hybrid e ink lcd display pricelist

Apple has shown interest in creating a new iPad with a hybrid display that could dynamically switch all or just part of the full-color screen to low-power black-and-white e-ink for text and other static content.

The new dynamic, hybrid system described by Apple could have sections of the screen operate as a traditional LCD screen for displaying video, while other parts with static content would be served up in e-ink. Rather than depending on the user to switch between e-ink and LCD, Apple"s system would handle the work and provide content in the ideal context.

Apple"s interest in the technology was revealed this week in a new patent application filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and first discovered by AppleInsider. The filing, entitled "Systems and Methods for Switching Between an Electronic Paper Display and a Video Display," describes hardware that can selectively switch between the two types of screens.

E-ink displays, or "electronic paper" as Apple refers to it throughout the filing, are advantageous because they do not require a backlight to operate, and they can be read more easily in direct sunlight. E-reader devices focused on delivering books, like the Amazon Kindle, use e-ink displays.

Of course, Apple is also involved in the sale of digital books through its own iBookstore. The iBooks application is available for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, but it cannot be utilized on a device with an e-ink display.

Apple"s patent application notes that display types on a device are typically based on an assumption about the visual content that will most often be displayed on the screen. An LCD or OLED display is ideal for high-resolution content with colors, while e-ink is ideal for static black-and-white content, like text.

The solution is to offer a screen with "multiple composite display regions," where content could be shown in both the "electronic paper" mode and "video display" format at the same time. Such a screen would also include independently activated backlights, illuminating panels when necessary.

Apple could accomplish this by having a translucent e-ink display that would be placed on top of the traditional LCD or OLED screen on an iPad. The top screen would allow users to see past it, so that video content in full color could be displayed on the screen below. And of course, atop all that would be a touch panel, allowing users to interact with the device.

The patent application, made public this week, was first filed by Apple in October of 2009. The proposed invention is credited to Gloria Lin and Andrew Hodge.

Got a netbook? Specifically, got a Samsung N130 or a Lenovo S10-2? Even more specifically, do you use it in and outdoors, but find it hard to read in the sun? We have good news! The Maker Shed will sell you one of Pixel Qi"s dual-mode displays as a straight swap-in for your existing LCD-panel.

The 10.1-inch screen runs in one of two modes. When indoors, or watching video, you use the regular LCD display, which will look pretty much the same as the one you already have. When you"re in to mood for some reading, or you are outside in bright sunlight, or you"re just running low on battery power, you can switch to the e-ink mode.

This disables the backlight and shows you hi-res, grayscale pixels, much like you"d see on the screen of the Amazon Kindle. Because it only uses power when updating the screen, it sips power.

There is also a hybrid mode, which lets the sun reflect off the back of the display assembly and back out through the color LCD. This both saves battery power and lets you view a normal color display outdoors.

The panel will cost you $275, which puts it out of the "merely curious" bracket but is still cheap enough for people who do a lot of outdoor computing. The Maker Shed store page also says that the panel will likely work in any netbook: the Lenovo and the Samsung are just the only ones so far tested and guaranteed.

And according to the Pixel Qi blog, which first described the plan to sell these panels separately from the company"s own notebooks, the swap-operation (swaperation?) is easy:It’s only slightly more difficult than changing a lightbulb: it’s basically 6 screws, pulling off a bezel, unconnecting [sic] the old screen and plugging this one in. That’s it. It’s a 5 minute operation.

It"s been far, far too long (read: four months) since we"ve heard a peep from the gentle souls over at Pixel Qi, but it looks like the long, heart-wrenching wait for the hybrid display that"s bound to revolutionize Western civilization is nearing an end. According to the startup"s CEO herself, Mary Lou Jepsen, the primetime-ready 3Qi display should make its glorious debut on an undisclosed tablet to be announced next month. For those out of the loop, this transflective display contains both e-ink and LCD properties, one for outdoor reading scenarios and the other for multimedia viewing. The amazing part is that toggling between the two is as simple as flipping a switch, which obviously means great things for battery life on whatever device it"s shoved into. We"ll be keeping our eyes peeled for more, but do us a favor and cross your fingers for good luck. Toes too, por favor.

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 B&W and much lower contrast than current gen e-paper, but viewing angle looks great (maybe 120 degrees confirmed from the video?). They definitely need a matte surface though; that glare was terrible.

There"s tech that looks much better like eInk"s ACeP (much stronger color saturation) but it needs multiple flashing refreshes to update so it"s not feasible for interactive devices. They"re just being marketed for advertising and the like.

everytime this topic of EInk comes up, people on HN seem to claim there"s a patent thing. I ask the simple question of which patent is blocking, and I get lazy answers like patent thicket. To be frank, I suspect those who make that comment aren"t actually directly involved in the industry. I"ve been to SID and other display conferences and the real problem is physics and also lack of funding. What I know is that EInk can"t get to the lower cost pricepoint without solving the scale problem which means getting an order for millions of displays. They can"t solve cheap large panels because that would require solving yield issues which again becomes a matter of scale. Startups show up but can"t get the billion or so that"s needed to get to scale. You can see this pattern repeated with companies like Mirasol. The real problem is that nobody wants to put millions into making displays when they could get higher ROI from putting it into another hot AI/ML or internet service company.

But the narrative is, this locks out generics somehow. The new patent can"t cover the subject matter of the old patent, as its automatically prior art, so only the improvements are covered by the new patent. If the "improvements" are so minor as to be irrelevant then I don"t see how this is a real impediment to a generic. If on the other hand there"s a significant improvement, it seems like that"s really something that should be getting patent protection.

I just feel like there"s always a step missing in the usual simple descriptions of evergreening I see. Is this all just tied in with something like doctors writing brand-name prescriptions, and the brand name just gets these minor pointless "improvements," but enough to diverges away from what the generic is so it can"t be easily substituted?

To a certain degree, it doesn"t matter if your patent isn"t completely valid, or doesn"t completely match what your competitors are doing. The point is to have deeper pockets than them and be able to spend more on lawyers than them. As long as your patent lasts long enough in court to stop your competitors from doing whatever you don"t want them to do, it has achieved its goal.

Ignorant question: are you not allowed to start developing a product, or "planning" to develop a product, before a patent it infringes on expires? I see from glancing at Wikipedia that with a US patent, "making" the item is infringement, but where is the line on that? Is it that you literally can"t fully make the thing, i.e. only get 99% of the way there and you"re fine? Or is it infringement to have an on-the-record chat with a buddy that you"re thinking of working on X when the patent for X expires? (Responses in the form of LMGTFY are welcome, I couldn"t quickly figure out how to search for this.)

Lawyer-no-longer-practicing-patent-law here: You have to look at each individual, numbered claim (at the end of the printed patent). Treat each claim as its own infringement checklist, with each term in that claim as a checklist item. IF: Every checklist item in that claim is present in what you"re doing, either literally or, as an edge case, by a "substantial equivalent," a term of art; THEN: That claim is infringed. (It only takes one infringed claim for liability.)

A canonical hypothetical claim is this: "1. A seating structure comprising: (a) a generally-horizontal seating platform; and (b) at least four legs, of substantially-equal length, each affixed, substantially orthogonally, to the same side of the seating platform to extend in the same general direction relative to the seating platform."

For that hypothetical claim, a tripod-style three-legged stool with angled legs wouldn"t infringe because four legs are required for infringement. (There"d probably be an argument over whether the angled legs satisfied the "substantially orthogonally" element.)

For the same claim, suppose that you had a conventional four-legged chair with a back. That chair would infringe claim 1 because the checklist elements are all present; the addition of the back is irrelevant to the infringement analysis.

Another edge case: If you "induce" someone to infringe the claim, you"re liable as an infringer. Still another is "contributory infringement," which I won"t go into here.

No infringement there — for infringement to exist, someone has to actually make, use, sell, offer to sell, or import the subject matter of at least one issued claim of the patent.

(Usual disclaimer: I"m not your lawyer, don"t rely on this as legal advice about your specific situation, small changes in facts can sometimes make a big difference in outcome, etc.)

Generally, you can be sued for infringement whenever you make, use, etc., anything that comes within the scope of any issued, unexpired, not-yet-invalidated claim.

Generally, yes — if the chairs come within the scope of an issued, unexpired claim that hasn"t yet been invalidated, then simply making the chairs constitutes infringement of that claim.

It was a really hard problem that required totally different tooling from a normal display manufacturer so I"d absolutely expect that to be a huge source of delays in getting set up.

You can"t just convert an existing display factory to make e-ink displays, so the startup costs are huge and the odds are good that you"ll take at least a few years to work out the quirks. Probably more like 4-6... if you get lucky and can figure out what tools to use quickly.

There"s not much of a market-based solution to a legally protected monopoly. The best you can hope for is to higher demand at lower price points that makes a lower price profitable

Consider: why wasn"t Panasonic able to capture all of the patents for LCD displays? If "patents" explained the problem, then why are high-resolution color screens so cheap?

IMO, the answer to this question is that there are simply more ways to implement color LCD displays than there are ways to implement e-paper displays (as far as we know).

Other firms could design electronic-paper displays, but they"re all going to work basically the same as E-ink displays, so they"ll run afoul of E-ink"s patents.

FWIW, the LCD "tech tree" got wider after the early 1970s patents started expiring in the 1990s; that"s when LCD prices started to fall. Maybe the same will happen to e-paper when E-ink"s earliest patents start expiring, but it"s no guarantee. As long as the tech tree remains narrow, E-ink could control the market for decades more yet.

Just because someone is an innovator doesn"t mean they are for continual innovations or for the spread of innovations or like the idea of people building on their works.

I think the inventors should be rewarded, but it seems misguided to do it by making them have to exploit an exclusive hold on their invention which blockades progress. Why not just give them prize money? You could set objective standards whereby a new invention that gets produced over X quantity by any party gets Y prize money.

For example, if a technology took ten years and ten billion dollars to develop to the point of it being commercially viable, well, yeah, a patent-protected monopoly is likely the ethically correct privilege the inventors should be granted.

An example (out of many) of bullshit patents and monopolies that should have never been granted are the horseshit patents Color Kinetics got years ago. These people had the audacity to patent the use of pulse-width-modulation to control the intensity of LEDs and make lights that could produce different colors. The patent office granted these people patent after patent. Once they had enough they started to attack the entire LED industry. Philips ended-up acquiring them. They let the industry know they would not enforce the bullshit patents. Still, the crooks took their thievery all the way to the bank.

As for the relative cost of LCD"s vs. E-ink. I think the primary difference is very simple: Volume. I haven"t done the numbers, but I think I can say that the LCD industry is at least 1,000 times larger in volume. It"s like the LCD vs. OLED comparison. Volume is king.

Another element is the tooling-up for manufacturing. A modern LCD manufacturing plant runs in the billions. Two billion dollars the last time I checked, but I haven"t been in the industry for ten years and have lost touch. You are not going to take a multi-billion-dollar factory and slice-off a corner to make e-ink displays. These factories are highly automated and tuned machines. They are designed to make millions of displays per month.

This means that making e-ink displays requires putting-up a specialized factory or retooling an old LCD factory that might no-longer be competitive for making LCD"s. Regardless of the approach, this is likely to be a very expensive undertaking. That, coupled with lower volume, is guaranteed to translate into higher prices.

Disclaimer: I was in the high performance display business for ten years. Exited a decade ago. So, yeah, I am a little disconnected as to the latest and greatest and what might be new in manufacturing. That said, I get the sense that material changes haven"t been as significant in the last ten years as they were during the prior ten.

Anyone who simplifies businesses along any line on a monochromatic plane has never run enough of a business to fully understand just how complex things can be. They grab one variable (minimum wage, taxes, regulations, oil, etc.) and think it can be manipulated without it affecting the aforementioned multivariate equation.

A sad example of this just took place a few weeks ago in California. I think it was in San Diego that the politicians decided grocery workers had to have a $4 per hour "hero" raise due to working through COVID. While everyone could agree that there are people who made sacrifices for the rest of us, as I learned to say, some problems don"t pass math and physics. the end result was that the Kroger company, which owns Ralphs and a bunch of other brands, closed four stores (maybe 2, don"t remember) because there was no way they could keep the doors open if they paid everyone an extra $4 per hour. So, a forced wage raise actually destroyed jobs --and this happened nearly instantly-- and people who had work found themselves on the street.

Still, it sucks that people lost their jobs this way. We need a system where politicians suffer real consequences for their actions. Not sure what this would look like, but it sounds good.

What we don"t know is if the $4/hr hike caused employers to have to reduce worker hours, shift people to part-time basis, etc. Maybe that information will come out at some point.

That means the store has to INSTANTLY generate at least 33% more in profits (not sales, profits) in order to cover that increase. I don"t know any business that can simply will a 33% increase in performance. This is where political thinking quickly becomes delusional. And, no, they are not sitting on fat margins that would allow absorbing such a thing.

That is one thing I got my reMarkable2 for. It is a great device and very useful. But one thing stands out: it runs Linux and offers you shell access. You can just upload your own programs to it and tweak many things. Even just having the ability to upload your own "power off" picture to it is a really nice thing[1]. If the makers of the reMarkable would push a bit more into the direction of enabling users to create software, as in documenting the system and creating APIs/libraries to use for integration into the existing software stack, this could grow enormously. The hardware is great, now comes the software.

What I dream of, would be scenarios which make great use of the always-visible screen content. Like a dashboard which shows you your upcoming appointments, unread notifications, perhaps just the weather status. It refreshes every 5 minutes but otherwise doesn"t consume energy or distract you with animations. Or being able to control the e-Reader from your computer. Reading a man-page? Why not send it to the e-Ink screen and have it displayed there until some other content is sent? Like a book which you keep open beside your computer, just remotely configurable. So much things could be done by just adding software to existing e-Ink hardware. And if such an environment grows, probably so will the hardware offerings targeting this market.

That"s surprising, since I was always under the impression that E-Ink displays were pretty low-power. Is it the drawing of the new image that requires so much energy in a small instant?

Although they never said it outright, it sounded like the main deterrent is just anyone else making money with an angle Disney hadn"t explored. It sounds similar to eInk refusing millions if it means someone else makes a greater fortune.

* Their manufacturing capacity is finite and not easily scaled, so they couldn"t actually deliver on a hypothetical millions-of-screens-per-year order.

* Some sort of brand protectionism. I see a lot of "we could probably hack and rig an E-ink display to do something outside its normal sales case" discussion. I could imagine a situation where they ended up-- in the eyes of end consumers-- responsible for the failings of such products. They never said to use their panel as a desktop monitor for playing 60fps video, but they can"t stop someone from trying and then bellyaching about it to the world.

Again, I think it"s...rather a lot of hubris to assume that a company is doing the less profitable thing (and it is an assumption, since none of us have better data than they do).

If you"re saying that even holding a monopoly, the most profitable price point is at market saturation, I"d need to see something backing that. And also what you mean by market saturation; the cost of parts for an iPhone 11 Pro is estimated to be ~$490. The list price is, what, $1100? You"re basically saying that either they"ve already achieved market saturation, and would gain no new customers dropping the price to $600 (parts + $100 for distribution, assembly, etc), or that they"re leaving money on the table. I find both of those very hard to believe. So maybe I"m misunderstanding you?

Software patents are the ones that make no sense because software is already protected by copyright and patents were never intended to protect algorithms.

So, less jobs, less innovation, less sharing of development, and more duplication of security efforts that are shared by every company. Getting rid of patents would be a recipe for further entrenching existing wealth. You"d have no protection from a major corporation replicating your garage-company"s processes. As it is, companies have a hard enough time fending off the likes of China which does not respect western IP.

Wow, that is a very serious allegation. But I googled and googled and googled, and found not even one such lawsuit. I also see competing tech like Clearink. Could you show us proof that what you claimed about "buried by their lawyers" is actually occurring?

So yes the patent is responsible for the existence of the monopoly, but it is also responsible for the existence of the product that the monopoly is built upon.

I think a 10 year limit on the monopoly is a good compromise (which is basically what the patent system is already doing). Even with those companies patenting DNA... after 10 years the argument is over.

Conversely, I find it hard to justify the cost of an iPad, becuase I already have a phone and several laptops. I can"t see a situation where a tablet would be more useful to me, so I"ve never bought one.

Turns out different people have different needs, and the e-ink note-taking market caters to that. Most people would find an iPad more useful, so they"re lower cost.

The real game changer was when I started taking the iPad to the gym and putting it on the elliptical and could do required reading or rewatch classes.

There was a positive reinforcement loop of wanting to run a certain amount but then also wanting to stay on long enough to finish a chapter and then once again figuring I should run just a little longer and get ahead in class.

I have the first generation, and I do enjoy it. However, I think a distinction is _how_ one takes notes. For brainstorming, and just writing free-form, it"s great. However, I find it really annoying for taking notes about a doc, for two reasons:

- If you need more notes than fit in the margins and whitespace of a PDF, are you going to flip between the doc and a separate file of notes? What if you want to compare two documents, and take notes about the distinct ways two authors discuss the same material? The idea that you can"t have more than one thing open feels immediately limiting.

- If you"re several pages into a doc and want to flip back to some prior point (and you don"t recall the specific page number), it"s actually pretty awkward.

I feel like these devices are on the cusp of being much more satisfying. But at present, either I print out all but one thing which I can deal with on the remarkable, or I end up looking at a combination of a laptop and the remarkable, and in either case, I can"t help feeling that an obvious use case was not well considered.

Considering how small the company behind it is compared to Apple, I was positively surprised how well it is designed and made - in some aspects I consider it superior to the iPad. Apple can fund a lot or R&D thanks to the volume of iPad sales, a small company has much more problems to do so. And probably the reMarkable sales numbers are small compared to the iPad. At least they were able to bring down prices quite a bit with the second generation. To be honest, I wouldn"t have paid much more than the 400€ for the device.

I don"t like the flaky sync but love seeing my drawings as PDFs. The LiveView function almost doesn"t work but a third party app allows me to display the tablet on the desktop for Zoom meetings.

Arxiv PDFs are easy to read only if you crop or zoom, which is a bit unfortunate. I would have loved integration with Pocket, Dropbox, Arxiv and other sources. There"s no TTS option, which is also unfortunate, because I find TTS doubles my focus when reading technical text.

Have you tried another PDF reader, like KOReader[0] or plato[1]? There"s also [2] which looks really interesting for cases where you want to save time.

I am thinking about getting one (or one of a couple other similar options), because I think it would be MUCH more comfortable for reading and annotating papers, which is my main practical use case for an iPad. And if it"s at all a decent replacement for a paper notebook, that would reduce the number of things in my bag.

But I"m also a bit worried that the organizational features might be lacking. Specifically, it sounds like there"s no fulltext search feature, and syncing has to be done through their cloud service, which sounds troublesome because I"ve already got a system and encompasses file types and tools that ReMarkable doesn"t handle.

It feels wonderful for him to use, as opposed to the iPad which makes me feel like I"m rotting his brain. After a half hour of using the ipad, he"s irritable and throws a tantrum when it"s time to put it away. With the remarkable it"s just like a pad of paper, but I don"t have to worry about him getting ink on my bedspread.

The iPad has the Apple Pencil and it"s not bad but for everything else the iPad is far better. You can annotate a pdf and send it somewhere else in different ways. It can take a or download a picture and mark it up. With the appstore it can handle and convert just about any file type. It also does a million other things like web browsing, chatting, videos, music and games. For most people that adds up to a more objective "useful" score.

But there is a huge charm and advantage for gadgets that are highly focused on a single function. For what it"s worth I still sketch and take notes using a mechanical pencil and spiral bounded notebook.

If there"s one thing I"d absolutely miss with the actual writing experience on a ReMarkable, it"s colored highlighting. I"ve been using the same color coding system for years and years now, and I"d hate to lose it. But it might just be worth it to lose the backlight and the glare, and gain the ability to do my reading outdoors.

For me, the most useful trait is that it gathers all my note in a "physical" gadget rather than being scattered on several laptops/smartphones/notebook.

I"m on the device 6 of 8 hours in a day, constantly taking notes of my meetings and conversations. Frequently I write sentences in the wrong order, and have to rearrange them for logical/linear understanding.

I used to get through about one paper notebook a month, and couldn"t find notes I"d taken 3+ months ago. Now everything I"ve ever noted is available with 5-30 seconds of searching and paging about.

The fact that, if I"ve written a bunch of notes in the wrong place, I can cut and paste them elsewhere is something I use every day. Everything is so much more organised.

Also, and it"s definitely NOT designed as an e-reader, but if you convert your ebooks to fit the screen, it"s approximately the size of a hardback book page, which I find miles more comfortable to read from than my Kindle.

I think people may have the impression this is like Android where the process is "ok, first reboot, hold all the buttons but not that one button and then unlock root, then flash the rom with a custom version of the OS from this sketchy site and ... bam! You"re in control now"

Actually it"s like: sign into wifi on the device. It"s now running an ssh server available on your network. The password to log in as root is in the settings. You can ssh in right then and write a bash script to do what you want.

I was really considering getting one, but I think the bigger issue for me is the LiPo battery. You can’t take the thing apart without a heat gun because it’s held together with adhesive, so in a few years when the battery doesn’t hold a charge, you have an expensive paperweight. I would pay a premium for a thicker device that used normal screws so that consumables such as the battery can be replaced easily.

Regarding the Nextcloud"s sync functionality on iOS, though: Does it support two-way sync? And do note-taking apps like Notability support it, too? Last time I checked, my impression had been that none of them does – which is a deal breaker for me, given that I"m a heavy user of Syncthing and have really gotten used to its instant two-way syncing functionality to keep all my devices up-to-date.

The problem is this is more of an import/export workflow rather than seamless syncing. I use it a lot while drawing, the files are all stored internally to the app but when I’m done I save the result to Nextcloud.

It would be nice to have apps automatically save everything there but I think Apple wants to avoid having these remote storage setups as primary storage so your device is still usable with no network connection.

Have you tried Syncthing[0, 1]? I"m actually considering buying a ReMarkable 2 right now and the fact that Syncthing seems to be working on it is playing a major role in my decision process.

It has an 8inch screen - about the same size as the iPad mini. It runs Android 8 but, obviously, some apps work better than others. It came with several nibs for its pencil.

I was told (and I have no way to back it up) that the yields on eInk are fairly low. They make a couple of square metres of screen, and then have to cut it to size. Because of defects in the process, they can have a lot of wastage. So the larger sizes are disproportionally more expensive.

Even if it is more convenient, you are still competing with the price of paper. iPads at least have multiple functions, but a set of eInk screens for music are pretty specialized.

What actually works as I count the weeks to my fortieth birthday is a fragile and ever-shifting combination of adderall, sleep, diet, exercise, therapy, e-ink devices, and the courage to be open up and be vulnerable with those who depend on me at work and at home.

It"s like how not having junk food in the house makes dieting a lot easier - you don"t have to use willpower to do the right thing, because the wrong thing is hard to do.

Honestly I would rather have the iPad for note taking. Response times are important for rapid idea translation, and e-ink systems are very lacking here, whereas the iPad is not. Probably an unpopular opinion, but it’s my own experience.

Personally, I think the benefits of reflective reading surfaces (ie e-ink) over backlit reading surfaces (everything else) is massively overblown. I have an e-ink tablet now that they are >300ppi and it"s nice to read on, but it"s a novelty. Some people love "em, but that hasn"t stopped the iPad Pro from outselling all of the e-ink tablets by a huge factor. I think e-ink"s future is mainly in small/low power/ambient displays, like price tags or luggage tags.

reMarkable is a small company that is now shipping their second device. Apple has shipped iPads for 11 years, even if they updated the hardware at every step, they still can rely on a well established supply chain.

It feels off-putting to see people get into this entitled mindset that requires that small companies price their products in the same low ranges as well established ones can afford to - either through unethical production practices, or, like you mentioned, economy of scale - or they"re not worth it.

I also wonder if perhaps these sort of concerted efforts to treat certain words as unacceptable to say might actually be giving those words _more_ power than they otherwise would have. After all, "idiot" used to refer to mentally disabled people and few would consider that word to be particularly offensive today.

It seems pretty clear cut that while maybe “retarded” has a different meaning for younger people than it does for my age group, the phrase “literally retarded,” is clearly contrasting against the figurative use. It seems clear that it’s pointing right back to mental disability, even if “literally” is figurative here.

Maybe the lesson here is that for quickly shifting words that mean something different to different generations, sensitivity is a worthwhile thing in a forum whose users span a few generations.

There is a current fashion to use "literally" as an intensifier, rather than to mean "not figuratively". Google "literally misuse" for a wealth of hand-wringing articles.

I"m pretty sure RicoElectrico is using "literally" as an intensifier - after all, companies don"t have thoughts or minds, cannot be IQ tested, and therefore cannot have intellectual disabilities.

All of this begs the question, when does a definition of a word change? I suppose it happens when we collectively agree on it, or perhaps when a large enough segment of the population agrees. Perhaps at this point, literally can mean figuratively if we consider the misuse, in the same way we accept irregardless and regardless as being one and the same. But I suppose then a new word would be necessary to literally mean literally and avoid confusion.

I think that form of the question isn’t a useful one and that’s the issue in the broader discussion. A definition is a useful yet leaky abstraction. If you

take the viewpoint that a dictionary is merely descriptive, then “the” definition isn’t really a thing. “A” definition is more appropriate. If a definition is an attempt to capture one of the common ways people use and understand a word, your question becomes this:

The distinction is crucial here because a word can mean many things, and it can mean different things to different people. I’d answer your question by pointing to that phrase about science: It progresses one funeral at a time.

I think there are two arrows of causality here actually, and they form a cycle. A word is offensive, therefore it"s taboo. The word is taboo, therefore it"s offensive. Why is "shit" vulgar, but "feces" not? Language is weird like that.

Finally, the "r-word" has been on the outs for /decades/ now. I tend to associate it with clueless teenagers - the same ones typically spewing lots of homophobic slurs - and anyone I hear using it will typically get a BIG discount in my perception.

And if they do reclaim the term like BIPOC we still have to understand and listen and not inject ourselves. Just like BIPOC use racist pejoratives - for many complex cultural reasons - it is not up to me/us a white guy to dictate or judge.

However, insults that previously were medical terms can carry particular heft for some people. Try telling the women in your life they are being "hysterical" when they are unhappy with you. Both law and medicine stopped using those words for a reason.

Here however it"s not the statement people are objecting to (most even seem to agree with that part), but one particular word that was used in expressing that statement. That"s a different thing entirely, and it"s what I mean here when I talk about a _word_ being offensive.

Originally an ancient greek insult, suggesting that someone doesn"t understand politics. Such was life debating at the agora. At least it was one example given by several teachers on English, Swedish.

It"s not the word that"s the problem, it"s the intended meaning. The euphemism treadmill is when people keep changing words instead of communicating better.

This person uses a word that used to mean "person with a mental health problem" to describe a situation where a company "lacks intelligence and awareness".

In any case, it is simply bad writing. There are many other ways to describe what this company does without using a word that comes with a heavy medical and social history.

The word is only "problematic" to people like you who want to emphasisze its historical baggage. I suspect that there are a whole lot of other words you place off-limits. The words "stupid" and "dumb", for example, are used just as often to bully people with mental handicaps and illnesses.

If all such problematic words are to be policed out of circulation, we might actually be left with such dry descriptions as "lacks intelligence and awareness". I personally appreciate the emphasis and efficiency of the stronger phrasing.

What you are saying is that the use of the word "retarded" is viable because it means "foolishness". However, the word "foolishness" shares the same baggage as "retarded".

Reread this sentence that you wrote: "I think simply "retarded" is also effective and concise, uttered not in a spirit of wanton bullying, but rather for the purpose of vivid illustration of behaviour that is, in fact, profoundly stupid."

Imagine talking to a business leader who has a child with special needs that is called "retarded" on a daily basis. You may be in a job interview where the interviewer happens to be on the austim spectrum and regularly has to deal with people who call them "retarded". What about a CEO who is struggling with bipolar disorder and whose actions are described as "foolish"?

It may not be in the spirit of gratuitous bullying, but the words still carry meanings. They stigmatize an already marginalized population. They carry meanings you may not be familiar with yourself but that others are very intimate with.

However, by using the phrase "lacks intelligence", you have shown that you also have issues with ableism. Are you aware of how offensive that phrase could be to someone who has struggled with a learning disability, or to someone whose child is mentally disabled?

I know you mean well, but by saying that a person or group of people are unintelligent or that they "lack intelligence" (as you did in your previous comment), you are using hurt language that is perhaps only marginally less offensive and hurtful than "stupid" or the r-word. For example, take the bipolar CEO from your comment above... imagine how hurt they might be if you described their actions as "lacking intelligence".

I suggest you take some time to understand and address your latent ableism. Ask yourself this question: "how can I use only positive language in every situation, so as to completely eliminate the possibility of ever offending anyone?"

No, they were not. And despite what the "you get offended so quickly" mob says, "retarded" main meaning when used in a negative fashion against someone always, always appeals to the "that person/entity has the mental abilities of someone with Down syndrome or any other similar intellectual disability". And you, me and everybody else KNOW this. You just decided that this won"t trouble you.

> It was formerly a technical term in legal and psychiatric contexts for some kinds of profound intellectual disability where the mental age is two years or less, and the person cannot guard themself against common physical dangers.

> Moron is a term once used in psychology and psychiatry to denote mild intellectual disability.[1] The term was closely tied with the American eugenics movement.[2] Once the term became popularized, it fell out of use by the psychological community, as it was used more commonly as an insult than as a psychological term. It is similar to imbecile and idiot.[3]

> The term imbecile was once used by psychiatrists to denote a category of people with moderate to severe intellectual disability, as well as a type of criminal.[1][2] The word arises from the Latin word imbecillus, meaning weak, or weak-minded.[3] It included people with an IQ of 26–50, between "idiot" (IQ of 0–25) and "moron" (IQ of 51–70).[4] In the obsolete medical classification (ICD-9, 1977), these people were said to have "moderate mental retardation" or "moderate mental subnormality" with IQ of 35–49.[5]

Not arguing any real point other than yes those words did. Have a couple of definitions I found in a rather harshly titled old book, Backward and feeble-minded children

To me, words like retard, imbecile, idiot, etc. don"t immediately invoke thoughts of mentally disabled people. Rather, I take them as descriptions of fools. GP"s post is a good example of this, and was an effective use of the word to describe extremely foolish behavior.

The situation is similar to famous Dutch insults like Kankerlijer (cancer sufferer), Klerelijer (cholera sufferer), or Pleurislijer (tuberculosis suffer). Using these to insult people who indeed suffer from these diseases is questionable and can be rather tasteless. It may even be confusing and fail to work entirely. By the way, it"s also wrong to insult sick people just because they are sick, and it"s wrong to insult people with mental disabilities just because they have mental disabilities. But using such expressions to insult, swear, or exaggerate at healthy people is a quite normal function of the Dutch language. So Yes, if this e-ink company was indeed lead by people with mental disabilities, using the r-word to make fun of them would be rather tasteless and possibly also ineffective.

Swear words and insults work because they break a taboo. If you regulate language to avoid one taboo, then speakers will simply resort to breaking another taboo.

I agree with this indeed, but I stand my point: the use of the word "retarded" is by all mean used to compare someone to a person with intellectual disability. I don"t know the Dutch nuances of _Kankerlijer_ so I can probably wrong but I wouldn"t think that it is used to compare one person to someone with cancer. What would that ever mean?

It reminds me of early 2002 when all the little kids on the playgrounds were calling each other "terrorist" as an insult. Their parents were aghast, but to them, they just knew it meant a really bad person.

I do think it"s important to point out that your taken offense is entirely your opinion. You are certainly entitled to that opinion, and I trust that you"re coming from a good place, but I feel it"s also important to acknowledge the occasional usefulness of language that you might be personally offended by.

I appreciate the emphasis on usefulness rather than right or wrong. I certainly didn’t interpret “inexplicably, self-destructively foolish” when I read the comment and apparently that extends to others too, which also speaks to usefulness or lack thereof.

On the internet, writing anonymously to a large anonymous group is very very much communication on hard mode. Things like Poe’s law reign supreme. If your goal is to get idea X into as many of the comment readers’ heads as possible, then it’s useful to use language that means the same thing to as many of those readers as possible. I think that’s what people mean when they talk about “inclusive” language?

The HN style generally seems to be choosing the clear inclusive phrasing over the stylistic(?) phrasing, choosing “inexplicably, self-destructively foolish” over “literally retarded.”

Then the 1990"s happened and it changed its name to something more politically correct like "Association For Individuals Of Differing Abilities." I found out when the big sign out front that i used to park by was changed.

A year or so later, the sign changed again. Back to "Association For Retarded Citizens." There was an article in one of the newspapers saying that donations dried up because nobody knew who they were or what they did anymore.

About a decade ago some prominent politician or other official was publicly excoriated for using "niggardly" correctly. I don"t think anyone"s lost their job for using "retarded" in its academic form.

I could be convinced otherwise, but I believe that"s a result of more people knowing not to use it, the same way you don"t hear much about people getting fired for saying the actual n-word. "Person gets fired for saying technically correct word" is more "newsworthy" than "Person gets fired for saying obvious slur".

I did find this, although the person who was fired also made racial comments in addition to saying the r-word: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/tory-candidate-lost-j...

At CES 2023, we interviewed the Assistant Vice President of E Ink, Tim O’Malley. The company is well-known in the tech world and produces e-ink displays that are used in e-readers, laptops, wearables, phones, and many other products.

Mr. O’Malley revealed a lot during the interview, including details about E Ink’s cooperation with BMW, its plans for expanding to other industries, and much more. You can read a brief overview of the interview below or check out the whole thing in the video above.

Q: Can you tell us a little more about your collaboration with BMW? Also, what challenges did you have to overcome to make it possible for BMW to put your color-changing material on their car?

A: A big announcement happened at the keynote, with BMW introducing its concept electric car. The car has a color-changing surface all over it, and we at E Ink are thrilled that we were able to work with BMW and supply them with the material they needed.

They really care about the lines and curves of the car at BMW in order to get the design they want. Some of these lines and curves are not the friendliest to work with, so we had to bend the material and build in ways to relieve the stress on it. There’s a big team at BMW we worked with to figure all this out.

A: The concept car uses 32 colors and can switch between them on any of its panels. However, the product we’re coming out with first will only use eight colors.

A: There are quite a few. We came out with the Gallery 3 product last year that brings full color to the e-reader platform. There are seven companies that are already interested in using it.

We also brought saturated full-color to retail, and we’re continuing to make progress in this area. I’m also really thrilled about some of the wearables like the Fossil Hybrid watch announced earlier this week. It combines fashion with the elements of great design and the use of our display.

Then there’s also the recently announced Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Twist, which spins to reveal an OLED display on one side and an e-ink display on the other.

A: Yes, we have. The energy efficiency has a lot to do with the fact that our products are relatively low voltage. There’s no power being used when a display is showing an image. We use power to update the display, and once that’s done, the display is not drawing power anymore. So a lot of the demos we carry around show full images, but we don’t actually have any power cords with us.

So a lot of the applications our products are a great fit for have a lower use cycle. Think of a retail store that only updates its prices on e-ink displays every now and then.

A: We have a product line called JustTint at E Ink, which can switch from transparent to mostly opaque. We’re continuing to advance the technology and are working with partners to bring it to market. We’ve discussed using it for automotive sunroofs, for example, which is really exciting.

So if you look at electric cars, it can get really hot when you open the sunroof, but if you then turn on the AC, you can’t drive as far because the battery life takes a hit. So with our products, you won’t have to make those tradeoffs.

A: We generally say it’s paper. We’re trying to bring additional functionality to places where people usually use paper. These include reading, note-taking, smart city signage, and retail shelf tags. These started as paper applications. We know that in some devices people choose LCD displays if they make sense for their use case, but e-ink displays can also be used in many cases and are better for our eyes.

Q: What do you see for the future? If we look 15 or 20 years down the line, do you think it will still be possible to improve your products and technology substantially?

A: Absolutely. We’re working on transparent films, which aren’t even full products yet, and we’ve just started our journey when it comes to color displays. I recently heard a quote by Bill Gates that I really liked. He said, “We overestimate what we can do in two years and underestimate what we can do in 10 years.”

We want to expand our business to cars, billboards, and more. The application of low-power full-color technology in this space is what the world needs right now.

This is just a quick overview of the conversation we had with Tim O’Malley from E Ink. If you want to learn more, check out the video at the top of the page.

"Your time is limited, so don"t waste it living someone else"s life. Don"t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people"s thinking."

Intel has just unveiled a new dual screen notebook called the Tiger Rapid. It features a full HD LCD display on one side, and an E Ink screen on the other, and both are powered by a single eighth-generation Core processor. This new device harkens back to almost a decade ago when the Entourage Edge first came out.

This concept tablet and ereader hybrid will not be officially released by Intel, but they developed it as a way to show its device manufacturer partners how to implement technologies like using an an e-paper display as a keyboard or jotting down notes with the active stylus.

Gregory Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the Intel Client Computing Group said that they worked on this design for over two years. Bryant explains how the prototypes express a design goal he defines as adaptable form factors. “Conceptually, it’s not a one-size fits all world,” Bryant says. “You’re going to see secondary products of different shapes and sizes, people are going to do secondary displays, obviously we’re going to work on longer-term things like bendables and foldables.”

Bryant emphasized that the motivation behind these designs was to make the PC bend to its user, not the other way around. “It’s not doing it because you can do it. It’s creating these adaptable form factors that fit the work that you’re trying to do.”

The E Ink part of the device is 7.8 inches and the other features 7.9-inch LCD display. Underneath it all is a Kaby Lake Core processor, an SSD, Wi-Fi, and an undisclosed amount of memory. With its 12-wHr battery, the Tiger Rapids can last an estimated 7 to 8 hours, and charges back up via the single USB-C port on its edge.

Intel has said that this concept E Ink tablet will be released by a partner sometime in the next two to three years. Maybe Lenovo will do something with its Yogabook or Microsoft will do something drastically different with the Surface lineup, maybe they might finally release the Courier.

Michael Kozlowski has writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past twelve years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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Many e-readers, devices meant to replace traditional books, utilize electronic paper for their displays in order to further resemble paper books; one such example is the Kindle series by Amazon.

Electronic paper, also sometimes electronic ink, e-ink or electrophoretic display, are display devices that mimic the appearance of ordinary ink on paper.flat panel displays that emit light, an electronic paper display reflects ambient light like paper. This may make them more comfortable to read, and provide a wider viewing angle than most light-emitting displays. The contrast ratio in electronic displays available as of 2008 approaches newspaper, and newly (2008) developed displays are slightly better.

Many electronic paper technologies hold static text and images indefinitely without electricity. Flexible electronic paper uses plastic substrates and plastic electronics for the display backplane. Applications of electronic visual displays include electronic shelf labels and digital signage,smartphone displays, and e-readers able to display digital versions of books and magazines.

Electronic paper was first developed in the 1970s by Nick Sheridon at Xerox"s Palo Alto Research Center.Gyricon, consisted of polyethylene spheres between 75 and 106 micrometers across. Each sphere is a Janus particle composed of negatively charged black plastic on one side and positively charged white plastic on the other (each bead is thus a dipole).polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) as the material for the spheres, dramatically improving the video speed and decreasing the control voltage needed.

In the simplest implementation of an electrophoretic display, titanium dioxide (titania) particles approximately one micrometer in diameter are dispersed in a hydrocarbon oil. A dark-colored dye is also added to the oil, along with surfactants and charging agents that cause the particles to take on an electric charge. This mixture is placed between two parallel, conductive plates separated by a gap of 10 to 100 micrometres. When a voltage is applied across the two plates, the particles migrate electrophoretically to the plate that bears the opposite charge from that on the particles. When the particles are located at the front (viewing) side of the display, it appears white, because the light is scattered back to the viewer by the high-indexpixels), then an image can be formed by applying the appropriate voltage to each region of the display to create a pattern of reflecting and absorbing regions.

An electrophoretic display - also known as an EPD - are typically addressed using MOSFET-based thin-film transistor (TFT) technology. TFTs are requiredactive matrix displays used in the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo eReader, and iRex iLiad e-readers. These displays are constructed from an electrophoretic imaging film manufactured by E Ink Corporation. A mobile phone that used the technology is the Motorola Fone.

Electrophoretic Display technology has also been developed by SiPix and Bridgestone/Delta. SiPix is now part of E Ink Corporation. The SiPix design uses a flexible 0.15 mm Microcup architecture, instead of E Ink"s 0.04 mm diameter microcapsules.Bridgestone Corp."s Advanced Materials Division cooperated with Delta Optoelectronics Inc. in developing Quick Response Liquid Powder Display technology.

Electrophoretic displays can be manufactured using the Electronics on Plastic by Laser Release (EPLaR) process developed by Philips Research to enable existing AM-LCD manufacturing plants to create flexible plastic displays.

In the 1990s another type of electronic ink based on a microencapsulated electrophoretic display was conceived and prototyped by a team of undergraduates at MITBarrett Comiskey, Joseph Jacobson, Jeremy Rubin and Russ Wilcox co-founded E Ink Corporation in 1997 to commercialize the technology. E ink subsequently formed a partnership with Philips Components two years later to develop and market the technology. In 2005, Philips sold the electronic paper business as well as its related patents to Prime View International."It has for many years been an ambition of researchers in display media to create a flexible low-cost system that is the electronic analog of paper. In this context, microparticle-based displays have long intrigued researchers. Switchable contrast in such displays is achieved by the electromigration of highly scattering or absorbing microparticles (in the size range 0.1–5 μm), quite distinct from the molecular-scale properties that govern the behavior of the more familiar liquid-crystal displays. Micro-particle-based displays possess intrinsic bistability, exhibit extremely low power d.c. field addressing and have demonstrated high contrast and reflectivity. These features, combined with a near-lambertian viewing characteristic, result in an "ink on paper" look. But such displays have to date suffered from short lifetimes and difficulty in manufacture. Here we report the synthesis of an electrophoretic ink based on the microencapsulation of an electrophoretic dispersion. The use of a microencapsulated electrophoretic medium solves the lifetime issues and permits the fabrication of a bistable electronic display solely by means of printing. This system may satisfy the practical requirements of electronic paper."

This used tiny microcapsules filled with electrically charged white particles suspended in a colored oil.circuitry controlled whether the white particles were at the top of the capsule (so it looked white to the viewer) or at the bottom of the capsule (so the viewer saw the color of the oil). This was essentially a reintroduction of the well-known electrophoretic display technology, but microcapsules meant the display could be made on flexible plastic sheets instead of glass.

One early version of the electronic paper consists of a sheet of very small transparent capsules, each about 40 micrometers across. Each capsule contains an oily solution containing black dye (the electronic ink), with numerous white titanium dioxide particles suspended within. The particles are slightly negatively charged, and each one is naturally white.liquid polymer, sandwiched between two arrays of electrodes, the upper of which is transparent. The two arrays are aligned to divide the sheet into pixels, and each pixel corresponds to a pair of electrodes situated on either side of the sheet. The sheet is laminated with transparent plastic for protection, resulting in an overall thickness of 80 micrometers, or twice that of ordinary paper.

The network of electrodes connects to display circuitry, which turns the electronic ink "on" and "off" at specific pixels by applying a voltage to specific electrode pairs. A negative charge to the surface electrode repels the particles to the bottom of local capsules, forcing the black dye to the surface and turning the pixel black. Reversing the voltage has the opposite effect. It forces the particles to the surface, turning the pixel white. A more recent implementation of this concept requires only one layer of electrodes beneath the microcapsules.

Electrowetting display (EWD) is based on controlling the shape of a confined water/oil interface by an applied voltage. With no voltage applied, the (colored) oil forms a flat film between the water and a hydrophobic (water-repellent) insulating coating of an electrode, resulting in a colored pixel. When a voltage is applied between the electrode and the water, the interfacial tension between the water and the coating changes. As a result, the stacked state is no longer stable, causing the water to move the oil aside. This makes a partly transparent pixel, or, if a reflective white surface is under the switchable element, a white pixel. Because of the small pixel size, the user only experiences the average reflection, which provides a high-brightness, high-contrast switchable element.

Displays based on electrowetting provide several attractive features. The switching between white and colored reflection is fast enough to display video content.

This results in the availability of two-thirds of the display area to reflect light in any desired color. This is achieved by building up a pixel with a stack of two independently controllable colored oil films plus a color filter.

The colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow, which is a subtractive system, comparable to the principle used in inkjet printing. Compared to LCD, brightness is gained because no polarisers are required.

Electrofluidic display is a variation of an electrowetting display. Electrofluidic displays place an aqueous pigment dispersion inside a tiny reservoir. The reservoir comprises <5-10% of the viewable pixel area and therefore the pigment is substantially hidden from view.

The core technology was invented at the Novel Devices Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati. The technology is currently being commercialized by Gamma Dynamics.

The technology used in electronic visual displays that can create various colors via interference of reflected light. The color is selected with an electrically switched light modulator comprising a microscopic cavity that is switched on and off using driver integrated circuits similar to those used to address liquid-crystal displays (LCD).

Other research efforts into e-paper have involved using organic transistors embedded into flexible substrates,triads, typically consisting of the standard cyan, magenta and yellow, in the same way as CRT monitors (although using subtractive primary colors as opposed to additive primary colors). The display is then controlled like any other electronic color display.

E Ink Corporation of E Ink Holdings Inc. released the first colored E Ink displays to be used in a marketed product. The Ectaco Jetbook Color was released in 2012 as the first colored electronic ink device, which used E Ink"s Triton display technology.

Several companies are simultaneously developing electronic paper and ink. While the technologies used by each company provide many