which is crazy to me.
The one feature I wish existed in every smartphone and tablet yet it exists in none. Perhaps I'm particularly clumsy but the amount of inadvertent interactions I trigger with my devices is infuriating.
It's a bit hacky but kinda works (netflix doesn't like stuff floating over a playing video so you have to set touch lock to lock in 10 secs then press play, there's a sort of knack to it. Also it doesn't lock the power button so sometimes that accidentally gets pressed and I get asked why did it stop? :) )
If there are better options out there I'm all ears!
With the One Mix Yoga 2S it forms my on call tech kit I lug everywhere. I wouldn't use this for full time work but I only need a tiny shoulder bag this way vs carrying the 14" ThinkPad everywhere just because once every half a year we have an emergency...
You can see my loadout at https://imgur.com/a/xmRmYSn
If I am reading reviews correctly it has micro(?) HDMI and a usb-C port. However, the usb port seems to only be for charging/keyboards/data etc., not for display port (next model maybe?).
I wish Movies Anywhere existed for ebooks but there's no way Amazon would go for it. :(
I explain it all in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21041543
I recently deleted my Amazon account and now use the kindle as plain e-reader as far as that is possible (ie buy and load books from other sources).
[0] https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=283371
These various applications sound like static images without fast refresh requirements. I wonder what the refresh rate is like on these.
I'm still waiting with bated breath for a reliable e-ink computer monitor comes out with a decent refresh rate. I'd even be happy with just greyscale.
A few of these, updating them maybe once a day, would be excellent.
The dream of someday coding on a high-resolution decent-refresh-rate color e-paper monitor is still alive!
Dasung's current generation grayscale e-ink monitor comes pretty close, IMO. It even does adequate video playback: https://youtu.be/vnUACe8Bsyg?t=27
Even laptops would probably benefit from it, when you're typing some text or reading a document you don't need 60fps refresh rate (especially if you can only refresh portions of the screen). That might save a significant amount of battery.
CLEARink have a best-of-all-worlds high-refresh rate color e-paper that want to release products around mid 2020.
As of last year they had only just partnered with a manufacturer and had yet to ship actual Dev or Demo kits.
For applications which need fast refresh rates and characteristics like good readability under sunlight, transflexive LCD displays seem to be more popular and economical.
Remember, eink works by physically moving 'ink' particles within each pixel using a magnetic field. It takes a lot of power and time compared to how quickly electronic signals usually propagate, and it seems difficult to get around that physical limitation.
(Even a drawing application could maybe handle it if you could refresh subsections of the display)
Brand like Pixel Qi offer those. They have 3 modes: backlight, reflective, and a combination of both. But to be fair the reflective mode always looks monochrome to me.
Not OP, but I daydream of a big character cell display for console work, especially my development work which is basically vi and a few other tools multiplexed in tmux. Not sure how it’d play out in reality, but in my mind it’s just more pleasant to work with hour over hour.
(It was actually a really neat little thing, I wish I still had it)
One of my main excuses has been the fact color is useful for programming books because you have syntax highlighting. Now I'm realizing reflective color screens may never really come, and it's probably better to devise some kind of software workaround. Some kind of system that would replace colored fonts with a system of very distinctive set of typefaces that work well in B&W.
1 frame / every 25 seconds = 0.04 frames per second
My oldest son is a voracious reader, and I would love to get him on an e reader, but I don't want to go for a traditional screen, so the lack of color e ink type option kinda stops me.
Great for reading PDFs as they're displayed at about real size.
[1] Yes, there is a shell out there that owns the rights but the original effort/team was killed by shooting too high and flaming out.
On the not-so-bright side, the software is not the greatest and it has a few bugs and limitations.
Sadly, Amazon has discontinued it. And newer tablets are probably faster and/or have better resolution. But if you're willing to change its battery once it dies, a second hand one could be what you want.
Here's an archive.org link: http://web.archive.org/web/20200108221349/https://shopkits.e...
https://shopkits.eink.com/product/atelier-with-13-3%cb%9d-ac...
Edit: original site is working now, it's them.
I've always thought more people would choose to work outside if their laptop had a decent e-ink display that performed well in sunlight. Perhaps there'd even be outdoor co-working spaces complete with gardens, fountains, and grassy lawns to sprawl onto.
You can buy it second hand, or with a broken display and replace the display (that's what I did).
..but they haven't shipped anything yet AFAIK. And no idea how electronics/etc is hidden around their demo frames.
- Usually reading seeing what's new in this space every year. Wrote my last comment in https://lobste.rs/s/ahy28r/remarkable_perfect_tablet_for_aca... .
- Taking some of the "developing markets" speech with a grain of "geek heresy" salt. It's out of my domain, but from what I've heard there's been a problem where technology in education has been rushed to as a cost-savings mechanism yet in practice the content / usability issues make the education experience worse.
I use an Amazon Kindle Fire Ow It Burns HD10 for this, because it's at the minimum intersection of suitable hardware and price.
I have to assume that the way that a full color electronic paper display is done would be vastly different than the method that the 3 color displays work. Anyone have any insight into this?
The closest I can find is those picture frames that people have. But to auto update them over the network, they always seem to require the use of some crappy online intermediary. And they're always way more expensive than they should be.
Any ebook that can be hacked to run "regular" android will do the job, since you will need to turn off the auto-sleep settings. I then used the stock browser to show a simple webpage with some small javascript. Benefit of using the stock browser was that sony had implemented partial refresh...so when the subway times update every 10 seconds it doesn't cause a full screen refresh.
Wifi needs to be rock solid, had quite a few problems with my old linksys....no problems since I switched to unifi.
With largeish colour displays, maybe that'll all finally become a reality.
Oof, that brings back a couple of unfond memories of cracked displays in the early ebook reader era. Hope they are able to develop a plastic substrate version.
Eink is a typical case where instead of scaling up, they try to get rich by much too expensive product. This is a maximum stupidity as instead anyone having their product in their home, they will also loose the ebook market over time.
The second option, the technology is just not there yet and they have problems manufacturing it in large quantities.
Not sure about glass though.
I know that there's the Onyx Boox Android thing, but that's only black and white, and technical books are occasionally in color.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/15/apple-has-taken-o...
reading PDFs on a device that doesn't burn out your eyes and can't receive notifications or produce audio is like a digital detox
all my favorite devices recently are low- and no-connection (voice memo, yubikey) and work fast with limited UX
End user products with this display probably are way over 1000 or 2000 USD.