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by lhl
972 days ago
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The original patents expired years ago (2016/2017?) and even before them EInk had some legal setbacks (Trekstor/OED). I remember buying a Plastic Logic device that used a different tech w/ similar output (OTFT substrate), and we've seen waves of technologies/companies come and go (Liquivista, Clearink, Mirasol, QR-LPD, DES, RLCD, etc.) so there isn't any shortage of competing technologies, it just turns out development/productization of new display technologies is massively expensive (EInk worked w/ Philips to get started and had to spend hundreds of millions ramping up production) and pretty thankless - Mary Lou Jepson had some interesting public discussions on the economics of new display tech when launching/running Pixel Qi. I've heard that Eink is notoriously hard to work with and as an outsider looking in, their product development is frustratingly slow, but it's a public company (acquired by a Taiwanese company a long while back), and looking at their financials over recent years, their operating margins seem to be 10-15%, which I guess beats a lot of other display companies, but still doesn't seem so impressive vs other semi/tech companies. That no one's disrupted them over the past few decades I think speaks to how it's more than just an IP moat at play. |
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From whom? I asked someone who commented this on HN and the person replied saying that they had refused to help him debug his 3 display project. So yes, any display company is notoriously hard to work with if you're not buying a reasonable quantity of their product. It is like saying Samsung Displays is notoriously hard to work with as they're not helping my startup debug our problems where we've bought a grand total of 3 displays this year.