[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?

[captainmuon]

The panels are very similar. Amazon made their own driver board, and they put a lot of work into tuning it. The ones you can buy for hobbyists have very cheap driver boards that are merely "good enough".

Why they can't be a dollar or two more expensive and have better components, or why they can't just release the firmware source so people can improve it, I have no idea. I would almost say they are intentionally limiting it, but I've seen the same behavior from single-board-computer vendors, for example. It's really short sighted.

[robinsoh]

> why they can't just release the firmware source so people can improve it

Isn't kindle firmware published open source? What is in this stuff that they provide? https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

[robinsoh]

> 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?

I have no idea what you mean by "refresh so much faster and better" or what an "eink hobby display" is. To me, you can buy the same panel Kindle uses on the market and you can drive it with various different controllers and the "update latency" (electrophoretic panels don't refresh) will be different.

[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.

[derefr]

Not from below. From above. IMINT countermeasure, to make countries with imaging satellites take longer to notice you flying silent over water into their airspace (presuming you've already got MASINT stealth covered, and are moving onto higher-hanging fruit.) Gives aircraft the same long-distance stealth advantage a sub has: they don't see you coming until you're there.

(Admittedly, I was being a bit silly with the missile use-case.)

[ggm]

Being able to retint your visible spectrum view from 10,000ft and above would be useful, I agree.

I occasionally see referrals in flow text to a Chinese claim they invented "holographic quantum" radar and can see all current stealth low echo aircraft and subs. I suspect it's bullshit but in war, if stealth was a purturbation, and deep water subs a more historical perturbation toward MAD and now, this is another perturbation much as drones have altered the symmetry for tank and mechanised ground warfare.. "shrug"

[hattmall]

Could be great for low altitude drones and helicopters though

[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.

[derefr]

In combat, sure. Making yourself invisible to satellite imagery during long-range flyover missions, on the other hand...

[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.

[mdp2021]

> A huge part of the web is [some website]

Makes no sense. What is your point? "A huge part of woodwork deals with nails, and one cannot easily use a screwdriver for that". Well, if you are into woodwork, use a hammer! Evidently, we are not talking about woodwork here. Clarify your assumptions. It may seem you wanted to state "EPD is not the best solution for [some website] users", which brings nowhere unless you contextualize the statement with some idea (very preferably a plausible one) that makes it logically productive.

> Even if we confine

Confine? A screwdriver is optimal for driving screws. To """confine""" a screwdriver to that is "proper use". Hypertext (the World Wide Web, as intended, none the less) is something meant to be /read/ and at the same time explored non sequentially: it is properly consumed with reading friendly technologies. EPD is meant to be that.

> needs scrolling

Absolutely false, and also irrelevant: scrolls have in fact disappeared as standard practice centuries ago, and we invented tablets and paging in 3300BC, in Sumer (not to mention sheep and cattle raising eight further centuries earlier, from which the folio comes): paging has been the standard for over five millennia. And when we used scrolling, it was because some technology had that as the most appropriate use. Clay? Paging then. Papyrus? Scrolling then. Paper? Flipping then. What has changed?

Hypertext and sequential text do not need scrolling - we have paged since forever. And when the user wants, scrolling is available and perfectly usable with EPD. Slower than LCD? Well LCD has a number of properties inferior to those of EPD: if you have no use for these, why should you use EPD? Clearly the balance determined by all properties changes according to use case. This is really basic.

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

Very trivial principle, contextualize it - it can be applied to CRTs and brass plaques: there exist a number of properties for two or more technologies; some use cases will turn the balance in favour of A, others in favour of B etc. You will use a hammer when it is appropriate to use a hammer, and a screwdriver when it is appropriate to use a screwdriver, and you will do just like Ben Franklin recommended and "saw with a file and file with a saw when pressed". Again, all of this is as trivial as reasoning comes; to make the reasoning productive (and debatable), you have to add the uncommon assumptions, not the foundationals. You have confirmed the opposite point: just refer your statement to LCD!

It seems, outside analysis and towards immediacy, that you just do not see use cases for EPD: - it's you. We have tried to tell you: you do not have the need, others do. Just trust it, you will see it when you will want to see it. Some people do appreciate «working with natural light with energy efficient systems on a mainly document-based flow».

"Ah, and all the compromises then are overcome by the benefits"? Yes, that!

[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.

[stormbrew]

This isn't entirely true. It's not the same intensity of flicker, but LCDs do have a small amount of flicker at about half their refresh rate to flip voltage and reduce the chance of burn-in. Also, the backlight itself may flicker depending on what kind of light source is used (especially if it's not an LED backlight, but cheap LED lights do flicker -- see christmas lights -- so it's possible some cheaper LED panels might have this effect too?).

[murderfs]

Cheap LED christmas lights flicker because they don't have a bridge rectifier, so half of the input waveform is zero, at 60Hz. You're not going to see that kind of flicker in anything that requires real DC power (PWM frequencies for brightness control are generally way higher than 60Hz).

Some displays do this as a feature though (known as backlight strobing, motion blur reduction, etc.): LCDs take time to transition, so if you keep the backlight on at all times, you'll potentially see blurring from persistence of vision while the display is mid-transition. Instead, you can turn the backlight off until the screen has transitioned and then turn it back on so that you never show a partially transitioned image.

[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".

[t-3]

The main problems eink solves for me are eye strain and battery life. These might not be issues for you, but I often read 8+ hours in a day.

[roeles]

My experience is from gliders, which are only operated in VFR conditions (not more than 30 minutes before sunrise and not more than 30 minutes after sundown). VFR is nothing glider-specific though, so I can see them being useful in other VFR-operated aircraft too.

In my experience e-ink displays reduce eye strain and attract less attention. This results in more attention being drawn to the outside world, which in turn is a good thing for safety.

I am not at all in agreement with your statement. In some contexts price is not a big issue and the qualities that e-ink brings are worth the money.

[drooglyman]

Suggesting that e-ink can be useful for "low refresh rate displays in VFR aircraft" sure sounds like a solution searching 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.

[ChuckNorris89]

I've seen them at many retailers in the EU, from Sweden, Norway, Germany, France all the way to Romania, so I'm curious where you're from that you haven't seen any. Ironically, I've never seen them in the US at all during my trips there.

[t-3]

I'm extremely confident that a US retailer using eink price tags would quickly find all their tags stolen or broken and then go back to paper.

[maratc]

I’ve certainly seen some combination of eInk and paper, but never a 100% eInk.

[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.