[mortenjorck]

I've long wondered why electrophoretic displays (the generic term for E Ink, which is a proprietary name) continue to be exponentially more expensive at sizes larger than a Kindle while other technologies like OLED have become vastly more affordable in larger formats over a similar timeframe.

The best I can tell is that there just hasn't been an investment in scaling up fabrication anywhere near what the likes of LG (mostly LG, actually) has done with >40" OLED panels. Presumably the demand isn't there yet, and so larger-format electrophoretics remain the product of low-volume, high-cost manufacturing processes.

[ScottFree]

That's because OLED has 45 years of active development behind it's belt. EInk only has 24.

[0] The first OLED patent was filed in 1975 and the first practical OLED was created in 1987. Only in the past 5 years (2015-2020) has OLED been used widely enough to bring the price down.

[1] The first patent for an microencapsulated electrophoretic display was filed in 1996. The earliest practical EINK screen I could find was the Sony Librié in 2004.

[lostgame]

But e-ink technology isn’t ready to go out of the gate - the refresh rate is still a significant issue that makes it virtually purposeless for much beyond reading. If it is at this point, it just didn’t happen quickly enough.

[nitrogen]

I'd like a very large e-ink display for artwork, signage, and metrics. It doesn't have to refresh more than once every several seconds.

[megous]

Even for signage it has some spectacular failure modes. Where LCD would just not show anything, the e-ink will keep the last (and invalid) information confusing everyone in the process.

[3fe9a03ccd14ca5]

Some of the eink displays linked here have 12s refresh, and it does a super annoying flash black/white process while refreshing.

[lostgame]

Then you are a niche case. In order to forward a new technology, the masses need to adapt it. Apple, for instance, had to upscale the manufacture of Retina displays by starting with a proven successful product - then moving it to the iPad, then moving it to MacBooks.

We had e-book readers for e-ink, but they stayed at a super slow refresh rate. There was no reason to create a tablet sized e-ink display until the ReMarkable removed the issue of the delay.

Now we will have clones of that, and after that we will see a push to larger displays.

Mass manufacturing is hugely about cost balance vs. demand.

I think digital whiteboards in offices would be a great market for this. Again, though, if you’re going to draw on it at all there needs to be zero latency.

[dingaling]

>There was no reason to create a tablet sized e-ink display

Of course there was; large-format publications like newspapers, magazines and technical documents. All requiring large display area and not needing fast refresh. But yet, all ignored by the manufacturers and so LCD tablets became the default for those despite their drawbacks.

[akavel]

How about ClearInk? https://youtu.be/kE_byDwLjxk?t=34

Also, ye olde e-Ink has plans for Q3 2020: https://youtu.be/vOTid3I-4EI

[arendtio]

A few years ago those Pixel Qi displays had quite acceptable refresh rates (the Notion Ink Adam had one of those displays):

https://youtu.be/193w4JLm5hE?t=286