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by captainmuon
1520 days ago
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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. |
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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.