[lolryan]

The technology is there, but E Ink (the company) is steadfastly refusing to lower prices because they believe there's a market for this. Now go to Alibaba and find that you can get a flexible, full-color OLED sheet for the same price as a given size E Ink panel.

Go on eBay and buy an older NOOK device (they all ran Android) for $20, tape it to your wall, and point at your web page of choice.

[SequoiaHope]

A great example of patents strangling innovation. If anyone has more concrete details on the way this company is holding back this technology I’d love to read details. Thanks!

[amenod]

The irony is that they are probably limiting their profit too. With lower prices the number of applications would skyrocket and they would get much bigger income.

The only reason I can think of is that scaling the production would be difficult for some reason?

[areactnativedev]

From skimming through their website, it looks like they target business applications with bigger displays (Health Care, Transportation, Industrial & Packaging, ...) which I would assume are high margin contracts.

So maybe another reason would be that offering lower prices for big displays would reduce profits from these business clients more than it would increase profits from the additional low-margin mass-market volumes.

[GordonS]

If large screens with a decent refresh rate were readily available and competitively priced, I imagine they'd be a huge hit with devs - I know I'd love one.

[Godel_unicode]

The pertinent patents were filed in '96, so it's almost certainly not that?

[akiselev]

Last I checked there were over a dozen patents from the 1990s to the 2010s that cover everything from manufacturing to software. IIRC the most important patents actually cover some algorithms on the display controller that won't be public domain until the mid to late 2020s.

[namibj]

Europe doesn't have software patents.

I think non-US space would be enough of a market?

[vanderZwan]

IIRC it gets a bit messy once we start talking about hardware implementations of algorithms. I mean, is an electronics circuit that essentially implements an algorithm still a software patent?

[namibj]

Why does it need to be a hardware implementation?

[okatzzz2]

What makes you think it’s to do with patents? Maybe there’s just insufficient demand.

[vanderZwan]

There is insufficient demand for high priced e-ink screens. Which probably comes down to supply, which probably comes down to patents

[TaylorAlexander]

I am responding to a parent comment that suggested there was more demand but the company was holding it back. If that is true the only way one company could hold it back is patents.

[okatzzz2]

No. They could just choose not to sell at a lower price. In a frictionless market someone else would step in and sell the good at the lower price, but in reality if not enough people want it then that third party won’t bother.

[crimsonalucard]

I don't think the answer is that simple. Would the initial innovation even be worth pursuing if not the existence of patents? Hard to say. At the very lease we do know that in a decade there's no more strangleholds.

[Thorentis]

This is why I believe patent laws (and copyright laws, but that's another story) are completely broken. Innovation is being stilfled because the world is addicted to profit, and not just profit, but easy profit. Gone are the days when making a superior product was the only way to get ahead, no. Companies want exclusive monopolies over anything and everything they create. An engineer just has to draw squiggle on a whiteboard and that becomes the IP of the company they work for. The patent system needs a complete overhaul.

[luka-birsa]

They would drop the price if there was a large enough volume play behind it. Do you think they don't want to make money?

[christopoulos]

Do you have an example of such OLED sheet that you can recommend?