| I mean, I read a rather detailed comment on here a few years back from someone actually in the industry, lamenting the stranglehold a particular company was inflicting on innovation. I actually found the particular comment this morning, pasted in full below from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779 dated Feb 2021 : Edit: And looking closely at that comment chain, I see you were there, questioning the patent stagnation narrative back then also. I guess you're consistent anyway. Edit 2: Man, you have asked this question a lot. And people have given you some very detailed answers, which you never seem to respond constructively to. Care to comment on this? ... Throaway to not get sued. E-ink, the company, holds the patents of the pigment core tech that makes "paper-like" displays possible and strongarms the display manufacturers and the users of their displays to absolute silence. Any research project or startup that comes up with a better alternative technology gets bought out or buried by their lawyers ASAP. E-ink don't make the display themselves, they make the e-ink film, filled with their patented pigment particles and sell it to display manufacturers who package the film in glass and a TFT layer and add a driver interface chip, all of which are proprietary AF and unless you're the size of Amazon, forget about getting any detailed datasheets about how to correctly drive their displays to get sharp images. In my previous company we had to reverse engineer their waveforms in order to build usable products even though we were buying quite a lot of displays. With so much control over the IP and the entire supply chain and due to the broken nature of the patent system, they're an absolute monopoly and have no incentive to lower prices or to bring any innovations to the market and are a textbook example of what happens to technology when there is zero competition. So, when you see the high prices of e-paper gadgets, don't blame the manufacturers, as they're not price gouging, blame E-ink, as their displays make up the bulk of the BOM. Tough, some of their tech is pretty dope. One day E-ink sent over a 32" 1440p prototype panel with 32 shades of B&W to show off. My God, was the picture gorgeous and sharp. I would have loved to have it as a PC monitor so I tried building an HDMI interface controller for it with an FPGA but failed due to a lack of time and documentation. Shame, although not a big loss as an estimated cost for that was near the five figure ballpark and the current consumption was astronomical, sometimes triggering the protection of the power supply on certain images. |
It's impossible to respond -- it just makes assertions that are impossible to verify, and without throwing any sources.
The only thing I can verify myself is that waveform data from e-ink is overzealously copyrighted and protected, to the detriment of OSS projects, but this exclusively applies to e-Ink technology itself, not competitors.
I don't work in the display industry, but I do think that e-ink just sucks enough by itself that one does not need to invent any type of outlandish conspiracy about how a company would boycott itself in order to limit their market share.
Every single time I have ever seen a color e-Ink display it has been absolutely disappointing. Both Triton and Kaleido were low-contrast, gray-ish blurry messes (and Kaleido is so little an improvement over Triton it makes me wonder what exactly has improved in the last decade). ACeP is the only color technology which really stands out somewhat (this panel, by the way), but it is limited by the extremely low refresh rate and color resolution (we are talking multiple tens of seconds to refresh). And as for the core grayscale market, most people would be better served by a memory reflective LCD, since it is visually indistinguishable from e-Ink, similar or even better contrast, much faster refresh rate, and actually better in average power consumption for most applications except maybe price tags (since e-Ink sucks a lot of power when refreshing).
The fact that not only e-Ink really fails to thrive but that they do have competition which thrives (e.g. smartwatches like Garmin use transflective LCDs that are color & exactly as viewable in sunlight as e-Ink, perhaps more) should also put an stop to the idea that they somehow exert control over the low-power, daylight-viewable display market.