Just to clarify, if you have a problem with what eInk is doing here, then you basically have a problem with patents altogether. This is essentially the prototypical case for patents:
* Invented a novel, physical device[1]
* Granted monopoly from the government for 20 years to extract monopoly rent from sale of the product in exchange for making the design publicly available
Now, personally, I bite the bullet here and say "maybe we should come up with a better incentive system than patents". But I find it hard to fault eInk specifically since this is exactly how patents are supposed to work.
[1] I mention it's a physical device because there are other more controversial types of patents like software patents and patents on genes which are more widely understood to be bullshit.
I am not sure that is how patents are supposed to work. Few people would object to eInk getting profits from their inventions. But the problem seems to be the strange ways eInk markets their products. It seems to be that they are not encouraging more companies to use their products an rather hold back their technology.
Patents were created as an incentive not only to do research but to publish the results of the research. So that many companies would have access to the technology and can license the patents when producing products based on that technology. That is not quite aligned with a company reluctantly marketing their technology.
Indeed, I don't think it's hard to imagine an alternate timeline where E Ink simply negotiated royalties with a handful of manufacturers over the past 10-15 years and we saw an explosion of e-paper displays as OEMs iterated on E Ink's processes and experimented with more scalable, cost-effective variants.
E Ink could have been the ARM of low-power display technology, raking in a billion dollars a year in royalties while the ecosystem flourished, but they couldn't let go of being the monopoly provider for their technology. What a waste.
I wonder why say, SoftBank, doesn't buy them and do what you're describing?
Is there something commercial players realize about e-ink that the rest of us don't? Or do they lack vision (seems unlikely under current market conditions)?
I wouldn't have high expectations of SoftBank but it does illustrate one key point. Everyone noticed that SoftBank was willing to burn a couple of billion on stuff like WeWork. It is considered reasonable in the VC/private venture industry to take bets on AI/ML, internet services. If those companies fail, nobody is going to fire you even if you vouched for obvious disasters like WeWork. The same VCs would never even consider taking a stake in startups that do the incremental improvements in pieces of display technology like TFT or material science improvements. I work in the display industry and I can only smile when people say it is being held back by patents and stuff like that because the real reason is really about investment.
> Is there something commercial players realize about e-ink that the rest of us don't? Or do they lack vision (seems unlikely under current market conditions)?
What I know is that their technology is limited by the physics of moving large particles. Their volumes are not high enough to achieve high scale. There was another post that explained this very well by showing the multi-billion cost of a typical LCD factory. I think E-ink can only re-purpose existing LCD factory lines and they can't get good yields on their products doing that.
I gotta be honest I'm on a completely different track than this thread: these displays are pretty bad! No one is choosing a 4096 color 2560x1400p 30" with a refresh rate thats so poor they won't share it - its surely measured in seconds.
It's a large color screen with a good resolution, visible from any direction and under any light condition, and which can keep showing an image for an unlimited amount of times.
With a battery and a gsm modem it could probably stay unattended for years as a billboard.
That wouldn't matter for passive information displays. The fact that it only needs power to change what is displayed makes them very useful in any system that displays something (semi)long-term. Think of roadmarkings, parking-space indicators, shop-signs, billboards, carbonmonoxide detectors, road-signals. I can figuratively come up with infinite amount of applications like this. Basically the only bad application is monitors/tvscreens/smartphone screens.
But they are used for that - up until my post this thread was bemoaning that IP law prevents them from being truly successful, i.e. in mass market consumer products
The refresh rate is something like 40+ seconds. This 31" display module isn't a new release of their latest tech, it was released at the same time as their 31" monochrome display module 2-3 years ago IIRC and has been discussed previously on HN.
If the refresh rate was improved I would buy it in an instant. I would probably buy a monochrome one. Maybe the refresh rate would have been improved by now had they allowed more innovation in the space.
This has already been covered repeatedly. There's no "had they allowed". The problem is physics! Please read about electrophoresis. It is pigment particles moving physically in a fluid! If you make them move fast then they're not going to be stable. You can look at the past 20 years of electrophoretic products and you'll see that there's been pretty much 0 improvement in speed. Startups like Clearink even gave up on bistability meaning they decided we don't need the pigment to stick, we'll just continuously refresh it like LCD and look how the investor and consumer market treated them.
Again, this "had they allowed more innovation" seems to be coming from people who have little to no knowledge of the industry.
>I am not sure that is how patents are supposed to work. Few people would object to eInk getting profits from their inventions. But the problem seems to be the strange ways eInk markets their products. It seems to be that they are not encouraging more companies to use their products an rather hold back their technology.
If eInk is really missing out on so much profit from the activities you describe, then a buyer might swoop in and put the company under new management. It's not the patent's fault.
It is the patents fault that the current situation exists. Whether a potential buyer might be able to change the situation is something independent. And of course, after not making a huge business out of eInk in 20 years, it is understandable that the buyers don't exactly line up to buy eInk - if they can be bought at all without the owners consent. The market for eInk devices could be much larger if it hadn't been so much restricted in the last 20 years.
Innovation happened before patents and it's happening fine in industries without monopoly protections, such as food and clothing. There you need innovation And fair prices And good service And availability. You can't just hide behind a protection, extract economic rent and keep everyone else out.
Also countries without strong rigorous patent protections are swiftly outmanoeuvring those with protections.
When copyrights were extended in 1976 and 1998 for example, there was no measurable effect to the amount of copyrighted works being produced. If the incentivize hypothesis held, there should be a measurable increase in the velocity of copyrighted works pivoting on the dates of those extensions. No such increase was observed. Where is the data to back up the claim? There is none.
So the incentivization hypothesis is not only disputed by evidence but also lacks any supporting evidence, so it's incorrect. It's a testable hypothesis that's been tested.
It doesn't exist, no matter how much you close your eyes and think it's true, it's simply not real. Patents and protections simply do not incentivize innovation, the evidence suggests they stifle and hamper it.
No amount of fundamentalist dogma
of desperately clutching wrong answers can change this reality.
They reward deep pockets, those who have enough money to fight a long, expensive, court battle.
They do not reward innovation. I know startups who have failed to get a patent because their invention was not "specific enough", and some who have failed to protect their invention because their patent was too specific to defend.
They maintain the status quo, which is entirely antithetical to their purpose.
They maybe work in biotech, and other industries where the capital investment is colossal and needs protecting. In most other industries, especially web tech, they're a net negative and need to be abolished.
I suppose, although I think an eink display is reasonably innovative, and I don't think the company has particularly deep pockets in comparison to the companies we generally complain about around here.
Eink is innovative. That doesn't mean patents reward innovation.
As others have said, they're chasing a monopoly on these types of displays, aided by their use of patents. That's not something we should be encouraging. The point of patents was to give a limited window for the inventor of a thing to exclusively capitalise on the thing, in return for making the details of the thing public so that others could in turn expand and improve on the thing. This is not what's happening here.
> Just to clarify, if you have a problem with what eInk is doing here, then you basically have a problem with patents altogether.
What in the world? So I can't agree that the patent system is net positive, and disagree with a company's specific business decisions under that system?
Can you elaborate how the patent system is good in general, yet e-ink is abusing it in a unique way? I don’t have a ton of knowledge on patents or E-ink’s business practices.
>then you basically have a problem with patents altogether
That's correct, I do. Patents should protect the rights long enough to bring a product to market, not stop all competition in an entire field of technology for decades
I think it's worse than this.
Patents can reward shallow, crappy thinking.
You can patent an idea which you haven't figured out how to build -- which I think almost always means you can patent it before you've finished figuring out enough to make it useful.
In this particular case, I don't think the problem is patents (thought I do have a lot of problems with patents as a concept), rather poor business decisions by eInk.
They are indeed using patents as originally envisioned: They have an effective monopoly on epaper displays. However their poor business decision of ultra-high pricing has prevented a serious market for their product from forming. Had they lowered their price per display, or done some kind of affordable licensing scheme with manufacturers, it's totally possible for them to have made tons of money while still allowing epaper displays to flourish in the market.
But that's not what they did; who knows what kind of money they're actually making, but the fact that the epaper market is basically on Kindle life support isn't the patent's fault.
(Edit: Perhaps Amazon had a hand in preventing wide adoption of epaper, in order to more effectively squash Kindle competitors?)
> However their poor business decision of ultra-high pricing
I work in the display industry and what I know for sure is that they can't make big 20", 32", 42" displays. Something about factory production issues so they're literally like hand making the big displays which to me seems like the reason why they cost so much. So I'm suspicious of your claim. Could you let us know which ultra-high prices you're referring to? What panel size? What DPI? What bin range and contrast range? Do you actually work in the industry and have knowledge of costs and pricing?
> Perhaps Amazon had a hand in preventing wide adoption of epaper, in order to more effectively squash Kindle competitors?
I'm sorry to be harsh but you sound ridiculous when you say that. And now I'm pretty certain you don't have industry knowledge. You do realize that Amazon spent hundreds of millions trying to scale up Liquavista to produce fast colour displays for the Kindle. It failed because again physics of electrowetting is complex especially when you go from handmaking 100 demo displays to trying to produce 1000 on a rolling production line. Maybe a billion and maybe then they could have succeeded but I guess Jeff had other cost issues or personal reasons that ended that.
Yes—-there has got to be more to the story-otherwise they could hire a sophomore Econ major, learn about elasticity, and pull in exponentially higher earnings.
I have seen contracts between large manufacturers where one pre-purchases exclusivity variants, like:
1) Exclusive licensing for x years
2) Exclusive licensing for x years after the first time buyer deploys tech not to exceed W years (usually 10)
3) Very limited sales/licensing to others
I will bite the bullet here. I think the patent system is a net negative, and I think eInk is a great example of how the patent system discourages useful innovation.
I can imagine alternate patent systems that would better encourage innovation. I can also imagine that no patent system at all could work fairly well.
> I think eInk is a great example of how the patent system discourages useful innovation.
Could you explain this? Because which patent is discouraging useful innovation? I'm actively working in the display industry and have no idea what you are referring to. I've asked this question before and I only get conspiracy theory answers like "secret consortium", or lazy answers like patent thicket. If you aren't actually working in the display industry, then how exactly do you know what is blocking useful innovation? Because if you were to ask me what's blocking useful innovation, it is the fact that investors are much more willing to put billions into AI/ML or an internet service startup than they are into scaling up a niche display technology or improving yields so that the price can come down.
I do not work in the display industry, but I can point at the 3D printing industry as an example. Several years ago, some critical patents expired, resulting in a burst of innovation. Or take 2D printers, where parties to giant cross licensing agreements can make printers and it’s very hard for anyone else to sell into the US market.
And yes, if I were an investor in display technology, I would be quite hesitant to touch electronic ink style displays due to patents.
Here’s a fascinating paper on the usefulness of patents:
> I can point at the 3D printing industry as an example. Several years ago, some critical patents expired, resulting in a burst of innovation
Yes, I've read that as well from magazines but I must admit I've never checked the journalist claims or seen what critical patent expired that made the 3d printing industry flourish. Because it could just have well been access to open source designs that only flourished in the 2000s but I know nothing about 3d printing so I'm just speculating and making it clear that I'm doing that. So when it comes to posts here about my own industry which I feel I know pretty well, I see claims that seem farcical to me so I've been asking, which critical patent does EInk have? So far, I've not had any answer.
> And yes, if I were an investor in display technology, I would be quite hesitant to touch electronic ink style displays due to patents.
If I was your boss, I'd again ask a simple question. Which patent? If you can't identify it, then do you think it is possible it is an incorrect belief based on perhaps a lack of understanding of the display industry?
> Just to clarify, if you have a problem with what eInk is doing here, then you basically have a problem with patents altogether.
Not necessarily; having a problem with the way someone uses a legal property right is not the same thing as having a problem with them having the legal right to do what they are doing, i.e., the property right itself.
But yes I agree that patent reform is sorely needed, for this reason amongst others. There has to be a middle ground where ideas can flourish while their creators can still extract profit.
Most devices that I can go and buy are covered by patents. EInk does not really have many devices I can go out and buy. I doubt it's due to patents. They just seem to have a strategy of not wanting to sell their products to many people.
> They just seem to have a strategy of not wanting to sell their products to many people.
Alternately, product designers and consumers seem to have a preference for LCD or OLED devices because they are better for common use cases and they have no need for the niche features that EInk provides.
> consumers seem to have a preference for LCD or OLED devices
Have anything to back that claim up, or is this your opinion? Because considering there’s only one major category of consumer devices with eInk displays and they are used in all the leading devices in that category, I’m not sure I personally agree. Without additional product categories available to purchase and because there is a pent up desire to buy them despite them not existing, I don’t feel your conclusion can be proven categorically.
I'm aware that many people find reading on an E Ink display e-book reader preferable to reading on a tablet or phone. When consumers pull out their wallets to make a purchase, however, they prefer tablets and phones.
E-Readers are single-purpose device. EInk are a screen technology. Comparison to phones only make sense if it was possible to purchase tablets, phones, laptops, monitors with eink screens. There exist some tablets (e.g. remarkable), but they are pretty expensive.
Comparison with phones and tablets makes sense because consumers use them for the same purpose as e-readers, reading e-books. They are an alternative even though LCD/OLED is inferior to EInk for reading in terms of eye strain, etc. People still prefer multi-function devices and EInk has so far been unable to produce displays that are competitive for multi-function devices.
I don’t think there’s a conspiracy at EInk or among its shareholders to intentionally make less money or sell less products. Their annual report, which describes a strategy and goal of improving the technology and expanding sales, suggests the opposite. [0]
Maybe it's how it's "supposed" to work in principle and by the books they're doing something wrong, but on the other hand, have why haven't other patented technologies ended up in such a limbo state? Lots of tech has been patented, some by ruthless and litigious companies like Apple, and yet somehow there don't seem to be that many broad technologies like electrophoretic displays that have ended up like eInk products.
What makes these displays so different?
(Edit: to be clear, I don't mean to sound snarky or rhetorical, I'm genuinely curious since these displays seem to be in a pretty unique situation)
It does happen to other products. Notably 3D printing was held up by a 1989 patent for 20 years - when it expired in 2009 it resulted in a massive boom leading to lots of new innovations in the space.
I do basically have a problem with patents altogether, but even in the current patent system, the way eInk is doing business is regressive and prevents innovation. They're far more concerned with maximizing their bottom line than actually pushing for adoption of the technology.
Even the founders of modern capitalism warned us of rent-seeking behavior like this that is actually counter to the goals of markets.
It's perfectly fair to condemn this, as well as the patent system that enables and encourages it.
Why is this "rent seeking"? eInk came up with an idea, reduced it to practice, patented that and now have a 20 year monopoly.
What they choose to do with it is up to them. It's a property right that they own. It's specifically mandated as a monopoly power that they have been granted.
After 20 years, anyone can make an eInk display.
You can argue that 20 years is too long, or that the patent is invalid, or that they aren't exploiting their idea in the most community oriented way, but calling this "rent seeking" and "counter to the goals of markets" is flat out wrong.
The "free market" is entirely about each individual making their own behavioral decisions, within the regulations of the market, to promote their own benefit.
You might not like the way the idea of patents has been reduced to practice, but that doesn't make the idea of patents a bad one.
in theory, the patents will allow industries to get an edge in tech and produce better product, and the cost is that some portion of the profits will go to eInk (patent author).
The problem with eink is that patents are not sufficient to produce the desired tech, there is some secret ingredient which is not open, rendering all benefits useless
The key thing with most patents is that the fees have to be "fair" (which is afaik also a legal requirement). In eInks case, the fee seems to be too high[1]. Now, does anyone want to go to court over this? nope.
[1] I'm just judging on the reaction here and on how competitive the prices are
> The key thing with most patents is that the fees have to be "fair" (which is afaik also a legal requirement).
It is generally not. Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory licensing terms are often contractually required from holders of standards-essential parents that are participants in standards-setting organizations responsible for the relevant standards, but are generally not required by law outside of such contracts.
Patents are not on ideas. They are on ideas reduced to practice. If you can find another method for the same outcome, it's not covered by the patent. If you improve on the method , you can patent the improvement and charge the original holder to license it.
The biggest thing wrong with patents are the logistics (lengthy, expensive filings and 20y monopolies are ridiculous today) and the lack of oversight in identitying prior art or vague, overreaching scopes.
Their justification, at least in the United States is Article 1, section 8, clause 8 of the Constitution:
“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
You can argue the meaning of "limited times" and "discoveries" and the interpretation of all that, but the justification is that by providing a limited monopoly, the inventor gets a period to make money uncontested, after which the invention is available to the community.
The alternative, a "trade secret", means that the invention may die with the death of the inventor and be lost to the community.
I really don't understand why is it fashionable to claim this these days in these forums. I have no numbers for "eInk's bullshit monopoly practices". I see a lot of chinese manufacturers building eInk devices. No hint whatsoever of either abusive practices or abusive royalties. Does someone have any evidence?
Most other competitors to eInk (e.g. Qualcomm/Mirasol, Gyricon, etc.) had viable products and have completely failed in the market.
Is this really "einks abusive practices" or is it just complete consumer disinterest in the technology outside of these extremely niche markets?
E Ink is part of a consortium that owns all the patents around the technology used in their ePaper displays. The general consensus is that they are difficult to deal with and require numerous NDAs and licensing agreements to gain access to their technology.
Nick Sheridon, inventor of the first ePaper display, suggested the watershed moment for ePaper would be in 2012 where it would gain mass adoption. It's been almost a decade and that watershed has yet to occur.
Many believe that the difficulty in dealing with them and their licensing requirements are stifling the widespread adoption of the technology.
Not that i don't believe you, but do you have any sources for that? A quick google search didn't turn up any articles or anything, just corporate websites.
"E Ink is part of a consortium that owns all the patents around the technology used in their ePaper displays."
That appears to be nonsense as far as I know. And I'm actively involved in the display industry. I keep seeing this kind of comment in HN which is surprising and each time I always ask give us some evidence or links we can read to verify and I get no answer. Same when I ask what patents are apparently blocking innovation or keeping EInk displays expensive, no answer or non-verifiable answers like patent thicket, secret conspiracy. As a person actually involved with displays, the biggest problem with E-Ink displays is they can't get to the next level of scale because they can't solve yield issues and they can't solve those because they can't get higher volumes. If someone like Apple suddenly put in a pre-paid order for 10 million E Ink displays, I bet you they could get to the next level.
> they can't get to the next level of scale because they can't solve yield issues and they can't solve those because they can't get higher volumes
I really doubt that theory, either. This world has just way too much money completely idle waiting. It would be extremely easy for them to get really big money if they really had anything that would be world-changing.
The problem is that, once you really look into it, there is absolutely nothing in eInk that is world changing.
Consumers have problems distinguishing the supposedly better contrast from cheap reflective+monochrome LCD displays (like the Pebble or stuff sold in amazon for $10 these days). But they can easily recognize it the moment the slow refresh comes in. So your average customer only sees disadvantages and high price. They will choose reflective LCD any day over pure eInk. And thus all use cases where eInk might have succeeded are perfectly covered with plain old reflective LCDs (e.g. week-long battery life, primarily outside use such as smartwatches).
So your only other benefit about eInk is the passive power usage when not refreshing. Which is why they are making some in-roads into this type of market, e.g. sales price tags, signs, etc.
But consumer market? There is just no interest whatsoever from consumers. None whatsoever. Only a handful of geeks know what benefits eInk brings over reflective LCDs (angles, polarity), and out of them only a handful care enough about them to buy.
> Many believe that the difficulty in dealing with them
I already mentioned that... but is there any actual evidence? It's very easy to claim "oh but they're evil! they're so evil they hide their evil actions behind NDAs!". It's a textbook example of non-falsifiability.
But what I see from my side is a shitton of chinese manufacturers (not very well known for their respect of NDAs or trade secrets overall whatsoever). So I have a hard time believing such an accusation.
> Most other competitors to eInk (e.g. Qualcomm/Mirasol, Gyricon, etc.) had viable products and have completely failed in the market.
I wasn't aware Mirasol ever made it out of handmade demo units. Maybe they did manage to produce some production level small displays like 4" but I heard from a fab guy in Longtan that they just couldn't get the process to work reliably.
> consumer disinterest in the technology outside of these extremely niche markets?
Consumers would be interested if they could be cheap and fast like LCD. But E-Ink is probably never going to get fast because you can't bypass physics unless they find a different way to get pigment particles to move. It won't get cheap either because you need huge volumes to get there. So unless someone with Applesque bank account makes that order, E-Ink will always be more expensive than LCDs.
They probably mean Dasung (http://www.dasungtech.com/) and Onyx (https://www.boox.com/). The former actually build eInk computer monitors with HDMI inputs, but they're very expensive and somewhat difficult to buy.
A recurring meme from people who meet one or more of the following conditions:
a) Don't understand business
b) Don't know anything about the display industry
c) Don't know anything about manufacturing anything at scale
d) Don't have any real information other than repeating something someone said
e) Never take the time to do enough research and gather enough data with which to support their opinions
f) Don't seem to care about the truth
As someone who worked in the display industry for over ten years, conducted seminars for thousands of engineers and business professionals on the design and manufacturing of display systems (down to pixel-level electronics) and, generally speaking, considered myself an expert in the domain...these kinds of comments come off as --to be kind-- terribly misplaced.
It would behoove HN commenters to at least exercise enough restraint to only comment in domains they have either researched profusely or understand to a good level of proficiency. That is, if they care about HN signal-to-noise ratio not degrading to Twitter/FB food fight levels.
You got that wrong. Listing the many ways in which someone doesn't know what they are talking about is a statement of fact, not a personal attack.
If I argued a bunch of nonsense on HN about an article on biology and someone called me for not having a clue, that would not be a personal attack, they would be factually accurate. Biology is not my thing.
There's been a bunch of comments making really strong claims. Here's some examples just from this post.
"They're famous for patent-trolling and disrupting anyone elses effort's to do anything with the tech".
When asked for proof of this, there was no reply.
"E Ink is part of a consortium that owns all the patents around the technology used in their ePaper displays."
When asked for proof of this, there was no reply.
"Because there's no real market, the only company "innovating" on the original technology is E-Ink. With a 20-year head start locking down iterative improvements, the technology may never get out of the tarpit. "
When asked to back up the claim, at least the response was better in that they accepted it was an assumption based on other comments rather than actually being based on facts.
" It is all just an assumption, and I don't have any evidence. Thank you for pointing that out, challenging me, and forcing me to take reconsider my opinion. "
So his/her point is that people are alleging a company is a patent troll, even perhaps part of a consortium seeking to control the market and when challenged, they are unable to defend their claims. So your question appears to be asking him for reasons to backup his questioning of other people making claims. Eg, you are acting as Dan in the following itemized list.
Alice: We are making a product at price X and volume Y with features Z
Bob: Alice is preventing anyone else from making similar products using your patents. Alice is part of a consortium that is evil. A is making enormous profits. A is a patent troll. A is an example of patents gone wild.
Charles: Uhm, Bob and buddies? Why are you saying that about Alice? I work in Alice's industry and see nothing like that. You guys shouldn't make such baseless comments as it brings down the quality of our technology forum and level of discussion.
Dan: Charles, you're making ad-hominem attacks and appealing to self-authority.
> Why hasn't E-Ink display tech gone mass-market?
Because their technology (ie: the physics they're reliant on) can't do what competing products like LCD, OLED are able to do. You can't magically make electrophoretic particles that stay in a stable position AND move fast. You can't magically fit millions of color pigments in a pixel when there is NO backlight. Until they can switch to a different technology or physics, they can't compete against LCD/OLED and will never reach high enough volumes to scale to a lower cost structure.
The entire fucking world of government and business runs on paper. I have to print out literally reams of shit for regulatory requirements, shit that could be easily stored in multiple locations, on tiny ass microSD cards that could be filed away into a single filing cabinet, potentially holding billions of records, damn near indefinitely, and near-immediately accessed on ePaper displays, with the color documents being displayed on color ones and the black & whites being displayed on greyscale displays... instead we have an enormous off-site filing warehouse to retain documentation for up to seven years. Hell, my corporation probably has several of these.
And it sure as shit isn't the legal framework holding all this up... everyone I deal with in government and business hates having to shuffle all this shit around, and would much rather be tossed an 8.5" x 11" eInk display with all relevant documents than having to shuffle through manila folder after manila folder of printed pages, and they'd all gladly lobby to have these laws and regulations changed and revised to allow for that.
I guaran-goddamn-tee you the market for eInk is there.
I don't think you understand how government works, how they buy things, what data archiving/security requirements they have and, well, frankly, the value of paper as an archival medium.
About thirty years ago I worked on a sizeable archival project. Technology deemed "modern" at the time was very hard to justify. Why? Because nobody could truthfully answer a simple question: What happens when the hardware/readers go obsolete?
Well, the first thing that happens is that you have to migrate ALL of your data from the old medium to a new medium before the old one goes out of style.
That's all the bean counters had to hear to know they'd rather keep things on film. Film, as the argument went, is good for a long time if stored properly and all you have to do is shine a light through it.
The started a slow transition to digital some 20 to 25 years after that conversation. Guess what? They were right. The film was --and still is-- in pristine condition.
I'm not sure I follow the logic. A setup where you are not allowed to store a document on a disk of some kind is not going to be friendly to a solution where you instead can store the document on a little microSD card hooked up to a eInk display instead.
If there's a fetish for a "this document is an actual physical object" somewhere (with all the usual security theater about security from theft and alteration), it's not going to be helped by taping eInk to a disk.
There was a comment by a throwaway account on a recent HN article about e-Ink displays that describes how e-Ink company monopolizes its contribution to epaper device BOMs and how difficult it was to actually integrate their parts. I'm having difficulty finding it but it was posted in the last few days.
From my understanding, they hold a large number of epaper patents and have made it difficult for other manufacturers to produce similar panels. EInk then also sets high prices their own panels, making it expensive for manufacturers to source EInk panels
I wonder if it's 2560x1440 (as claimed in the upper section), or 1280x720 (as claimed lower). Given the lower resolution is 1/4 of the larger, and the product description diagram shows quarters.. perhaps it's 4 displays merged into the final project (perhaps it can be further embiggened).
4096 colours seems limited though.. the 13.3 linked in January [discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21996326) looks much more impressive - although the NDA and lack of definitive numbers makes it hard to compare.
Forgive me if I'm misremembering details, but I think the way color e-ink displays work is they have the black/white "ink" capsules that are pushed up/down by magnetic charges, just like a regular black/white e-ink display, except for in the colored ones, each "pixel" also has a red or green or blue color filter over it (one of each in a cluster). But that means the pixels per inch drops because now 3 black/white "pixels" have to work together to be one single color "pixel"
I'm not really sure how they measure resolution with this, that could still just be a mistake. But I do know e-ink displays sacrifice resolution for that colour with current technology.
So, assuming that’s what it is, subpixel resolution is now being advertised as the “true” resolution? Because when I buy a 1080p display, I’m expecting 1920x1080 addressable pixels. Whether that’s implemented as 3840x2160 (2x2 subpixel) or 5760x1080 (3x1 subpixel) is not my concern. And if I bought a display advertised as 3840x2160, and my computer told me it was 1920x1080 (because it’s a 2x2 subpixel layout), I’d be upset.
In Apple ][ hires graphics, the 280 pixel-wide display area was really 140 pixels with the extra resolution coming from sub-addressing the RGB pixels on the display. On a black and white display you got the full 280 pixels but in color you would get weird color fringing happening. Even more fun was that one byte of memory was mapped to 7 "pixels" with the high bit indicating how the RGB sub-pixels would be split into the left and right halves of the pixel. Technologically it was rather cool, although it was a challenge to program against.
Wow, I never understood until reading this comment that this is why Apple II graphics often had that fringing effect. Those visual artifacts I remember from The Oregon Trail finally make sense.
Bad precedent, to be honest... Pentile was infamous for its inferior image quality on things like text and fine lineart.
It reminds me of the LCDs on digital cameras, some of which use the same trick to reduce costs --- natural photos don't look any different, which is why it gets a pass, but text has a noticeable graininess to it as a result.
They can! Not frequently, I'll grant. Once I was using Lightroom and was very confused by a pixelated looking edge of a yellow flower against a blue sky, the edge of which moved diagonally across the pixels. Eventually I realized it was the mosaicing! I actually ended up switching to RawTherapee for that picture, the AMaZE demosaicing algorithm handled it much better in that particular case. Lightroom in the last few years added a high quality demosaicing mode that you can selectively enable, and it handles the picture correctly. It's pretty slow though.
In any case, reporting resolution using the single-color "pixels" is probably more justified for an image sensor (with its array of square light detecting sensors), than it is for an LCD screen, which is usually a square array of non-square sub-pixels.
Pentile is more complicated, since for most of them the advertised number of pixels matches the number of green elements, but not the number of red or blue elements.
At least one HN story in the last month was an eInk type product, either them or a competitor, able to position the tiny cells into more than one pair of modes, the current ones is up or down this one had some colour space like rgb as well. So it wasn't 1/3 the pixel density for a colour pixel.
That's what the original Amiga chipset had. 4bit/RGBchannel definitely is not as good as 12bit/ch but it isn't bad. DPI can make up for it, that's how print works.
But at 31.2" and those resolutions, the DPI isn't great.
If you click on "Specification" in the lower section, it says 2560 (H) × 1440(V). And if you download the manual it also says 2560x1440. So maybe just a typo?
> They're famous for patent-trolling and disrupting anyone elses effort's to do anything with the tech
I work in the display industry and have never heard of this. I don't see any data showing this either. Could you show us what you are basing your claims on? Am I missing something?
I challenged that post. You can see my reply asking for any proof and they never replied. I work in the industry. I've attended SID and hung out both with competitors and partners of EInk and I've never ever heard of any of the things that person is claiming.
I'll repeat my request for evidence again.
"
Wow, that is a very serious allegation. But I googled and googled and googled, and found not even one such lawsuit. I also see competing tech like Clearink. Could you show us proof that what you claimed about "buried by their lawyers" is actually occurring?
"
I've already stated that I was inaccurate with my wording.
When I stated "Kind of like Halloween Document era Microsoft", I was referring to their apparent willingness to use the legal system to shut down competition.
As for evidence of "one such lawsuit", there is this link. The only source provided 404's, but given that it's a government website that appears to have gone through a redesign, that's not shocking: https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2015/03/02/german-court-fi...
Most of my information on the topic so far has come from HN and reddit. That being said, what is being said on HN/reddit does appear to match up with what's going on, at least from the consumers perspective.
> Most of my information on the topic so far has come from HN and reddit. That being said, what is being said on HN/reddit does appear to match up with what's going on, at least from the consumers perspective.
Sigh.... I give up. Please read my post history if you genuinely want an industry perspective on these matters.
Is there any practical use for color ePaper yet though?
From my understanding, the technology is still limited to extremely low-saturation colors with extremely low contrast as well, see [1] for example photos and how the tech works.
It's certainly not ready for advertising -- instead of a vibrant color image, it looks like something printed on newspaper and left to fade in the sun for 5 years.
And color e-readers have significantly worse contrast than black & white ones, which already aren't great.
So if you truly need usable color, it seems like you're still always going to choose a traditional LCD/OLED display. Based on the fundamental limitations of the color filters used with eInk, I don't really see a future for it. At least not unless a new technology emerges that doesn't rely on using color filters on top of traditional black-and-white eInk?
There's a grocery chain (Superstore, Canada) which has been using the small two color displays (black white red) for pricing.
They use the tiny 2.7" e-paper screens and a TI cc2540 microcontroller to periodically update the pricing via some 2.4ghz signal (ok fine, I was curious so I stole one to take apart). Seems like a VERY expensive way to keep prices up to date. The BOM cost on one of those little guys has to be north of $10, and I would imagine that the vendor that sold them the system doesn't sell them at cost. Multiply that times thousands of products....
So yeah, people are using them, but it doesn't seem like a great system.
> Seems like a VERY expensive way to keep prices up to date. The BOM cost on one of those little guys has to be north of $10
That's nothing, even after markup and multiplying it around all the shelves, consider the wages you have to pay for people to go around continuously re-stickering everything. I'm pretty sure it would pay off in under a month and reduce errors... freeing staff to do more useful things. What i'm sure will _not_ be paid off in a month is the cost of integrating it into existing pricing systems.
However I think there is a more practical reason why it's not suited to most supermarkets: they are constantly moving things around due to different products coming and going and different parts shrinking and growing, so why bother with digital labels when you have to keep physically moving them anyway.
I've worked in retail and this is spot on. There are people who did practically nothing but update tags all day. And yeah, any change to the existing software is going to be the real issue. Everything they use is old.
Either the # SKUs would have to be lower, or the BOM smaller to justify this.
On the flipside consider the material cost of paper pricing tags, reduced risk of pricing error, ability to change pricing more rapidly, increased customer marketing/attraction.
I'd also imagine that removing this function from individual stores and centralising it would save a considerable amount of store management time.
The customer probably won't notice and if they do they'll walk back to the place they found the item and find the e-ink price tag has a price that matches the till. If they some how dispute it further the business will just lie like a rug until a particularly pernicious customer takes pictures of the price tag and then argues with the manager.
The eventual outcome will possibly be a class action law suit and in a few years the customers can sign up to receive a gift card.
This seems like a bad idea. If I own a physical store and you’re in it I don’t want to encourage you to leave quickly. I want you in there as long as possible putting things in your cart.
Could maybe be solved by adding some more technology (e.g. a barcode) that allows them to reserve the item at the current price, plus maybe some other kind of incentive.
Call me paranoid/cynical but maybe they are planning on a future system were they use the profile they have on you to calculate your preferences and buying power and update the signs on the fly when you're coming up to them.
Or maybe they are already doing that ... I said to call me paranoid.
Some online services are already engaging in price discrimination, though physical retail has greater limitations in communicating prices to individual customers. I think that removing price tags entirely would be necessary for full price discrimination in brick and mortar retail (or some similarly revolutionary step, like AR vision placing price tags on items). That's not to say it's infeasible, but other changes may be necessary first. For example, in an Amazon Go location, you don't need to check out the items at the end. Customers would still definitely want to know prices of items, but I could imagine them caring less about seeing price tags if they aren't checking out immediately after. I think another system that could help would be a partial or full subscription model, where the subscription price could be an opportunity for price discrimination.
Keep in mind that shelves must be restocked as well. Employees are putting their hands on most product's shelf space daily. Updating the prices while restocking seems like an almost negligible cost.
That said, I know some people that work in the grocery industry, and my impression is that the margins are tight enough that they do the math on EVERYTHING
In terms of their hardware cost and software development/wireless network, it's much more than just Superstore. Superstore is indeed huge but it's just one part of a much larger gargantuan grocery conglomerate, Loblaws.
From observing the behavior of my local superstore it also appears they're using the eink price tags on shelf in conjunction with some sort of software for planning shelf space and inventory, so it has some value to them other than just the manual labor to change paper price tags.
I am not the OP but I do. I'd love to use small color e-ink displays for low power indicator displays on equipment I design. I only run into it with hand held battery stuff, so for stuff I plug in it's kind of a non-issue.
Feel free to visit my website and send an email if you think you've got something that we could work together to get into some of my clients' projects. If it makes the final product more compelling I'm definitely open to it, especially if it runs on trivial drivers that a low power microcontroller can handle.
Of course fancy people have access to Qualcomm parts, so I understand if that's what you're aiming for. But if it's suitable for a bit less fancy of microcontroller chips and has a reasonable price I'd love to replace the literal LCD displays we're still stuck on because I guess it's 1996 in the realm of equipment prototyping.
> Is there any practical use for color ePaper yet though?
Years ago, the cafeterias at Microsoft switched from using regular signage for their menus to giant plasma TVs that showed a static image of the menu that had been there. The menu at some of the stations (but not all) did change daily, so there was some, slim, benefit, perhaps.
After awhile, they moved over to having a slide show on the screens that alternated between glamour shots of the food, and the menu. Now you could only see the actual menu for a fraction of the time, and despite being a speed reader, I'd often have to wait for the menu to come back around multiple times before I could read it all and decide what I wanted to eat that day.
But it sure did look modern!
Further irony, IIRC that was around the same time I volunteered to be part of a campus wide partnership with the local power company and I stood at a desk in the cafeteria handing out free CFLs bulbs.
The tl;dr is that companies will invest in expensive, less useful, signage, if it is perceived as being cooler.
Heck it isn't like menus carved/painted on wood have particularly good contrast ratios, but they still pop up now and then.
> they moved over to having a slide show on the screens that alternated between glamour shots of the food, and the menu. Now you could only see the actual menu for a fraction of the time, and despite being a speed reader, I'd often have to wait for the menu to come back around multiple times before I could read it all and decide what I wanted to eat that day.
I've seen this problem elsewhere. I don't get why you wouldn't display the menu on some of the screens and the photos on other screens.
The local McD's drive thru has a giant LED screen where you can see your order and total cost. Very nice for confirming they understood what you ordered after:
I, as an equipment designer, would select an e-ink color display for my main feedback if:
- it was battery powered and needed a display with infrequent updates but super low power
- the display was otherwise a large part of the power (i.e. otherwise it was a LCD display)
- the color was useful in indicating an error or clarifying the menu items
If it did those things it would be worth upwards of $10 a unit to me if the resolution was over 720p for sure, and likely even for lower resolutions if it worked reliably with a slow microcontroller.
The whole point I'm making is that no advertiser or restaurant is going to use color eInk because the contrast and saturation are so terrible.
This isn't like working around the limitations of a medium to develop pixel art, or black-and-white drawings, etc.
Color e-ink is just a worse medium in every way. It's worse contrast at black-and-white (B&W e-ink is far better), and it's terrible contrast and saturation at color.
I don't see it working for signs, ads, or menus at all.
Color e-ink feels like a cool prototype, a proof-of-concept, but that basically demonstrates its limitations don't make it commercially viable for any general purpose.
Wouldn't it be technically possible to reduce the backlight for LCD displays at night? Seeing that it itsn't happening I have little hope that e-ink displays wouldn't be illuminated to the maximum as well ("out ads should be as bright and vibrant as possible!")
> Is there any practical use for color ePaper yet though?
CI and monitoring dashboards. These tend to have large relatively static areas for long periods. Every regular LCD I've seen gets horrific burn-in after a month or three and then burns a lot of wasted electricity for bonus points.
But that's my point -- the contrast for regular black and white text is so much worse with color eInk than it is for regular black-and-white eInk.
It seems like a terrible tradeoff to make, for colors that are still terrible.
Reading a graphic novel on a color e-ink reader will be so washed out... if you really want the color, it seems like you still have to just read it on an iPad etc.
For some specialized uses, sure: think about researchers wanting to look at illuminated manuscripts, especially wanting to see marginalia and the like. A large, low-eyestrain way of seeing high-quality scans would be very handy.
Or a phone. Do either of these exist yet as single display devices? I've only seen half measures with a regular LCD plus an e-ink add on that was very much a gimmick.
I would be so thrilled for an e-ink phone to get rid of my current one with. I don't play movies, the refresh rate doesn't need to be great, it does need to be color, and if the battery lasts a week again... well worth it.
Oh, that's exciting! I was last looking hard in 2018 but I'm still surprised I didn't notice.
Alas, I've got the whole "phone needs to be small enough to use one handed" due to disability stuff so https://www.gsmchoice.com/en/catalogue/hisense/a5c/ is their smaller one and it's a bit big but close...
Might be a wait until there's enough market for a niche of both not huge and also e-ink. There was a bar e-ink phone though! I'm surprised they can't just put a more complex OS on it given the resolution...
> Is there any practical use for color ePaper yet though?
> It's certainly not ready for advertising -- instead of a vibrant color image, it looks like something printed on newspaper and left to fade in the sun for 5 years.
This is still a big improvement over black and white if you're displaying, say, a math textbook.
Me personally: manga, retro magazines, papers with colored charts etc. I am still looking for the day when we can read magazines, manga from the past in full vibrant color e-ink platform.
edit: speaking of which I am looking to purchase high quality retro gaming magazines (PC, Playstation 1 in particular). anybody wants to get in touch please reply.
This page implements its own custom scrolling behavior that tries (but fails) to mimic the smooth scrolling behavior that is default in most web browsers.
It probably feels like something is slightly off if you have smooth scrolling enabled, but it's extremely and obviously jarring if you have it disabled.
I have concluded over the years that scrolljacking is always bad. It’s not possible to do it well, as the browser platform doesn’t provide the primitives needed to make it work. I have seen I think two implementations that were almost acceptable, but they still failed badly in the end.
This page is made much nicer by disabling JavaScript and removing the nice-scroll class from the root element (they did that part badly too—without JavaScript, you can’t scroll at all until you remove that class).
Let's hope clearink[1] and other competitors get funding and push their tech forward. Clearink seems to be targeting educational emerging markets fisrt though[2].
I wonder why the e-ink company company is using this strategy. I feel like there are a huge amount of embedded devices that would absolutely love to have a screen like this or cannot even exist without a such a screen. But the amount of NDAs, restricted dev tools, and unit costs kill most of these devices in their infancy.
I was thinking along the lines that someone will come along and eat their lunch once patents expire so they won't be able to reap the benefits of scaling.
To me, it would make sense to invent in capturing a larger market if e-ink believed that they could compete at scale.
Because there's no real market, the only company "innovating" on the original technology is E-Ink. With a 20-year head start locking down iterative improvements, the technology may never get out of the tarpit.
I'm working in the display industry. I've never heard anyone in our industry talk about this "tarpit" or "locking down". Could you explain exactly what you mean or what you are claiming?
Like many I just assume that the potential marginal profits are too thin to overcome the royalties demanded and the transactional costs of negotiating with E Ink. The market is indeed small, trying to grow it by scaling production is speculative at best, and there are plenty of other investment opportunities. So even if E Ink's royalty and others demands are "reasonable", they might still easily impose too much of a barrier to invite any interest.
This dynamic would only be compounded by E Ink apparently spending considerable effort securing its patent position for the indefinite future. There's little potential to achieve a demanding, independent market position short of buying E Ink.
The software industry is a great example. It doesn't matter how nominally low commercial software license prices are (and were); the amount of innovation and productivity unleashed by gratis FOSS is incalculably greater than would have ever been possible otherwise. And it inured to commercial products and services just as much as to users directly using FOSS. Even the smallest amount of friction at various points can turn interest away given how transactional costs can multiply, and given opportunity costs. An explosion of diversity and emergence of a rich ecosystem is often a prerequisite to creating even the most speculative market potential.
That said, I take your point. It is all just an assumption, and I don't have any evidence. Thank you for pointing that out, challenging me, and forcing me to take reconsider my opinion.
There may be another equilibrium where they make more in total, but no guarantee that it will be reached if they lower their fee.
Say you were getting a million dollars a year totally passively and I offered you an option where your income would temporarily drop to 1% of that but had an 80% chance of recovering to 1.2 million per year after a couple years and a 20% chance of recovering to only 100k/yr. Would you take it?
And what if the whole income stream had fair odds of drying up after a couple more years regardless?
Sometimes issues like this are solved by finding a risk seeking buyer to take most of the upside in exchange for giving the owner a more secure position. But when the maximum payoff of the high-risk-route isn't high enough it won't attract risk seekers.
Another HN thread mentioned https://www.clearinkdisplays.com/ ; their marketing at least seems to offer nearly everything I'd want in a color display.
(Their demo video shows the display reflecting ambient light sources like glass does, which is definitely a bad thing. I don't want it to look like glass and I don't want a glass panel in front of it. I want a matte surface that I can touch without smudging it.)
A comparable high-brightness 1080p display is about the same price [1], but uses a lot more electricity and from my experience with them, they have definite lifespan (2-4yrs, despite the 100k hours light lifetime claim) if they're running 24/7.
Well McD uses Samsung's OHF series screens and I have yet to see sunlight diminish them. I expect other restaurants to adopt them or similar. Pretty much eating 200+ watts an hour in typical use for a 55 inch screen
I don't want to come off as a pedant, but "watts an hour" doesn't make sense in this context.
Watts are a unit of power, energy per time. Joules are a unit of energy.
One watt is precisely one joule per second.
"Watts [per] hour" would be a change in power per time which is equivalent to an acceleration of energy and not an amount of energy.
To get an amount of energy, you multiply the power (watts) by an amount of time. If you want the energy in units of joules, you multiple the watts by the number of seconds in which the power was consumed. That's why kilowatt-hour a is a unit of energy; it's equivalent to one watt applied for one hour. One hour is 3600 seconds, so one kilowatt-hour is equal to 3600 kilojoules.
I believe you meant that the screens consume 200+ watts.
E-ink only actively uses power while it's changing the content on the screen. Assuming you want a static image, e-ink can outlast that easily while using virtually no power. Mine lasts for five years now even though it's "on" the entire time (because even when it's locked, it displays a wallpaper).
Power isn’t the main issue I’d be concerned about re: “lifespan” for signage. I wonder more about how it handles long-term UV exposure, day-night temperature cycles, changing humidity, etc.
Feels like a bit of a no-mans land size wise. Too small to be good menu boards or art displays, too big and expensive to be most of the other options I can think of.
I'm not sure. One benefit of e-ink is the low power use.
Some on-street transit stops have displays with live schedules displayed. I wonder if there are use cases where you'd want that sort of kiosk somewhere you couldn't run power (and would power by solar).
4096 implies 4 bits per color. I don't think they can do that with their tech. Their tech is based on pigments. So I don't think they have 4096 pigments in each pixel. I think maybe 32 pigments at best and this isn't like LCD where they can control brightness so 32 is just 32, there's no 32 * 2^4 to get more.
I hope so, too. But this is not likely to happen any time soon, as the refresh rate of e-ink displays are still way too low. Meaning, unless you can watch a Video on it ... it won't be a competition in that segment.
Old advertising displays in the analog era used prisms that would turn in synchronicity to display one of three images. Their refresh rate was many seconds, but they still found (and continue to find) use in advertising anywhere from low-cost highway billboards to low-power display stands in malls and parking lots.
There are definitely many applications for slow refreshing displays.
But I would actually suspect, that advertisers would prefer the LCD as it is active. It catches the eye more, than the passive e-ink.
When they come down in price, I'm in for one of my displays.
For reading documentation or news articles, it's probably much more comfortable on the eyes.
I agree. I'd like to try a color 10" Kindle with a screen like that so I can properly read graphic novels for example, not sure that big a screen would be very useful for that.
I don't think waveshare manufactures panels. They're an integrator that sells lots of different stuff. I'm pretty sure they buy panels from different vendors and put them together with their kits. E-ink is like the liquid crystal supplier whose material then gets put into lots of different types of panels.
Yes, of course. Shopkit is E-ink's devkit sales. They'd never undercut their own distributors. It would be like expecting Samsung to be selling LCD screens at a lower price to mom and pop buyers than to Apple.
Eink has very low refresh rate usually. How long does an eink last of used regularly with high refresh rate e.g. What is the lifespan of Dasung's eink monitor or the Onyx Boox paper tablets which you can even play games and watch videos on?
The spec says 4096 colours, but I think there is plenty of potential already. Given a high enough resolution, adjacent pixels could just perceptually blend together. With the right algorithm, one can simulate many more levels of colours.
No one that actually means they won’t sell to random internet strangers has a price listed up front and center. This is likely a CYA from the legal department.
If you're considering E-Ink for environmental/ethical reasons, keep in mind that electricity may eventually come from renewable resources, while materials that go into electronics like E-Ink devices and tablets are definitely finite (and people die every day in Africa because of that). If you need to reduce eye strain and headaches because you read a lot, that's another story (blue light filtering glasses help, BTW). But if you already have a decent tablet, you're not doing the planet or anyone else a favor when you also buy an E-Ink device.
Edit: subaquamille raises great points about battery life and obsolescence which strengthen the argument for E-Ink.
Do people really think E-ink is environmentally friendly? I've never heard that angle before. The appeal of E-ink style displays always seemed to me to be the battery life and visibility in sunlight.
Is it wrong to associate low energy consumption with environmentally friendly? I don't follow e-ink news much, but I feel I've seen at least that angle somewhere.
Consider also batterie life and how it's affected by load cycle numbers: ablets get charged one every second day and e-ink devices once a month.
Consider also technologie obsolecsence: estimate the times it will take in 10 years for your devices to open a book, change pages, mark highlights. I hardly open a pdf now on my iPad mini and my e-ink device from the same period seems to do the same operation at lighting speed.
I mean there's no real innovation that will make your device anywhere near obsolete in a few years. My Paperwhite from 2015 is pretty identical to ones sold now, and unlike with phones and tablets, software support is still there. So unless you break it, it's probably gonna outlive your phone/tablet/laptop. Mine for sure did.
> My Paperwhite from 2015 is pretty identical to ones sold now
Yes, you're right if you're looking at update time of the display, which I have. There's pretty much no improvement. That's due to the physics of pigment particles. I don't see a way for them to improve that. They have improved contrast ratios. The whites of their carter displays are much better than the previous gen pearl and vizplex before that.
Consumption decisions made by individuals will never solve this problem, as it is more of a problem with labor/industrial regulation and corporate governance.
Pretty much correct. It’s a bit ridiculous that high-tech gadgets (rare earth metals and all that) are sometimes considered to be environmentally friendly. Still though, consumption choices will ultimately never save the environment.
