E-ink is one of those techs that only advanced when large batches of patents expire. E-ink the company has tied up the tech stack in so many patents, NDA's, and exorbitant prices that no one wants to touch it. E-ink the technology wont go any where for 10-15 years when that next big batch of patents expire. Its just like 3D displays and VR there will be a massive consumer push new batches of patents will be filed progress will grind to a halt as no-one can afford everyone else's patent licensing fees on a unproven market until the next wave expires and better products can be built again repeat
And this is why patent duration should be tied to product lifecycle length. Pharma where you need 10 years to pull off clinical trials could keep 23 years, but consumer hardware where new generation of devices launch within 2 years should be limited to 10 years. Software should likely be limited to 5 years.
Alternatively, make the cost to renew a patent each year increase exponentially, with the base proportional to the worth of the individual/company filing the patent at the time of filing.
That ties the duration of a patent directly to how much value it provides to the company over time, which is the rationale for having patents in the first place. A company could only afford to hold onto a patent for as long as it causes the company’s revenue to grow exponentially. Once the patented technology matures and growth plateaus, keeping the patent would become prohibitively expensive. This would completely eliminate patent trolls and patent squatting/speculative patents.
> That ties the duration of a patent directly to how much value it provides to the company over time
Actually I think that idea causes the opposite of what is wanted.
A high value monopoly patent will stay locked up for a long time, well after the development costs and risk have been paid off. The consumer is paying high economic rent and the product has less supply.
A low value product is where a longer patent makes sense: the patent gives the inventor time to recoup their costs which otherwise wouldn’t happen.
That said, the world runs at a much faster pace, and patent durations should be decreased.
Software patents should be discarded (because society doesn’t get any value from publishing software patents although society pays high costs for the economic monopoly, and because small startups cannot compete with software behemoths). Unlikely to happen becaus software powers have monopoly profits which can pay to influence legislation or regulators. Also the US is capturing monopoly payments from the rest of the world so the US loves software patents (ironically given some of the historic reasons for the US kicking the British in the nads for independence).
It is not the whole point of patents. They at least ostensibly exist as a trade to eventually make the invention enter the public domain. Per Wikipedia:
> In accordance with the original definition of the term "patent", patents are intended to facilitate and encourage disclosure of innovations into the public domain for the common good
The idea is that to avoid companies keeping the details of inventions hidden indefinitely using trade secrets, the embargo period is set up as an incentive to disclose the idea. This is an incredibly important part of the entire social contract of patents. Maintaining a complicated legal apparatus (courts, patent offices, etc.) to defend and enforce these legal monopolies is expensive and is paid through public funds. Thus a public good is expected in return. A system that allows the most important inventions to stay locked up forever seems to go against the spirit of this entirely. Perhaps you think that this has its own merit, but it is certainly not the intended purpose of the patent system.
An exponentially growing annual fee is also a great way to fund public goods.
For example, if you increment the exponent every three years, a $20 initial fee would cost half a billion dollars annually after 20 years. That buys a lot of school supplies.
Getting exponential curves right is very tricky though (just look at Covid). I believe using such escalating fees would just favor the big companies who can stay ahead of the curve.
Another idea I think worth exploring is mandatory licensing at fixed rates which decline over years and/or are tied to revenue the patent holder generates with the patent. The goal really should be to increase utility of the patent for the public.
But it doesn't only apply to large companies. It also applies to small companies. And the point at which the small company will have to stop paying the fee because they can't afford it will be much sooner than the large company. Thus giving an advantage to the large companies.
> Benefits of this proposal outweigh the cons. Average length of patent protection will decrease.
reply
Why not do that in the straightforward way of simply decreasing the patent protection duration? Or as other people have suggestion: make it contingent on the type of thing being patented.
Because different patents might have vastly different value. If someone has invested a billion dollars to develop some new technology, they might want to benefit from it longer than someone who invested $10k. Yet, this scheme still allows the $10k investor to keep protecting his invention in case it's wildly successful.
Would be nice to see increasing annual maintenance fee. 1K for first year 3K for second, 10K for third and so on. After 6 years or so you either make/pay millions of give it up.
Should drastically reduce the amount of junk patents. It it's not worth at least a few million not worth applying.
This would most probably benefit big cooperations more than smaller ones as they can use money to speed up RnD and time to market.
I can think of 1000 ways to make the patent system more fair but also 1001 to game each approach.
It's a tough but to crack.
What perplexes me more is not the patents (since they are public information), but the NDAs. They could've kept the underlying technology and manufacturing process patented, while at the same time selling mass quantities of the displays to everyone who wants to buy some and freely publishing all the information on how to drive them (which actually turns out to be not that difficult.) I bet that would actually get them more profit than the situation today.
That has not stopped the more creative and resourceful individuals, however:
Between 2007-2009, 80+ Stratasys patents expired. Think about this - a single company holding back the world in advancing forward in 3D printing. Orthogonally, ever wondered why memory on your PC is so expensive? Thanks to Micron, Hynix and Samsung triopoly.
I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say here. Are you implying that they could price gouge even more than they already are and are keeping prices relatively low out of the goodness of their hearts?
I think their point is that these companies gave us cheap memory in the first place. Which is an important thing to remember. The distruptors of days past are the monopolists of today. And they themselves will be disrupted one day.
RAM, 2011:
"A single 8GB stick of RAM is about $80 right now. In 2021, you’d be able to buy a single stick of RAM that contains 64GB for the same price."
Disks, 2011:
"The price of a 1-terabyte hard drive is $80 now...
In 2013, a 2TB drive will be $80.
In 2015, a 4TB drive will be $80.
After that the doubling rate may lengthen to 3 years instead of 2 years so..
In 2018, an 8TB drive will be $80. And finally in 2021, for $80, you’d be able to buy a 16 terabyte hard drive"
I don’t think it’s fair to expect hard drive capacity/$ to grow exponentially forever.
Certainly for consumer hard drives, there’s a cost of getting the drive to the customer (transport, shop rent, employee salaries, etc) which is, at best, fixed.
If manufacturing costs drop to zero, price will approach that fixed cost (plus any markup sellers manage to extract, for example by marketing their drives as better/more hip/etc.)
Is applying Moore's law relevant, since the manufacturing process of DRAM is hugely different from the one for usual chips (limited by capacitor size, not transistor one) ?
Same goes for hard drives.
Not saying that price gouging has nothing to do with this, but simply saying "Moore's law was not followed" does in no way imply something interfered with it.
Moore's law was (1) an observation of historical data and (2) never a guarantee by vendors to make higher capacity products at lower prices. The extrapolation is just nonsense wishful thinking.
Just to play devil's advocate, that's the whole purpose of patents, to prevent progress by others.
On the other hand, the gain is that E Ink Corporation decided it was worth investing in developing and commercializing the technology knowing they'd have exclusive rights for 20 years, and quite possible only because of that. If they didn't have that guarantee, it might not have been worth any company developing it in the first place.
Now I'm not familiar with the history of investment in e-ink specifically. But I'm curious if there's anyone here who is: if patent protection wasn't available, would it have been worth it for any company to develop it, knowing it might be copied a year later by a competitor who would then undercut the original inventors (not having to pay for the expensive R&D)?
> Just to play devil's advocate, that's the whole purpose of patents, to prevent progress by others.
Not really. The "societal" purpose of patents is to promote innovation. That's really the yardstick by which most of the conversation around patents needs to be measured - does this help or hinder overall innovation.
There are also moral/philosophical arguments for or against patents, but I think the majority consider the societal impact to be the most important.
The mechanism by which patents achieve this is by giving a temporary monopoly to the inventor. It also requires the inventor to disclose, in detail, how their innovation works ; that's part of the tradeoff - the innovator gets a temporary monopoly, but society benefits by the innovator not hoarding it as a secret. This should actually encourage progress by others, in the long run.
It’s important to remember every laws has trade offs, including patent laws. Perhaps patents stiffened e-ink but OP seems to have issue with patents in general which it would be hard to argue universally prevent innovation.
The purpose of patents is to give innovators a temporary competitive advantage, by forcing competitors to pay royalties for the patent.
The main problem is "temporary", as patents have a flat duration but fields innovate and turn over at different speeds - compare web software to aeronautics/NASA software. The former could potentially he outdated within months, the latter likely won't be used until it's been tested for decades.
So obviously a 30-year patent is potentially paralyzing in webdev, yet might even be too short in space tech!
The problem is there simply isn't any duration that can satisfy both fields.
Meanwhile, often patents don't benefit anyone because they're 1) more trouble than they're worth to actually enforce, and only serve to reinforce the incumbents who don't need them, and 2) are in some cases deliberately written to be meaningless and uncommunicative, which defeats the purpose of open publishing in the first place.
Every law might have upsides, but that doesn't change the fact that patents are fundamentally flawed.
Your response makes me think of the phrase “More Perfect”.
Agreed, patents are flawed. But so is basically every law in the United States. However, laws can change and we have influence on that so rather than chalking the idea of patent law as “fundamentally flawed” let’s look at ways we can tweak the existing system to work better for everyone.
For example, one commenter had an interesting suggestion of increasing the patent fees exponentially over time incentivizing only orgs that are using the technology and disincentivizing trolls long term.
It that tweak perfect? of course not, but rather than viewing it as an all of or nothing game of us vs them let’s keep working together to make it “more perfect”.
Patents have stalled technology in many areas since a long time. The book "Against Intellectual Monopoly" [1] by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine analyze the economical impact of patterns on society. They give some surprising examples, like how the Wright brothers invested heavily in patents and legal actions to stiffle competition instead of continuing development of airplanes.
Firearms industry had this as well. Smith & Wesson for the longest time fought tooth and nail to be the only revolver manufacturer in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
> E-ink is one of those techs that only advanced when large batches of patents expire.
I don't really understand how this is true. If I google, I don't see any evidence that any patent or block of patents is blocking the "tech". Could you specify which specific patent is blocking?
> tied up the tech stack in so many patents, NDA's, and exorbitant prices that no one wants to touch it.
But... you do realize there's lots of startups that enter the bistable display space? eg: ClearInk. https://www.clearinkdisplays.com/ They even use the exact same underlying principle which is electrophoresis.
If you go to any display conference you'll easily see that most of what you're saying comes across as highly inaccurate or even ridiculous.
I checked their website to see what their technology looks like. I wanted to see how their product compare to a eInk screen use in many devices (such as Kindle/Kobo/ReMarkable), as this is the kind of products that interests me. It turns out that all the pictures shows the back of what I expect to be tablets/phone prototypes (or maybe it's just stock photos), and not a single time the screen.
It's almost comical : you advertise for a screen tech, but you carefully avoid to show how such screen looks like. Definitely a red flag.
> It's almost comical : you advertise for a screen tech, but you carefully avoid to show how such screen looks like. Definitely a red flag.
Are you an E Ink employee or something trying to badmouth clearink? Because you can just go to youtube and search clearink and find clear videos of their products from various conferences.
I'm not related to any of those company in any way. I do not work in this field, and to be quite honest, before your comment, I did not even know about ClearLink.
I've highlighted something that makes no sense. Do you expect a car manufacturer not showing one of its cars on its website ? Apple not to how its iPhone ? A SaaS company not showing screen captures of its product ? I don't.
Those images should be easily available without having to browse YouTube, or do a search on google.
FWIW, I would actually welcome any concurrent to eInk and its monopoly. I totally share the point of view of the top comment, as I've seen this tech stagnate for years.
Most of the supposed alternatives 10 years ago(PlasticLogic, Liquavista, Mirasol, etc.) either never produced something relevant, either failed the expectations.
I actually find your comment quite disrespectful: if you want to promote a product, you can do that without having to resort to ad hominem attacks.
Anyway, thanks for the YouTube tip: I was able to see what I wanted to see.
Edit: if some employee of ClearInk see this message, do yourself a favor and update your website with some pictures of your product, or even a embedded Youtube video. It will speak more than stock photos.
I'd love a newsletter that tracked what patents were expiring on any given week. I'm pretty ignorant of what's coming down the pipeline from a legal perspective.
Another example of how IP laws have become an enemy of the goals society had when passing them, which is not to enrich a few corporations but to incentivize innovation, but now it is clear copyright, and patents today are doing far more HARM to innovation than they advance it
As such we as a society need to look hard at those laws and policies to reform them
Sadly the large corporations have a huge amounts of lobby money and are rapidly attempting to get the terrible IP laws codified into complex international treaties to ensure no nation can do any reform at all
I strongly disagree about patents. This is the patent system working as designed. It incentivized a company to invent a new thing, and gave them a monopoly for a reasonable amount of time (20 years). When it ends, others can operate in the space.
I agree about copyright, though. Copyright has been expanded to cover software and even APIs. Copyright is a giant drag on innovation. A single company can tie up a space for life of the author plus 70 years, which is absurd. Copyright should never have applied to most forms of software, which clearly fall into the exceptions of 17 USC § 102(b). But we are where we are.
22 years ago, I had a 8mbps DSL connection, and a significant part of urban Japan already had 100mbps.
On other hand, America had more fibre than any other nation, but its hyperregulated telecom industry only managed to cross 10mbps averages 10-8 years ago.
I think 20 years might be a reasonable amount of time for hardware, which requires a heavy outlay in money to produce and which does not have almost zero cost to replicate, but not for software which can generally be copied for nothing and does not cost much to produce.
Nokia probably had a gajillion GSM patents that they used to make the phone, and a bunch of other companies had to pay them money for many years to build 2g/GSM phones.
Qualcomm and a few other companies have a bunch of patent for 4g tech, so even now (when we're rolling out 5G), it's practically impossible to make a modern...ish modem without giving atleast some money to one of those companies, and 4G is "old tech" already.
One thing that has allowed 4G to expand radily is the fact that those Qualcomm patents are under a FRAND agreement in exchange for them being including in the 4G standard.
FRAND is not with out its own problems, but it is alot better than the situation with eINK or 3-d Printers where there is not FRAND agreement
Clearly it is not, e-Ink, 3d printing, VR, and hosts of other technology has been held back not advanced because of patents
Now that is not to say I would advocate for complete removal of the patent systems but I do think Compulsory FRAND style licensing should be a requirement of obtaining a patent
Your distinction between Copyright and Patent is also strang as the suffer from the same flaw so it seems your only justification is that you believe 20 years is "reasonable" but Life is not
I think both are unreasonable, I would personally like to see both dropped to 10 years, or some compromise where you get 2-3 years exclusive use of the creation then have some kind of compulsory license where the creator is compensated but can not with hold the creation for 20 years (with some kind of scheme that the license be fair and equitable)
Held back might be the tradeoff we have to pay for letting them exist in the first place. Developing new technologies is not cheap or trivial- especially hardware innovations. I'd rather have a delayed 20 year start to fast e ink innovation than have e ink never get the r&d funding needed to get past the valley of death and make it to market in the first place.
These companies didn't make money on patent licenses, they made money on selling the stuff. More money than they should, because they used patents to limit competition.
Patents can be useful as an incentive, but their length need to correspond with the pace of progress in a given field. Otherwise, they end up slowing down everyone.
Other than the false equivalency of your argument, you would also have to prove the technology would not have been completed with out the patent, I think that is a hard conclusion to draw given the amount of other progress we have made with out such consideration (i.e see FOSS )
Once you have proven the need for an exclusivity grant, You also need to prove that 5, 10, 15 years of exclusivity via a patent would be unable provide enough incentive, that it had to be 20 years to strike the proper balance
In today's fast moving society, I think 5 years would provide more than enough incentive even for expensive technology that requires lots of capital investment though I would favor a shorter exclusivity grant, and then may be longer required licensing grant. like 2-3 years of exclusive use, and then 10 years of licensing but the patent holder is required to treat all uses of the patent in the same manner with fair and non-discriminatory pricing.
There is also an issue of maintainability and spare parts. For example, the technology behind how phone screens work is broadly understood, leading to people being able to replace their phone screens if they are broken or no longer working. There is no such thing for Kindle or e-readers more generally, because a lot of this is hidden in patents. so if you're a consumer and want to purchase one, and it breaks somehow you're SOL.
I've heard people argue that e-ink displays would be in much wider use if the patent-holding company weren't so protective of the technology. So the news I'm waiting to hear is when E-Ink the company decides to loosen up its business practices.
not going to happen it s the only thing they have and they know its a cash cow if it gets wide adoption unfortunately they have gotten greedy and no one will pay it.
They also seem to think their market is digital signage and aren't that interested in licensing for other mass market consumer products despite the fact the market it has been adopted most in is e-readers
Is it true that e-readers is the largest market for e-ink?
Supermarkets alone use each thousands of e-ink displays for shelf price labels for example, I wouldn't be surprised if that was a more profitable market than e-readers for e-ink, and also much easier to cater to.
> They also seem to think their market is digital signage
I believe this was because of the limitations of the previous generations. I saw some color e-paper that was super slow to refresh and had terrible ghosting. No one would buy a color e-reader if it takes 15 seconds to turn a page, especially if it costs more than grayscale ereaders due to the 'new technology'.
OTOH, store signage is a use case where refresh and ghosting is relatively unimportant.
This is why I am so against intellectual monopoly like this. It does not create continuous incentive to innovate and instead allows companies with just a bit of innovation to rest on their laurels. I think there would be much more innovation in the world, aka a “higher rate of innovation” without intellectual monopolies and intellectual property restrictions.
Why would you want to innovate when the bigger competitor can just copy you without paying you anything?
This current situation is unfortunate, but I think it's an imperfection of the market. If the patent owning company had been a bit less greedy, they could have made far more money with it.
The whole "innovate" word is just loaded and overblown.
Many software patents written today cover average work done by average engineers to solve average problems in a way that if you asked 100 engineers to solve said problem, the majority of them would could up with exactly the method in the patent.
Software patents are just a truncheon for incumbent companies to wield against other companies unlucky enough to try to enter the same space as patent-holding incumbent.
I agree with you about the software patents. They should go in the places they still exist. My statement was mainly meant about non-software patents. Sometimes a lot of research/experimentation/thought goes into a single patentable invention.
It was developed _by_ professors and students _at_ MIT, who then went on to found the E Ink Corporation (and presumably found an arrangement regarding the IP with MIT). This is the backstory of basically every startup founded out of a university lab.
> Why would you want to innovate when the bigger competitor can just copy you without paying you anything?
Because they can't begin to copy you until you've released your product to market, so you have profit potential for being the first mover.
This happens all the time as only a small percentage of the innovation that occurs actually gets patented.
In some cases it would be possible for a big company to take your innovation out from under you but if they can do a better job then we're all better off for that. If as an inventor you've only got one idea, you're screwed. You need to be able to innovate repeatedly.
But the concise way of responding to this is: markets already reward innovation. We do not need state controls on information to "stimulate innovation". The incentive exists as a natural effect of markets.
Sure there is a tiny reward in that you offer something earlier than your competitors, but it might not be enough to offset the investments into the research that made it possible in the first place. Yes, a lot of innovation is not patented, but that's usually the stuff that requires little investments.
Also don't forget the disclosure part of patents. If you want something be protected by patents, you need to publish a description of how you do it. You can't just keep the engineers isolated on an island or whatever. A no patent world would make manufacturers build in even more measures to prevent reverse engineering, engineers sharing secrets, etc.
First, I would think that research would be more distributed - more smaller investments rather than centralized large developments. Second, I am not just advocating for abolishing intellectual property restrictions but also for promoting a culture of sharing. If we actually care about advancing human society, we should be willing to look at how to truly maximize innovation. It seems to be quite plausible that if we abandon IP restrictions as a notion and embrace sharing while also permitting reverse engineering of those who don't share, we would see a much higher rate of innovation. That has HUGE implications for society and I can't accept the idea that patents are good simply because most people believe it.
There are so many people out there with crazy ideas, but they don't want to invest in it because they know they will be eaten by a bigger fish. Their only hope is to stay under the radar long enough so that they will have enough money to retire once their idea gets copied.
There are also a lot of people who would really like to improve upon existing products but are prevented from doing so due to patents. So patents promote some kinds of innovation while severely restricting other kinds. It may well be true that there is more potential innovation being blocked due to IP restrictions than there is being promoted by IP rights. People seem to take it as a given that the latter outweighs the former, but rarely have I encountered evidence for this claim. The implications of getting this wrong are staggering, and I worry that people rarely critique this idea.
Maybe make it so that the patent royalties are paid by the consumer as patent tax. Then that tax is distributed among all patents in use by that product.
Pre-Pandemic I started seeing them in the re-branded Amazon/Whole Foods Market in Santa Monica. They replaced all the traditional paper price tags with tiny e-ink displays. I assume that this was to reduce the amount of labor necessary to handle price changes and sales.
This seems to be the opposite of what the article says:
>This technology is not going to be employed for digital signage, but instead will be marketed towards e-reader companies who want a high resolution alternative to E INK Kaleido 2.
Yes because the only thing better than a medium sized company that won’t license its patents is a megacorp that won’t license its patents /s
No the solution is to incentivize patent licensing and in the case of software make it simply not patentable. The corporate overlords won’t save us from themselves. If they had their way patents would simply never expire.
Big corp probably isn't as devoted to milking one IP asset to the detriment of its adoption. And they may have the resources to make more products in-house that utilize the tech.
I agree that the patent system needs modification in the long run, though.
Counterpoint: game publishers are more than happy to sit on an IP without releasing a game for years. For example Dune (the board game). Dungeon Keeper. Hexen 3 (Hecatomb). Rune 2. Prey 2.
A megacorp sitting on some patents can and will still release a whole range of mass market products (large volumes, so has to be cheap) that uses those patents and makes it available to the masses. A medium sized company can't really do that, so at best they will release a niche product that makes it available to a few people.
MegaCorp (like say Amazon) would lock the tech up so only their products have it, So instead of being able to pick from a Kindle PaperWhite, OnyxBook, and a Remarkable you would only have the Kindle... and varitions of the Kindle
Medium Corp will license their patent (at extreme rates) to other companies MegaCorp will not.
Medium Corp is better than MegaCorp for consumers most of the time. FRAND licensing even batter, and No Patents at all even better
I really want an e-ink (I mean an e-ink-only, not a dual-screen Lenovo ThinkBook) laptop. And I want it monochrome, low-refresh, no-clutter lo-fi. Rich colour, high refresh rates? No, thank you, I appreciate the mental silence classic e-ink devices provide. Just give me a reMarkable with a keyboard, capable to run a terminal and something like Emacs with org-roam.
That's great but I actually want the keyboard to be an integral part of the chassis rather than a separate thing to carry with me and put on a table. Like in classic laptops or like in Lenovo Yoga. This way I would also be able to type the classic laptop way - putting it on my laps when in public transport.
The closest I can think of is the Hemingwrite typewriter which has an e-ink display and is portable in some sense. At $342, I hope it's more than a toy.
But that's really a typewriter. Which is somehow good if you just want text, not code. And here's the problem: these things belong to consumer segments so narrow that I don't see them getting the attention I'd like.
I think I read a blog a few years ago about someone replacing the display in their laptop with an e-ink monitor but I'm having trouble tracking down the link. This might be of interest however...
Most refresh times that are listed are for "full" refreshes, not specific state-to-state timings, specific color transitions can be MUCH faster. This is how the reMarkable achieves its low latency drawing (around 21ms for white to black), which it can do for the whole screen, not just a sub-section. Other specific shade transitions can also be quick, it depends on the details. But it's more than fast enough for typing purposes, your current keyboard-to-display latency stands a decent chance of being higher.
The tradeoff is that continually doing those faster transitions gradually accumulates errors, i.e. ghosting. Which is why e-readers tend to do a few pages of fast changes, then do a full refresh to clear things out (or before/after an image is shown). Fast-transition latency beyond something like 50-100ms from button-press to page-turn nowadays is almost exclusively due to software on the device, not the screen.
I never tried to actually type, only to enter words letter-by-letter with a stylus (on a PocketBook). Obviously I would prefer it to be fast enough to handle typing but I don't want dynamic visual effects which modern UI/web designers consider a norm and I don't need it to play realtime games or videos.
> They can display a total of 32,000 colors and 200 to 300 PPI, depending on the screen size.
I’m going to guess that’s 15-bit colour (32,768 colours) in the form of RGB channels, 5 bits per channel (32 possible values).
For full colour imagery, I imagine you’d still want dithering to simulate higher bit depths. 300dpi is fine enough that I believe you could make it very subtle indeed, so that you could well have to examine it quite closely to notice.
> It will be able to display over 40,000 different colors
… but then again, maybe it’s not done as RGB data in this way. I have no idea what array of inputs a range of 40,000 would correspond to. I’m not familiar with this sort of hardware.
Each pixel has all eight pigments in it. I'm assuming that is RGB,CMY, Black, and White. It's not clear whether they can mix two or more of those pigments in a single pixel or if they can only switch one fully on and the others off.
It would be nice if they provided some detailed gradient color wheel images on the device.
I very much doubt they’d shrink 65,536 to 40,000, even if some of the values were indistinguishable from others. That’s not how marketing works! If you have a 3×9 gear combination on a bicycle, you call it 27 gears, never mind that a lot of it is overlap and that it’s even possible for some ratios to be identical (e.g. 26:9 and 52:18 is conceivable).
> ACEP achieves a full color gamut, including all eight primary colors
Last I checked there are three primary colors, and what is a full color gamut? There are several standard choices of gamut.
What confuses me about color e-ink products is that it is a reflective display, yet none of them use a reflective color model (CMY) - all of them talk about RGB pigmented subpixels. Either what I learned about color reproduction for print media is wrong, or these devices are probably incapable of showing a large number of colors. Given the washed-out appearance of several photos of real products, I'm leaning toward the latter conclusion. I'd love to see magazine-quality color in a reflective display some day, but they don't seem to be starting from the right fundamentals. Has anyone benchmarked the color reproduction of these products?
In a subtractive colour model you typically have a fourth channel (CMYK) because simply mixing all three primary colours together still reflects too much light to get good contrast.
For E-ink the colours don't actually mix with each other, so some basic maths shows that you would have even worse contrast with only three colours in a subtractive model:
Each ink colour absorbs only a single RGB channel, eg. cyan absorbs red. This means that at each location on the display, 2/3 of the light is reflected even when CMY channels are all at their maximum.
I think E-ink is neither an additive nor a subtractive colour model: it can only produce colours that exist somewhere between the extreme primary colours, ie. it's more of an "interpolating" colour model.
The inks probably come in pairs: black/white, red/cyan, green/magenta, blue/yellow. This gives the expected eight primary colours. For each pair, you would be able to pick any mix, eg. 30% black, 70% white.
For the darkest black you would have 100% black, red, green and blue. For lightest white you would have 100% white, cyan, magenta and yellow.
(This would reflect (1/3) * 3/4 + 0/4 = 25%, and (2/3) * 3/4 + 1/4 = 75% of the light respectively assuming perfect inks and equal coverage for the channels, which is pretty decent contrast)
Right, but this situation also happens in traditional color printing as well. Ink can't be varied in intensity, so images are halftoned/dithered. Halftone screening is done at a different angle per channel to avoid moire, so there is a mix of true overprinting and places where dots of distinct color are next to each other.
Because it’s bad compared to every other digital display. They’re always on the order of seconds, and get even worse the more colors there are. Tri-color displays (red, white, and black) are sometimes up to a dozen seconds or worse. For example, [0] has a refresh time of fifteen seconds! I’d be surprised if this isn’t an order of magnitude worse than that.
Although they don't give a number, they do actually mention refresh time in the penultimate paragraph: "it is rumored that E INK was able to integrate their Regal Waveform controllers in ACEP 2, resulting in faster page refresh speed and no ghosting."
I'm still waiting for widely available and affordable e-ink displays for tinkerers. I'd love to put one onto a Raspberry Pi to show some information, but it's just too expensive right now.
I just bought an InkPlate. It's a recycled Kindle display on a board with an Arduino, Wifi, SD slot, and even a couple of capacitive touch spots on the board for interaction. Can be programmed in C or MicroPython, or switched into "peripheral mode" (I might have gotten that name wrong) and glommed onto a Pi or whatever.
The larger the display, the more expensive it is, but that's not unusual, and LCDs aren't much different in price until you start to get to really large e-ink panels. (Given the depth of the LCD market, I'm sure you can find unusually cheap panels somewhere... the point remains. The prices aren't that bad these days for e-ink.)
For that size screen, yes. I think roughly $1-3/screen for that size is good. That’s what a small OLED screen will run you at any kind of volume. For $20 I would want something on the order of 6x8”. For $35 a 20” diagonal panel.
Granted you linked to Adafruit which is wonderful for their educational resources and easy to use high quality components, but that’s not where I would source parts for a project unless they had something truly unique or I was buying it for a newbie who could use the support they provide (bought some Arduino stuff from them recently for my kids).
If you negotiate directly with manufacturers, or order direct from china, I'm certain both of these would be much cheaper, but I'm talking about US retail prices and how LCD and E-Ink are very similarly priced at this level.
> but that’s not where I would source parts for a project unless they had something truly unique
I can link you to other retailers who charge very similar prices. Direct from china is different, and similarly, you can find these e-ink displays for cheaper on aliexpress and similar. That's irrelevant to the discussion.
$20 is fine for this. We're not (as far as I'm aware) talking about someone making a product to sell in bulk on kickstarter. We're talking about buying one to use at home.
This is the price you’d pay if you are willing to wait. I rarely need just one component and 5 displays at $20 is serious. If you want to sell a device, a $20 can easily kill your profit margin.
I am talking about direct from China and potentially selling products because if you just limit the discussion to single component hobby use then no amount is really too high. Why not $40? $80? You only need one, right?
I literally already said you can pay less on aliexpress, and the same absolutely applies to e-ink.
If you're making a point, I can't figure out what it is. This is way off topic.
EDIT: you have edited in some more relevant points, but there definitely is a price that's too high. If you had to pair a $35 computer with a $100 display, most people would absolutely find that to be too much in this hobby context. They would have to either have a lot of money, or a lot of passion for a particular project in order to justify that. Most people will find $20 to be reasonable.
$20 for the LCD is one component among many that you need to build a hobby project. It adds up quick if you pay retail like that. Meanwhile, if you can reduce that by an order of magnitude, the number of projects that will take advantage of it will increase. As for hobbyist projects vs commercial products, many hobbyists have created businesses from their projects, and that goes from woodworking to baking to electronics. Seems like 6-7 years ago there was a lot of excitement around the idea of "desktop manufacturing" and realizing the promise of 3D printing for small batch electronics. Maybe that was a little early in the hype cycle but I very much would like to see this sort of thing take off. Every $ counts in making that a realistic possibility.
I think you have a point, that Adafruit isn't trying to sell you the raw screen and compete with component suppliers.
I think of it more as a hobby screen kit. The $20 dollar one is on a custom board that interfaces with adafruits existing kits (Raspberry pi or "StemmaQT interfaces). They even supply "Circuit python" libraries to drive the thing, which is a their value add.
If you were mass manufacturing a screen for your custom board you'd order the part direct, but for a quick hobby project screen its not completely crazy.
Having worked for a company that had custom electronics hardware built with components, certainly we ordered direct from Chinese suppliers, it was much cheaper (with the associated lead times).
So I’ll ask here as there may be some lurkers who can help me in my quest:
I am trying to find a basic e-reader.
I have a simple want: I want a built in browser that will let me download ePub and pdf etc from the browser.
I’m not interested in bundled bookstores. I’m not keen on having to load books onto it via a pc app nor emailing them nor having an Amazon account neither. I just want to be able to browse and download FanFiction and stuff like that from a basic browser.
I am guessing I want an android tablet with an e-ink screen? What choices do I have and what do people recommend?
I use a Kobo Clara HD. It has a Kobo store where you can buy books, or you can use the “experimental web browser”, point it to libgen or your libraries website, and download whatever book you want.
More often than not though I just hook it up to my Linux laptop and transfer books via usb.
I use a Kobo Libra H2O which has been quite good to me. For people that want to take it to the next level, there's the calibre-web project[1]. It's able to tie into calibre and push books to kobo devices through the built-in sync command.
I have the same ereader, and I can understand the want for wireless book loading from a convenience point of view.
But from the “I don’t want to depend on proprietary software and/or require a privacy breaching login account” point of view, a Kobo is just fine. If you so desire, it’s just a USB drive with an e-ink screen attached. Connect - drop files - eject - read files.
Aha, this brand is easy to get ahold of where I am!
Googling suggests the “beta” browser has been beta forever; does the software never update?
And does the beta browser support multiple tabs and copy+pasting urls? (FanFiction doesn’t do ePub, but there are several helper websites that provide it if you can copy paste the FanFiction URLs)
I love the little guy. Lighter than any paperback I've ever owned. Fits in a large pocket. Displays in color! Which lets me highlight in color! And runs Android 9.0 with Google Play Services (though activating this is a bit hacky). Can install whatever Android browser you want. It's the "Gameboy Color" stage of color vibrancy, but it's color.
Problem is, to my knowledge, this was a limited run. I got mine from Good eReader, but they sold out of this model, and I don't know when or if there will be more.
I haven't tested, but I think the Onyx Boox Poke 3 (not color) might be able to install GPS too.
In the same place, I think I have contradicting wishes.
The hardware resources needed for "basic e-reader" and the ones for, basically, a modern browsing machine are very different. Something gotta give there, you will either have an overpowered and overpriced reader, or a clumsy browser. Additionally, having to type on a virtual keyboard on a e-ink screen is not a top-notch experience.
Kobo looks like a good direction for me, I can have my reading matter formatted exactly as I wish and USB-transfer it over. For my parents who are not tech-savvy, Kindle is great, as I can prepare books and email them to their kindle.
Do you mean the "Mobiscribe Origin"? The original Mobiscribe (which is just called the "Mobiscribe", for anyone who's confused) has major lag issues and I wouldn't recommend the note-taking unless you want to wait 30+ seconds at times, switching between virtual notebooks.
I suspect it's partially due to bad coding that scales up poorly (the .note files have to re-render their vectors every time you turn the page, including completely erased parts), and it didn't pop up until I'd owned it for a while.
i bought an onyx boox nova3 last month and you can install the play store on it which means you might be able to use some apps (not all will work well with eink or the custom android ui that they use.
the idea i had was to mostly manage adding and removing books/articles from my laptop or phone and then have them sync across to the ereader using syncthing. (mainly because its slower to do any of that from an eink)
im using a firefox extension that saves articles to epub. i think there are android apps where you can do something similar through the share menu. but i might just try out wallabag next which is like pocket/read-it-later and then install the wallabag app on my ereader
anyway, I've only messed around with it for a few days but I'm liking it so far, i just have to figure out why syncthing isnt syncing in the background. resilio sync or others like dropbox, google drive might work either. for the moment i just need to open them syncthing app to activate a sync
How did you get to this result ? (I'm not claiming this is the real look it will have, simply wanted to check the metodology)
Simply counting the number of colors in the image does not seem a good idea since even with a real photo, a screen with all pixels outputing the same will not give you a single-color image when captured with a camera. The issue is even worse with e-ink due to their technology.
It's probably a simple photoshop as the image even seems to be higher resolution than the hardware.
But counting unique pixel colors in a photo of a display tells you nothing about the display.
Find a picture of a gameboy screen (10 colors) or gameboy color (56 colors) and send the jpg through that tool. You should be able to realize the problem from simple intuition about what a photo is.
I agree with the conclusion but how did you do your calculation? If you take a picture of a 16 colors screen you will find many more colors in that picture (main reason being that pixels won't align perfectly).
Unless they can solve the refreshing rate, I won't be too thrilled about this.
In fact there are so much more content nowadays are developed/created beyond text format isn't good news for E-Ink. They are risking solving a problem that people would soon forget why it worthy solving in the first place.
Let us hope that there will also be normal, maybe smaller?, e-ink displays for PCs and that they will not only be used for eBook readers or similar. I for one would love to have a display that blends perfectly in with its surroundings and doesn’t stand out under any lighting conditions.
Or ..perhaps..based on your biometric/phone/personal data. Here comes Tom.
Tom can afford prices to be 15% more.
Change the price.
We’ve sort of seen this before with websites showing different prices to PC and Macintosh users; based on the analytics that people who own a Macintosh would pay more
Saturation, contrast and refresh are still the main weaknesses though. Especially because a full-color display uses numerous full-page refreshes to achieve all colours which are really jarring.
> Especially because a full-color display uses numerous full-page refreshes to achieve all colours which are really jarring.
Can confirm - I have a Kaleido based e-reader and whilst I do like that book covers are in colour, scrolling through even a small library is jank central due to the multiple refreshes.
Worth noting that Kaleido and ACeP are very different.
Kaleido is effectively an RGB LCD in front of an E-Ink screen - you get color at 1/3 the resolution of black and white, but "normal" refresh rates. This accounts for all of the multi-color e-ink readers on the market now.
AcEP is 4 pigments per cell, so you get full resolution and better saturation and contrast, but terrible refresh rates. Last I saw for ACeP it was something like 15 seconds. Presumably this 2nd generation is much faster, but I haven't seen anything that actually says how fast.
Not with Kaleido, it's a normal monochrome eink screen underneath. The color filter on top changes in something like 1ms, it's invisibly fast. ACeP and the other black/white/(red|yellow) "color" inks do require multiple cycles though, and yeah - wildly unusable for reading purposes.
I have a Pocketbook Colour which uses E Ink Kaleido and it takes multiple refreshes to correctly display colours - there's 3 or 4 flashes on the coloured areas.
Go to about 3:57 on this video and watch the book covers flash on and off as they do multiple refreshes - easier at 0.25x but still visible in real time.
I’ll be interested to see how long it takes for this to redraw. Two color eink panels can be pretty quick these days , but the color panels take a while because they’re addressing multiple layers. This is apparently just one layer.
Probably at least 1 Hz to even be slightly usable as a screen you are composing or editing on, but current refresh times are multiple seconds so there's still likely a long way to go...
so many people complaining about the patents, but it is indeed their waranty to keep strongly innovating. That said, _as consumer_ I wish there weren't patents, but we have to acknowledge that the patents are what made the company innovate
Goddammit I hate patents, trade secrets and intellectual property. I want this out there on all my devices. Imagine how much less energy we'd use, how much less e-waste we would generate, and how grateful our eyes would be if we weren't staring at blue lights all day.
Its difficult to find the details on this because these companies are so secretive, but from everything I have seen, the e paper technology we have is completely useless for anything but displaying mostly static content. The refresh time is insanely slow so simply typing text or scrolling a page would be almost impossible.
Also almost all of the full color eink screens I have been able to find details on are actually just normal TFT LCD displays with some matte film over the top. The core eink tech seems to be fairly easily changed to get 3 colours at the cost of 15 second refresh times but any more colurs seems unlikely.
