[chrisgp]

I remember this project from a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25063726 Very cool idea but the screen used was $2k+, and two years later the price is the same.

Seems like we're still a long way off from reasonably priced large e-ink displays -- very curious to see any progress in this space.

[wakeupcall]

As written by others, probably due to eink the company itself.

I love eink. I have several readers, a remarkable which I adore.

I wouldn't mind using a slow-refresh display for coding. The price just makes it impossible. Having color for this task, even if washed out, would be an absolute boon.

As for all eink announcements, they may have the tech, but they might make it so so expensive that nobody is going to translate it into mass production product. Without volume, we'll never get better prices.

Been watching eink for a lifetime now. I read each announcement as a red herring at this point..

[dotancohen]

  > Been watching eink for a lifetime now. I read each announcement as a red herring at this point..

I didn't even want to read the announcement, because I already know it's showcasing exactly the tech that I want but will never be made available. I've had half a dozen E-ink devices and I love them. But it seems like the company behind the tech has an active incentive to keep it out of consumers' hands.

[captainmuon]

I can confirm (take it with a grain of salt, I can't give you written sources but it matches the experience of many people). I previously worked in the display and industrial PC industry, and we tried to buy e-ink panels. The reseller would only sell them to us after giving them a detailed business plan. The sample we got had labels scratched from the chips (OK this is actually more common than you might think). And I had a strong suspicion that it was artificially limited to a lower color depth than possible [1].

Even further, a Chinese colleague hinted that they will never sell to you if you are doing anything in the consumer space (except you are one of the big e-reader makers of course). And that the traditional display companies could retool pretty quickly to make e-ink instead, but won't. It's all very very odd to me. I would suspect a cartel, but it doesn't make any sense - e-ink is too slow and to ugly to really cannibalize laptop and monitor sales. We had good use cases: industrial PCs, outdoors informational displays, and so on. But apparantly not good enough for e-ink.

----

[1] There is a look-up-table in the microcontroller that tells the display how much current to use to switch a pixel to a given color. It depends on the previous color of the pixel and the temperature. These "waveforms" or "wavetables" are proprietary and secret. It looks like they are just "good enough" and small enough to fit into the cheap MCU. I suspect you could get better results by using larger and better tuned tables, and I've seen a hobbyist actually get higher color depth by using their own waveforms.

[Cthulhu_]

> And that the traditional display companies could retool pretty quickly to make e-ink instead, but won't. [...] e-ink is too slow and to ugly to really cannibalize laptop and monitor sales.

I don't think it would cannibalize these sales, but I do think that if e-ink was cheaper and competitive with LCD, it would be everywhere.

As it stands though, LCD and probably OLED will overtake any use cases that e-ink would have had. The company behind e-ink dropped the ball there, thinking too highly and too exclusively of their own product. It's not that fancy, like, bruh.

[ineedasername]

>an active incentive to keep it out of consumers' hands.

They seem to act that way, but what would be the actual incentive? (As apposed to just bad business acumen)

[n8cpdx]

You might be surprised at how many companies get comfortable servicing a commercial niche and just choose not to pursue consumer growth. Without pursuing it, the potential value is hypothetical and internally it can be hard to build a compelling case for mass marketization.

There is a lot of effort required to scale up technologies to the point that it is affordable for consumers. In the software space I see it with solutions (think $500+/year/seat licensing) that could be broadly useful, but the company doesn’t want to make intuitive or bug free (enterprise software users will tolerate a lot of abuse). In the hardware space, there is a risk of building a million units of something that doesn’t sell (think Surface RT).

[mertd]

They are either impossibly incompetent or there is something about the technology that makes mass availability in different form factors not viable and our laymen understanding doesn't see it.

[robinsoh]

> They are either impossibly incompetent or there is something about the technology that makes mass availability in different form factors not viable and our laymen understanding doesn't see it.

You are correct, it is the equivalent of me as a display engineer coming here and saying "Cray computers has an active incentive to keep it out of consumer's hands" or alleging "Microsoft is blocking progress in the operating system industry using their patent". If you examine my comment history, you'll see I've tried repeatedly before on HN to explain why the physics of electrophoresis is the dominant limitation in the industry but that is apparently harder to understand and harder to accept, whereas people saying things like "the company behind the tech has an active incentive to keep it out of consumers' hands." or "the technology is locked by a company that doesn't innovate nor mass produce their tech. " without citations or any evidence is accepted as the gospel truth. :-)

[haroldp]

Why does my 12 year old kindle-keyboard refresh so much faster and better than any eink hobby display that I can buy? Do you think there is any hope of this changing?

[derefr]

Conspiracy theory: it's because e-ink technology has military (stealth / penaid) applications. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=499TkWOl4PM; then picture a "chameleon jet-fighter" that syncs its color to the surrounding sky; or better yet, a chameleon missile. Without losing range due to needing to power active panels.)

I don't necessarily mean to imply that the military is restricting the tech for competitive reasons; but rather just that E Ink Corporation might be price-anchoring relative to what their biggest customer is willing to pay.

(See also: why "holographic glitter" is so expensive, compared to other metallic glitters. Holo-glitter paint is an effective radar diffuser; and, more obviously, the glitter itself is literally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure) !)

[h2odragon]

Another conspiracy theory: the LCD cartel has been paying them not to compete. Given any actual difficulties yet to be worked out for mass production of eink (and there's always something), they may just be making more money by threatening to compete with LCD displays than they could by actually doing so.

[ggm]

Holo glitter works in the radar domain. So, its passive tech which has an effect.

EInk has a refresh time. Which is a significant mismatch to the flight speed of devices which seek to mask themselves against changing background. More to the point, optical detection is the least worry in this space. by the time it's visible in motion, its already a problem. '

For on-the-ground, its easier to put it under a canopy.

EInk does nothing for radar, or thermal imaging. So your proposed conspiracy is to defeat human eyes, which rarely if ever are the first-spotters. The circumstances where using radar breaches your own privacy are understood. I would expect an ML vision system could defeat this anyway. (and I say that as a bit of a long-term non-believer in AI)

I love a good conspiracy, but alas, I think this isn't it. The grassy knoll is just, after all, a patch of grass, and not an EInk facsimile, in my personal opinion.

[xvector]

> a "chameleon jet-fighter" that syncs its color to the surrounding sky;

would be largely worthless as visual isn't really the primary way we detect and destroy aircraft anymore.

[jve]

Yeah I wonder if price point is justified or not.

Accessible pricing may result in eink screens taking consumers, businesses, hobbyists and whatnot by storm. But meh...

[dredmorbius]

My thought: market segmentation, and/or the inability to do so meaningfully.

The principle characteristics of e-ink displays are size, resolution, refresh rate, and colour gamut.

(Even B&W displays have a range of greyscale gamuts.)

Small displays are now reasonably cheap, with displays of ~6--8" available for $20--50.

Larger displays, suitable for advertising, marketing, or other commercial/industrial applications are much more expensive, as noted here. Some of that is likely cost-driven, but another element is that if a larger supply were offered, the price would fall. Absent some way of bracketing specific applications, there's little to keep, say, advertising or commercial users from making do with cheaper consumer-grade displays.

There's a somewhat similar rationale that was arrived at in the 19th century by French engineer / economist / polymath Jules Dupuit, in describing the rationale by which 3rd class rail carriages were so much poorly fitted than 2nd class --- if the 3rd class accommodations were merely sufficient then they would cannibalise 2nd class ticket sales. Instead, 3rd class was made intentionally bad.

That's a dynamic which is replicated today in both transporation (e.g., airline coach class seating) and free-tier Internet and information services.

I don't know that this is what's driving EInk's business strategy. But I have my suspicions.

[maratc]

I would not assume any malicious intent. e-Ink is a wonderful solution looking for a problem.

Anything with a mouse pointer can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates.

Anything looking at a web page can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates.

Anything playing video can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates.

This leaves us with e-readers, but that market is very limited in size. Not everyone wants a dedicated book-reading device when a multipurpose device can, besides everything else, also read books.

Even smaller markets are information kiosks and "smart" price tags in supermarkets.

[mdp2021]

The problem simply is: working with natural light with energy efficient systems on a mainly document-based flow.

Of those notes: I have used mouse pointers with E-Ink and had little issue - only, I also had touchscreen so the mouse was in general unnecessary. That statement about hypertext is absurd: hypertext consumption is fine on E-Ink - provided your purpose is to read those hypertexts, instead of using the web in some "different" way, by the way alien from what it was intended. And video is usable, though suboptimal, if needed - the technology was not born for that, but just in case it can cope.

The practical verification is given: there are people who have been using large E-Ink devices, coupled with keyboards, for a long time, to work on documents.

And again let us suggest an important thing: if you actually have to work intellectually on a document, the same contents will remain in front of you for a relatively long time. This makes a technology "cheap on state retention, costly on state switch" the sensible solution.

[maratc]

A huge part of the web is Facebook, and it has videos. Lots of them. Even if we confine ourselves to “hypertext” (HN for example), it needs scrolling, and that’s not smooth enough on e-Ink, because slow refresh rates again. Documents are sometimes long, and that again needs scrolling. Which is again, bad.

The fact that it could be done in practice doesn’t mean that it should.

[dylan-m]

> Not everyone wants a dedicated book-reading device when a multipurpose device can, besides everything else, also read books.

Someone definitely flunked the messaging on this one, and I find it very disappointing :( The key advantage to an e-ink style of display is less eye strain, because you aren't staring into a bright light source that refreshes 60 times a second. (And battery life, of course; you can put your book down and forget about it until later). And that this limits the device is fine: a lot of people do a lot of reading! People like reading! Alas, as more and more people grow up reading all sorts of things on LCDs, so the inconvenience and the discomfort is just a normal part of reading for them, that becomes a much harder sell.

[nybble41]

> because you aren't staring into a bright light source that refreshes 60 times a second

LCDs update 60 times per second (or more… 120 Hz displays are becoming more common) but they don't flicker the way CRTs used to, so there's no reason to think this would contribute to eye strain. Brightness could be an issue but you can just lower the brightness of the screen to match the surroundings.

As I see it the advantages of e-ink displays lie mainly in their visibility in direct sunlight and minimal idle power consumption.

[maratc]

You don’t have to convince me (I bought the first commercially available reader, Sony PRS-500, for $350 the day it went on sale, and several others since), but for great many people their laptop does the job just fine, while many others enjoy the dead tree variety.

[orril]

I comfortably watch videos, browse the web, and do work every single day on my eink external monitor, my eink cell phone, and eink tablet. it is absolutely magical how fast the refresh rate is on modern eink android devices. you wouldn't want to watch your favorite nature documentary, but it is very useful for getting pertinent information from a video., watching lectures or stand up comedy works perfectly fine, and eink is vastly superior in my opinion for browsing the web if you primarily read when you are on your computer.

[aaroninsf]

Hypothesis: slow refresh is a feature of great value, if the goal is to moderate media consumption and disrupt the "engagement" drip.

Slow refresh is a fine way of supporting healthy data dieting.

[Shared404]

This is why I want more availability of eink displays.

There's lots of places I would like to put an information readout, but not have it be an attention draw through anything.

More related to the fact that eink uses external lighting I suppose. Still.

Also I wish I had an eink screen for code.

[ddingus]

Yep. Low temporal fidelity has its attractions. The items you mention are high on my personal preference lists.

[roeles]

There's a whole range of applications where it makes sense. Since it is very well readable in full sunlight, e-ink is very suitable for low refresh aircraft displays. I suspect the same could apply for all kinds of HMIs which are used outdoors.

[maratc]

Aircraft displays need to work in full darkness too. e-Ink might make sense but its price, compared to some LCD screen, might not.

Otherwise, I take from your comment that we're in agreement that "e-Ink is a solution looking for a problem".

[ChuckNorris89]

>Even smaller markets are information kiosks and "smart" price tags in supermarkets.

That's not true. Electronic shelf labels sold to supermarket chains and retailers, far outnumber the number of e-book readers sold to consumers. Especially that electronic price tags usually have a fixed shelf-life (~3 years or even shorter if they get damaged), so they need to be replaced often, while consumers generally keep their e-book readers for many more years.

[maratc]

I haven’t seen any chain that went fully eink, but I’m not from the US and the labor is not so expensive here, so the alternative (paying people to print labels and attach them) looks cheaper here.

[stjohnswarts]

Musk should buy them and put a fire under their asses.

[bipson]

Not sure if you're joking or not... :S

[stjohnswarts]

mostly tongue-in-cheek. it would be nice to see progress rather than milking the patents.

[jandrese]

It's like 3D printers back in the 90s and 2000s. There's a huge potential industry just waiting for the patents to finally run out because the early innovator only cares about tiny niche uses of the product and not undercutting those niches with affordable consumer goods.

[mrandish]

> Been watching eink for a lifetime now.

If it's been that long, do the blocking patents expire soon?

[voakbasda]

One modus operandi of such companies is to amass a lot of patentable ideas as trade secrets, which subsequently can be rolled out as sequential patents. This effectively extends their monopoly on the products as a whole, despite patents expiring that protect the initial innovations. They can always roll something out sooner if a competitor might be approaching their IP moat.

[nicd]

One of my friends works on an e-ink product. My understanding is that one of the major trade secrets are the e-ink waveforms (the sequence of voltages used to print and erase content on the display). They are shared under NDA and baked into product firmware. Apparently the open-source versions are significantly worse.

[userbinator]

Apparently the open-source versions are significantly worse.

Or perhaps that's just what they want you to think...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284

[mdp2021]

> the open-source versions are significantly worse

That can be overcome, especially with sustained collaborative effort.

But the production of the displays, controller software aside, will not be "cheap".

[ratmice]

Hearsay, but I've read in the past that these were tailored specifically to the display, so difficult to actually collaborate since each display is a little different.

[resoluteteeth]

If the devices are being embedded in consumer products like eink screens, is it really possible to treat the technology as a trade secret?

[lostcolony]

They only go out in devices after they've been patented.

Think of 3 years of research. Rather than it leading to three years of progressively better consumer devices, you instead patent the first idea and use it to go to market, then sit on the rest. After X amount of time (where X < 20 years), you patent the next winning idea, and go to market with it. Etc.

This presents a challenge to would be competitors; to go to market, you have to leapfrog the existing technology and patent (with as broad a language as patents tend to have), hope the incumbent doesn't have something that would immediately deprecate your product (or at least, relies itself on something you patented along the way), and then overcome the incumbent's existing advantage in in the market. And also be prepared for a legal fight, since almost assuredly one of you is going to accuse the other of infringing a patent.

[lostcolony]

If you want an e-ink device using 20 year old technology you can get a used one for cheaper than any would be competitor can produce one.

If you want one using anything developed in the past 5 years...oh, look, that's why eink still has a research division; they've been slowly improving things (not as fast as actual competition would cause, but enough to make it hard for someone to just leapfrog them using seed capital) and so would-be competitors are now running up against patents with 15+ years left.

[Cd00d]

> I wouldn't mind using a slow-refresh display for coding

I've seen this sentiment a lot when eink displays are discussed here. But, I'm not quite sure I get it.

I've typed in platforms with significant lag between a keystroke and the character showing. It's horrible! So often, you think maybe you made a typo, but have to wait to see it and fix it, instead of a quick few backspaces and ONWARD! I find it really disruptive to my train of thought and it breaks the brain-interface link.

Maybe the eink displays refresh fast enough to make this be a minimal issue, but my few years old Kindle Paperwhite doesn't have me confident that's true.

Or, maybe I just type way worse than those of you that want an eink dev environment.

[wakeupcall]

An eink display doesn't handle the same as a regular framebuffer, and the speed of the update depends a lot of what operation you want to do on it and how you want it to look like.

With partial updates the latency can be pretty low. There are many ways to control ghosting in a way that doesn't affect the latency too much (essentially, refresh asynchronously - and again - only where needed)

For regular typing, I have no doubts it can work without disruption. What is harder is modifying blocks of text. Scrolling quickly. It can be done, but would eventually require a full screen refresh to get good quality due to ghosting again.

(Ironically eink demonstrated high refresh rate video playback what.. one year ago on their screens? - another vaporware demo)

In a sense, it's like working remotely with a slow modem. The latency is not high, but you need to be smart on what you display (the original vi editor would actually be a _perfect_ fit for this ;))

The question is why I would put up with all this effort and limitations with eink. For me, it's because eink is MUCH easier on the eyes. It's pretty much the only display which is truly readable outdoors. So far I wasn't able to use any single tablet/phone/laptop outside, despite owning devices with pretty bright 500nit screens.

[robinsoh]

> With partial updates the latency can be pretty low. There are many ways to control ghosting in a way that doesn't affect the latency too much (essentially, refresh asynchronously - and again - only where needed)

I would be interested to see some proof of above, I haven't myself seen a usable implementation that successfully controls all those behaviors and latency. People will often point to Dasung but I've used it and I feel it is unusable.

[robinsoh]

> (Ironically eink demonstrated high refresh rate video playback what.. one year ago on their screens? - another vaporware demo)

When you say "high refresh rate video playback", you're referring to A2 mode at 8fps right? Because that's the only demonstration ever seen, and I wouldn't call it vapourware because that's what you're using when you use a Dasung panel.

[LeifCarrotson]

Displaying a character on an e-ink display can be low latency, it's deleting a character that takes time (or vice versa, depending on the chemistry and fore/background inversion).

[spaniard89277]

Eink displays no longer have that problem. Look at Boox and Dasung displays.

[robinsoh]

> Eink displays no longer have that problem. Look at Boox and Dasung displays.

Just curious, have you actually sat down and used and looked at a Boox or a Dasung display? I think you'll find that A2 mode is not really what the marketing videos make it out to be, at least in my usage of it.

[orril]

i use two daily and they are wonderful. definitely not as fast as an l c d but you can watch video and read and scroll and write very well in my opinion. well worth the trade off for the view ability and eases on the eyes

[JohnJamesRambo]

Do they just not believe the pricing rules all other business is pretty much based on or what? With scale comes the real money, right?

[bee_rider]

I think this is the real head-scratcher.

Wondering if either they just fundamentally aren't capable of scaling up their business, so they are getting as much as they can out of what little they can make.

Or maybe there's some confusing IP situation and they just want to create a minimal number of devices to keep some sort of... copyrights or patents alive or something (as far as I know they don't work that way in the US, but maybe other countries?)

Or maybe this is, like, just the CEO's hobby project and and they don't realize that people want these things?

Or maybe, actually, only a couple nerds like us want these E-ink screens. Assuming tech nerds are generally pretty well off overall, but a fairly small-ish group, maybe E-ink screens just end up being fairly price insensitive as a result?

I dunno. Seems weird though.

[brewdad]

> Or maybe this is, like, just the CEO's hobby project and and they don't realize that people want these things?

There was definitely a time when I really wanted a color e-ink screen. But now, with iPads having 10 hour battery life, I can get all day performance and better colors and refresh rates from that device, so my desire for color e-ink has greatly declined.

I do love my b&w e-reader though and use it every day.

[mynameisvlad]

I mean, is 10 hours really that long? My SuperNote notebook lasts for days, my Kobo for weeks. I certainly have had flights longer than 10 hours. At least nowadays you sometimes have a USB-A charging port if you needed, or a 120V if you're lucky.

[spaniard89277]

Idk about you, but I really really bad want to code outdoors, surrounded by nature.

I currently do that with an x260 but it's not cobfortable at all, no matter how much brightness and battery life you have.

[janekm]

I think it's the last one, the two proven applications are book readers and price labels (and a few niche applications like readable displays for long-life battery-operated devices, Remarkable). There's not many potential users clamouring for a dumb terminal "laptop" (the battery life advantage would disappear real quick if you tried to compile large code projects) with E-Ink screen. Not that many people would buy a laptop that can't play YouTube videos or go on Facebook. Even I wouldn't want to write code on a laptop with the display latency of e-ink...

[spaniard89277]

Forget about latency. Boox and Dasung displays for desktop show that it's entirely possible. They only lack color and to be in a laptop to be 95% solved problem.

[ineedasername]

Do they even manufacture the screens themselves? I though they mostly just did r&d and licensed things, in which case scale shouldn't really be an issue, at least on manufacturing the things.

[ineedasername]

It's possible they don't see much elasticity in the market, e.g. that a 50% decrease in cost would net them >= 50% increase in sales.

In the very short term they're probably right, but I think they'd be wrong in the long term: once the price drops it might take time but I think people would come up with a variety of novel products and use cases. Amazon for example has made a big bet on digital comics w/comixology. I'm sure they'd love to offer an affordable color comic reader. Or cheap 8.5x11 tablets could become the default note taking devices for a lot of students, especially for many STEM classes.

[m12k]

I just wish it was possible to build a version of the Frame TV that didn't still use 30% power while in "picture mode" but instead used a color e-ink display like this to cover the screen with art/photos when not in TV mode.

[Someone1234]

It is a cool idea, but creating that would require you to put a color e-ink display over the normal display panel, which may cause it to look washed out/lose crispness.

I think it is technically possible, I'm just not sure many would accept the cost/functionality trade-offs. But I may be wrong.

[mynameisvlad]

I think the idea parent comment had is to use the rollable technology from the article so that it only overlays when not in use.

[RoryH]

Yes! This is the perfect use case for Photo frames, or even for advertising billboards where there's no need to have humans change the advert.

[robinsoh]

> Seems like we're still a long way off from reasonably priced large e-ink displays -- very curious to see any progress in this space

"reasonably priced"? It will always be more expensive than LCD/OLED because the volumes are completely different, like 1000x different.

[Kuinox]

The volumes are different because the technology is locked by a company that doesn't innovate nor mass produce their tech. There are tons of applications of low power screen. It could even outweighs the OLED in term of volume.

Some companies in China, that ignore the patents, manage to produce 20 fps 23" eink screen. Add color to it and it's the perfect screen for a lot of computer work.

[varenc]

Awhile back the Founder of Visionect refuted this idea that patents are holding things back on hacker news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25067824

My personal take: E-Ink screens have too many drawbacks for 99% of consumers to be at all interested in them.

[jessriedel]

That comment doesn't really have any evidence beyond the fact that it's the opinion of the founder of Visionect, it just makes assertions, so I wouldn't say "refuted".

Color e-ink has a killer app: Changeable photo display in homes. This is much harder to achieve with alternative technologies (any display emitting light is an immediate no-go for just hanging on your wall). In contrast, e-readers have a significantly smaller advantage over the alternative of just reading on your phone or tablet, yet that seems to have been enough of a market for them to become cheap. And unlike e-readers, where you only really need one per person, there is hardly any limit to the number of displays people would put in their home if they do not emit light, have nice UI, and are cheap.

[bee_rider]

Is that really a killer market, though?

People have tried changeable photo displays before, with LCD or whatever. Of course, these require more power, but they are plugged in devices and I'm not convinced non-technical people think about the power consumption of their devices outside of really niche situation where everyone knows they supposed to care (large appliances like washing machines). And, even the best e-ink screen looks kind of washed out when displaying color, right?

Like I'm all in for an E-ink terminal, latency be damned, if someone make a no-fuss one for less than a couple hundred dollars. But I can't imagine wanting an E-ink picture frame over (say) an OLED one (although I guess burn in would be a problem there).

[quirkot]

Think bigger. Not photo display like "pictures on the end table"... photo display like "teenager has band posters on the wall" or even like "changing the wallpaper on my actual wall to match the new pintrest trend"

[jessriedel]

Having used one, I can say that changeable photo displays with LCDs, OLED, or anything emitting light is a non-starter. It lights up the whole room (think about what happens when you turn off the lights!) and just doesn't feel at all like you're looking at a printed out photo.

I haven't seen a color e-ink display in person so I can't speak confidently, but the demo videos don't look washed out to me.

[cmrdporcupine]

For black and white photos / etchings, etc. I can see it. But yeah, the colour will always look washed out, like older newsprint.

I too would really dig an e-ink terminal. Just needs to do VT-100 sequences and let me run Emacs. But I think it's likely a niche product.

[eli]

"Why aren't prices of large eink panels cheaper?" is a question that can only be answered with opinions until someone actually does it.

Seems like the opinion of someone actually in the business of selling large eink panels should count for a lot more than speculation by an outsider.

Visionect sells some eInk signs for showing the status of meeting and conference rooms. I thought that was a clever application -- saves companies from having to run wires and mount a bunch of hardware.

Color photo displays could be cool, but I suspect it'd be hard to compete with the incredibly cheap Google Home and Alexa devices with screens.

[kortilla]

> Seems like the opinion of someone actually in the business of selling large eink panels should count for a lot more than speculation by an outsider.

Not really. That particular person’s entire business depends on eink being a high margin business product.

[jessriedel]

> Seems like the opinion of someone actually in the business of selling large eink panels should count for a lot more than speculation by an outsider.

I agree it's certainly more authoritative than a random person (that's why I said "beyond"), but it's still just one man and we still don't know his incentives well.

[robinsoh]

> Awhile back the Founder of Visionect refuted this idea that patents are holding things back on hacker news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25067824

Thank you for providing the link. I agree in general with that opinion as well.

[pjerem]

> Some companies in China, that ignore the patents, manage to produce 20 fps 23" eink screen.

I'm genuinely interested, are you talking about Onyxboox Mira or Dasung ? Because i thought that they manufactured official e-ink patented products

[Kuinox]

I was talking about Dasung. Dasung respect the patents? My bad then, I've read somewhere they were not.

[AlanYx]

Dasung panels are properly licensed from eInk Corp. They (Dasung) actually have a couple patents of their own on their e-ink driver board tech, which drives the panels. If you're searching a patent database, search for "Beijing Dasung".

[EGreg]

Which companies in China?

Can they produce large format screens, like a few feet on each side?

Or do we have to buy small ones and tile them? We probably can’t tile them as they need electronics around each border.

I want to do e-paintings. So if you tell me which Chinese companies, ie their websites, I would try to reach out !

[robinsoh]

> The volumes are different because the technology is locked by a company that doesn't innovate nor mass produce their tech.

Citation needed. I'd love to see some evidence backing up your incredibly confident claim.

> Some companies in China, that ignore the patents, manage to produce 20 fps 23" eink screen. Add color to it and it's the perfect screen for a lot of computer work.

I've never heard of that. Please share some evidence for this please. 20 fps electrophoresis? In my opinion, that's physically impossible unless the screen is 0.1mm thick. How did they escape Q = vA ?

[dalbasal]

"Citation needed" is not a nice quip. You're responding to a forum comment, not reviewing a paper.

It's fine to be dubious of a claim, and it's fine to ask politely for sources or rationales. Just be nice.

[robinsoh]

> It's fine to be dubious of a claim, and it's fine to ask politely for sources or rationales. Just be nice.

I was not aware that "citation needed" is considered impolite. It is something I use at work a lot when interacting with colleagues. My apologies, I'll refrain from that in future.

[vanattab]

I would be willing to bet your colleagues at work would find it annoying and impolite too.

[scratcheee]

I disagree, it is in fact a very polite and fair minded way to respond to claim you find dubious. If anything they were being more polite than later in the comment when they suggested the claimed results should be impossible (though that's still a reasonable claim to make if they beleive it to be true).

Rather than saying the equivalent to "I think this cannot be true", a request for citation merely means "I am interested in this claim and would like to know the source" (even if phrased more tersely). The content is more indicative of the intent than the phrasing, and requesting a citation is not an accusation at all, it is a request for a source for further research.

[dalbasal]

>>it is in fact a very polite and fair minded way to respond to claim you find dubious.

Citation needed.

[endisneigh]

I didn’t consider citation needed to be a “mean” thing to say.

[greysonp]

I assume they're referring to Onyx and Dasung[1]. Not sure if it's actually 20fps (videos I've found look to be more in the low teens by my eye), and I believe they're making a lot of trade-offs around ghosting and stuff to achieve those frame rates. Also no idea what their licensing situation is.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRvlJ2HjH30

[ThrowawayR2]

E-Ink lists Dasung's monitor as one of their showcase products so that supposition is incorrect: https://www.eink.com/Laptop-Peripherals.html?type=applicatio...

[Kuinox]

https://youtu.be/RRvlJ2HjH30?t=250

[robinsoh]

Yes, that's a Dasung Paperlite. That's a regular E-Ink screen from the same manufacturer, not as you wrote "Some companies in China, that ignore the patents, manage to produce 20 fps 23" eink screen. ".

That's not 20 fps. That's A2 mode which is a 1 bit mode and is a non-stable state so it will decay. I'd recommend you read the user manual about how that works.

[mdp2021]

A2 should be 8fps, 125ms.

How does the 'Q = vA' law you mention apply, to reason on an example, to the case of A2, as a limiter to the rate?

> A2 mode which is a 1 bit mode and is a non-stable state so it will decay

It makes little sense to use A2 on a long-lasting render - nonetheless, I suppose the decay time will be relatively long (I have never notice an A2 dot change state...).

[fortran77]

This is an old trope on Hacker News, as predictable as "have you tried re-writing it in Rust." But there's little evidence it's true.

[jokowueu]

I don't think he is saying patents are bad. But the company it's self is .

[robinsoh]

> But the company it's self is .

and it would be lovely if he could share what leads him to believe that.

[Kuinox]

Did I hurt you personally for you to be so toxic with me ? Chill.

[m-p-3]

If the tech becomes attractice enough (high visibility in direct sunlight, lower power consumption, etc), maybe we'll see more public advertisers switch to them for digital signage, significantly increasing the demand and volume.

One can dream..

[rory096]

The transit stop use case really does seem to be ramping up, including the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority currently adding them to most surface Green Line stops: https://www.mbta.com/projects/solar-powered-e-ink-signs

Transit was one of the two core practical applications the Visionect founder mentioned in Nov 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25067359

[m-p-3]

Interesting. Now I'm curious about the tech used behind it to transmit the info accross the network. I'm wondering if a LoRa/LoRaWAN-based mesh network could do the trick to avoid using some kind of cell data or wired infrastructure, but also be energy-efficient enough to work using only solar power.

[Melatonic]

Aren't all e-ink displays highly visible in direct sunlight? You need exterior to even use them in the first place

[m-p-3]

I meant compared to traditional displays.

[Melatonic]

E-Ink is a ton more visible in direct sunlight compared to traditional displays?

[m-p-3]

Quite a bit more.

https://i.imgur.com/Z36BcCn.jpg

[robinsoh]

> One can dream..

Of faster than light travel? :-) They're limited by the physics of electrophoresis.

[m-p-3]

I mean there's other ways than refresh rate where there can be improvement, especially on color eInk displays. They managed to increase the DPI on this version after all :)

[mdp2021]

«Reasonably priced» very probably just meant "a price closer to their individual potential buyers' attributed value". That «LCD/OLED» will be cheaper does not affect that.

[jonplackett]

Surely if it’s much cheaper volumes also go up massively…

[robinsoh]

> Surely if it’s much cheaper volumes also go up massively…

No, that's not true. If you're making a black and white screen, and you sell it at the same price as a color screen, nobody will buy it. Volumes won't change if your product isn't better than something equivalently priced.

[dotancohen]

But the E-ink screen is much better in the regards that software developers want. Colour is not necessarily one of those regards.

[mdp2021]

Either this makes little sense, or it is (or may be) unclear. «Your product [must be] better than something equivalently priced» /and that performs the same function/. Now we are talking about large bistable colour displays - which have no competition.

[thrown12]

I bought it and it's an amazing product for coding.

[goldcd]

Surely it's both.

1) Product has to exist - and now it does tick 2) Has to be useful tick 3) Has to have possibility of being make cheaper by mass production no idea 4) Has to be put into mass production depends on 3

So we're currently stuck on 3.

Not sure there's much demand for a colour e-ink tablet - but maybe could be layered with a transparent OLED. I'd cough up an extra £100 for that. Normal tablet - with reading mode. Spend a while looking at static image, OLED turns off, e-ink layer fires up. Scroll down and the OLED takes over.

[jonplackett]

That would be pretty cool. Could the e-ink just be set to white while the LCD did it’s thing and the LCD to clear while e-ink does it’s thing?

[_ph_]

I am so disappointed that Amazon doesn't invest more in the Kindle. They have deep pockets and a guaranteed market. Currently, I am still holding out for an upgrade of the Oasis, but would be willing to spend quite some money for upgraded Kindles and I think I am not alone (even if they just go to 8" and USB-C/Qi charging, it would be worth it). Of course a 10" Kindle would be nice and a true A4 Kindle just a dream.

[xd1936]

I too think about this project all the time. I wish I could have a wall-mounted raw display to use with a Pi or Arduino as a picture frame that didn't cost thousands of dollars for the panel.