hybrid e ink lcd display brands

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.

One of the big problems when you are breaking a completely new area of technology is finding some revenues along the way, before you are ready with your full product line, and that has to be the category we place the recent efforts of PixelQi, announcing this week that it has a way of getting its hybrid e-ink/backlit LCD screens into play before manufacturers are ready to buy them in bulk quantities.

After two days on the company’s web site, all of its available stock was sold out, although the company never gave an indication of how many screens that was.

The company signed a deal with Make magazine to introduce the 3Qi display, a plug-and-play 10.1 inch display to the DIY community. E-ink is a high resolution technology which uses mostly ambient light ‘ reflection, and a persistent display which refreshes slowly, as used in eReaders ‘ instead of relying on a backlit, rapidly refreshed display. Backlit displays take up most of the power used in a modern laptop, which is why the Amazon Kindle has a battery life of two weeks when the average Notebook has a battery life closer to 1.5 hours. Another advantage is that e-ink can be easily seen in harsh sunlight, in fact the brighter the better.

So by offering screens to the DIY community through Make Magazine (do-it-yourself for technology) the idea is that innovators could buy a screen to go with existing netbooks, which allows them to take them outside in the sunlight. However the price, at $275, is almost the cost of the Netbook you are improving.

The Pixel Qi screen uses the same LCD crystals for both functions, reflective or backlit, and still has about the same efficiency, speed and resolution as a standard LCD when backlit. Pure e-ink screens usually offer poor resolution and color when watching video or images.

Dan Woods, GM of MAKE’s Ecommerce said, ‘We’re seeing a lot of interest in making and modding tablets, netbooks and e-readers within the maker community, and we’re always looking for innovative new ways to help inspire and support DIY enthusiasts to take on new challenges.

‘Getting a brand new technology like Pixel Qi’s screen into the hands of developers and makers who will do something unusual, compelling and unexpected with it is tremendously exciting to us,’ he added.

Screens have to be swapped over, usually breaking the manufacturers warranty by unscrewing the original screen, but among the Make community the expression ‘Void Your Warranty’ is viewed more as an encouragement than an admonition.

The natural evolution from black and white to color is a well-worn path for both product design and media of all kinds. E Ink has continued to develop its color technology, listening to customers along the way to get feedback and make improvements to meet market needs.

When we think of e-ink, our minds usually turn to e-readers. When Amazon released its first Kindle in 2007, many other companies jumped aboard, creating their own e-readers and e-ink displays.

E-ink was designed as an electronic screen that acts like paper, which is why e-ink technology is also referred to as e-paper: electronic paper. In the age of vibrant LED, LCD, plasma, or other modern displays, do we really need another type of display?

Where e-ink technology really stands out is its low use of power. Simple e-ink displays can last years on one charge. The more complex ones that use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth still last months.

Secondly, e-ink users prefer a display that isn’t backlit. We stare at backlit screens all day; they’ve lost their novelty. People want something different to look at instead of the computers we’ve been stuck in front of since the 1990s. Plus, e-ink offers non-glare displays, which are easier on the eyes than other displays on the market.

Next, some people still prefer that classic look of pen and paper or chalk and a chalkboard. Today, most companies and businesses want a touch of class with their modern style. Rather than making your office resemble a walk down the Star Trek Enterprise, add some class with paperlike displays instead of blazing LCD screens.

Thirdly, e-ink displays are getting larger. Originally, the biggest e-ink displays on the market were no bigger than a book. The largest e-ink display today is a whopping 42 inches across: not bad for a technology that’s not even a decade and a half old.

Whatever you can do with paper, imagine doing it with an e-ink display. Most of the uses for e-ink today originate from someone dreaming how to make a paper experience better. Here are some examples.

At the end of 2020, Visionect announced Joan 32, a 32-inch e-ink display. It can be placed wherever it’s needed the most, whether that be an office building, an airport in a shopping mall, or anywhere else where information needs to be displayed. It’s most often used for corporate communication, digital menus, airport signage or to provide wayfinding information.

Joan’s battery lasts for weeks and can be recharged overnight. There’s no need for a constant power source, drilling, or wiring, which is a huge advantage over LCD screens.

Launched in 2017, reMarkable recreates the pen and paper look and feel that a backlit screen simply can’t. The device is listed as a “tablet” with one very notable difference to the popular tablets on the market: it uses e-ink.

In 2020, IONNYK came up with the idea to use e-ink in place of black and white photos. IONNYK’s 31-inch display is encased in a frame, which cycles through a galley of images. The result is lifelike photography that convinces viewers they’re looking at real photo prints. IONNYK’s frames are based on Visionect’s 32-inch screens.

E Ink is the first company to offer a 42-inch e-ink display. Their large e-ink displays can be used for food menus, floor plans, interactive whiteboard simulations, and more. Whatever its use, the large e-ink display is sure to add a touch of class to any environment.

Although it’s come a long way, e-ink technology is not as responsive as LCD, LED, and other mainstream displays. Users report e-ink displays taking “15 to 20 seconds to power on completely,” not to mention seconds to simply wake them from sleep mode.

While Amazon was the first to release an e-reader, Sony was the first to make their e-reader usable in the dark. Since then, it’s been commonplace for e-readers to have front lighting for users to read in the dark.

Because e-ink uses capsules with different colored particles that rise and sink to change the screen’s color, the devices are limited to greyscale displays. While some e-ink displays are breaching this barrier, it’ll take a while for others to add more colors to their e-ink technology.

Considering e-ink displays are composed of millions of minuscule capsules in a thin film, it will take a lot of investment for the displays to get much larger than 42 inches. Although progress is coming, it won’t be as rapid as Samsung’s Wall and its 292-inch screen.

As mentioned, it takes a lot of investment to get e-ink displays to be larger and colorful. Therefore, the displays aren’t cheap. With only a few e-ink manufacturers releasing e-ink displays, there aren’t really less-pricey alternatives.

Are they worth it? If you’re a classicist, pragmatist, or innovator, e-ink displays are for you. The devices are classy and low-maintenance with endless uses. If your room isn’t too dark to read a piece of paper, you’ll love integrating e-ink displays in your space.

A Chinese multinational electronics company has developed a new type of screen technology that provides sharper graphics than traditional E Ink displays, with less power consumption, no backlight and an ability to display flicker-free video.

TCL Technologies reported Thursday that its Nxtpaper display is "the artistic combination of screen and paper" that can provide full HD definition. It is intended for use on tablets and e-readers, but not smaller devices such as smartphones.

Nxtpaper compares favorably to current LCD and E Ink displays, according to TCL. Its new displays achieve 25 percent greater contrast than LCDs, and are about one third the thickness.

They also are 65 percent more power efficient. TCL was able to achieve huge energy savings because instead of relying on power to provide screen backlighting, it takes advantage of natural reflective light to illuminate the screen. Devices using Nxtpaper can consequently boast not only great energy savings but significant reductions in weight since large batteries will not be required to power the screen.

E Ink displays were devised 20 years ago. They offer low-energy options and a more natural look than traditional video terminals. Products such as the Kindle Paperwhite, Kobo Aura and Sony Digital Paper offer lightweight tablets with the E Ink displays providing a more comfortable reading experience.

TCL said it devoted two years to research to design the new screen. Eleven patents were acquired specifically for eye protection techniques such as flicker-free video reproduction and the elimination of harmful blue light.

Studies have shown that blue light, which contains a very high energy level, can cause eye strain, give us headaches and negatively affect quality and quantity of sleep. Laboratory studies have shown extensive exposure to blue light can contribute to macular degeneration, an eye disorder. Tablet manufacturers offer options to reduce blue light, such as Apple"s Night Shift mode, which boosts warmer, orange tones.

Nxtpaper"s elimination of blue light represents a significant advantage over traditional E Ink displays. The company says it has received eye protection certifications from the German Rhine and SGS laboratories.

E Ink Corporation recently announced plans to improve its displays. With current slow refresh rates, video resolution on E Ink products reach only 100 ppi resolution. The company said it will double that resolution by next year. It hopes to follow that improvement soon after with color displays matching monochrome E Ink displays at 300 ppi.

E reader enthusiasts should expect to see increasing competition for their eyeballs soon. ClearInk features 4,096 colors and allows full motion video. It uses up to 90 percent less energy than an LCD screen. ClearInk technology does not suffer from the drawbacks of earlier e readers, such as poor contrast, slow refresh rates and higher costs.

Tianma"s Reflective Color LCD can display full color and animation and does not require a backlight. But it has suffered from weak contrast and limited color range.

Along with its announcement of Nxtpaper this week, TCL also unveiled a tablet featuring "intelligent eye-protection"—no flicker, no blue light—and adjustable color and tonality that changes depending on time of day and lighting conditions. The TCL 10 TABMAX also features an advanced dual-microphone system with noise reduction, and 8 megapixel front and 13 megapixel rear cameras.

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.

If so, then you, my friend, are in luck. That’s precisely what the hybrid smart watches from Fossil and Skagen (related brands, if you didn’t know that) are offering you. So, why might you be looking for this?

Well, for starters, any number of smart watches are bringing heart rate sensors to your wrist, whether you’re looking to have it track that just throughout your day, while you’re working out, or even as part of a more comprehensive sleep analysis. Many of those rely on large digital screens, and that’s fine in certain situations. Myself, I like those digital displays when I’m jogging, but maybe you want to be able to track your day with a more discrete look?

That’s where the Fossil Hybrid HR and Skagen Jorn Hybrid HR come in. First off, they’re considered hybrid because they’ve got traditional analog hands spinning over a dial that’s actually the display of the various smartwatch info (and for hybrids, I prefer this much more than hands trying to indicate things on the dial). To help keep the watch flying under the radar, they incorporate e-ink, rather than relying on an LCD or OLED display lighting up. Along with giving you a simpler monochrome backdrop, it also means you’ve got pretty low power consumption (sort of how like your Kindle can last weeks upon weeks, while a tablet needs charging every few days). That’s going to depend in large part on how much your phone is talking to the watch, but they’re estimating you can around 2 weeks between charges.

And yes, both of these watches are truly smart watches – you can get notifications on your wrist, control your music, and all the normal things you’d expect (even have it give you up-to-date weather), including changing the look of the display.

This seems like an interesting option for those who want some HR tracking and modern “smarts” in a watch without going to a full-blown mini computer. The Fossil Hybrid HR range comes in between $175 and $215, while the Skagen versions are all $195. In the coming weeks, be on the lookout for a more in-depth review, as we’ve got a Fossil Hybrid HR Collider coming in for a more in-depth review.

Popular Science article about a startup coming out with a new ebook+ screen tech called "3Qi" (though much of the article is a human-interest piece about the founder):
http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/...y-kill-paper-forever

Excerpts:

quote:

Turn on the store-bought tablet PC that Jepsen’s prototype screen sits in—she removed the old screen with a screwdriver and swapped hers in—and it looks and acts like any LCD screen, because it is an LCD, only better. LCDs display color and video, but they kill battery life. Electronic ink is more energy-efficient and paper-like, but it’s black and white and is frustratingly slow to load a new page. Jepsen’s screen combines the best of both technologies. Flick a switch, and the bulb that makes the screen glow will dim. But instead of going dark, only the colors will fade. That’s because in Jepsen’s screen, ambient light can substitute for backlight, bouncing off the mirror-like material that Jepsen has added to each pixel to reflect shades of black and white. With the lamp completely off, the screen, called 3Qi (pronounced “three chee,” as in qi, the Chinese word for “spirit,” and a geeky pun on the 3G wireless network), displays letters as crisp and readable as those on Amazon’s Kindle. In this mode, 3Qi uses about one fifth the power of a normal computer screen, Jepsen says. And unlike the E Ink–based Kindle or any other widely available e-reader, it still does everything a regular LCD does, including play videos.

quote:

And this could be the year the leaders in the display race pull away from the pack. The cellphone-chip giant Qualcomm; the current e-reader display leader, E Ink; and at least one other major player are set to release next-generation e-reader screens by 2011. But Jepsen’s hybrid screen is likely to be the first and the least expensive of the bunch. Her company, Pixel Qi, which is based in both Silicon Valley and Taipei, will, by the time you read this, have started a run of millions of screens. Although Jepsen won"t name brands, she says these will soon appear in netbooks, tablet computers and dedicated e-readers.

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At CES 2023, TCL dropped a whole bag of gadgets — including new phones, a Windows convertible, and a new tablet with its own take on the color e-ink tech. Say hello to the TCL Nxtpaper 12 Pro tablet, which aims to beat the likes of Apple and Samsung with a palatable price, a screen that feels like paper, and a large canvas, too.

Unlike regular LCD panels that alter the screen temperature and give it a yellowish tint, TCL’s Nxtpaper tech relies on a built-in multi-layer filter system. This not only cuts down on the blue light exposure but also keeps the color profile as close to natural as possible and reduces the glare effect.

TCL ships a dedicated reading mode with its Nxtpaper line of tablets that turns the screen output into a grayscale mode for an e-ink experience. As for the paper part in the marketing material, TCL claims “a tactile feeling just like touching real paper,” adding that the actual display surface has a paper-like finish to the touch.

On the software side, you get a dedicated PC mode for effortless file management, plus a floating window mode to handle multiple app windows with ease. Take that, iPadOS 16. Disappointingly, the TCL Nxtpaper 12 Pro still runs Android 12 out of the box.

In 2023, TCL claims to have upgraded the Nxtpaper display tech, doubling the brightness output for a more comfortable outdoor viewing experience. However, the company assures that despite the bump in brightness figures, the screen is still capable of reducing the blue light output by up to 61 percent.

Delving into the technical side of things, the Nxtpaper 12 Pro tablet offers a fairly sharp 12.2-inch 2K (2160 x 1440 pixels) display with 370 nits of peak brightness and a 3:2 aspect ratio, somewhat like the iPad Pro. The stylus-ready screen, however, still doesn’t offer any high-refresh-rate magic.

The tablet draws power from the MediaTek MT8771 chipset, the same as the TCL 10S 5G tablet. It will be available in a single configuration packing 8GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage. Thankfully, you can pop in an SDHC or SDXC card to boost the memory.

The 8,000mAh battery is claimed to last up to 13 hours, beating the figures Apple touts for the iPad Pro. The TCL Nxtpaper 12 Pro supports 18W fast charging, and thankfully, the power brick comes bundled in the retail package. Notably, TCL bundles the standard e-pen stylus that can recognize over 8,192 pressure levels in the retail package, just like Samsung.

TCL also sells a detachable keyboard and a stand case, but you’ll need to fork over extra cash for that. There are a couple of 8-megapixel cameras on the front and a 13-megapixel camera at the back. The tablet is already up for grabs, priced at $499. There’s a 5G-ready version that will hit the shelves “later this year,” carrying a price tag of $549.

At its current asking price, the TCL Nxtpaper 12 Pro definitely offers a superior screen experience compared to the 10th Gen iPad and undercuts the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8. However, it does so at the cost of a significantly weaker processor. Plus, TCL’s software update record isn’t as good as Samsung’s or Apple’s.

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HP announces a new display technology called Electronic Skins. eSkins is a flexible reflective color film, that can alos display icons or alpha-numeric characters.

HP eSkins technology offers brand manufacturers new ways to personalize their products with an electronically controlled color surface created using HP’s breakthrough roll-to-roll manufacturing platform. Designed to make fine-scale circuitry on plastic substrates, the platform processes flexible screens in rolls rather than individual sheets, offering the potential for more cost-effective manufacturing.

This new device architecture is compatible with roll-to-roll plastic circuits that can be combined with proprietary, electrically controllable “inks” to achieve print-like color performance, as well as transparency. Using a technology similar to color printing, HP is developing the capability to produce specific “ink” colors within the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM® range. The vibrant, print-quality colors have excellent visibility in direct sunlight and can electronically shift into a transparent state, revealing the surface below the eSkins film.

Today"s e-book reader may be lightweight, easy-to-read, touch-sensitive and use little power, but already consumers want more. A color, flexible screen that hosts video is top of the wish list, but can display developers deliver?

U.S.-based electronic paper pioneer, E-Ink, has been quick to respond by placing a color filter over its established paper-like black and white display. Snapped up by China-based e-reader supplier, Hanvon, the color E-Ink e-reader is due to ship, in China, in May of this year. But all is not well.

Critics describe the display"s colors as muted and have complained that it can"t handle full-motion video, only simple animations. So what"s the problem? The technology.

Like most of the screens in today"s e-readers, E-Ink displays use electrophoretic technology. Here, black and white, charged, sub-micron particles, floating in a dielectric fluid are enclosed in a micro-capsule. When an electric field is applied, the particles move toward an electrode, making the surface appear black or white at that spot (Figure 1).

Figure 1. E-Ink microcapsules: Applying an electric field forces the charged particles to move to the electrode with the opposite charge, making the micro-capsule surface appear black or white.

Simple and effective, this technology has made E-Ink display market leader for two key reasons. First, its display is bi-stable and able to hold text and images without draining power from the battery. Power is consumed only when an image is changed, or a "page is turned," so the battery can last for weeks on a single charge. Second, the display is reflective and doesn"t require a backlight to illuminate its pixels, which means it can be viewed in direct sunlight.

But for providing bright color and video motion, the technology has reached it limits. With the current particle and fluid chemistry, color is only achievable with a filter, which blocks light, making the display look dull and washed out. Meanwhile, the display"s response rate is only 250ms as the particles suspended in fluid just can"t be forced to move between electrodes at video-rate speeds.

E-Ink"s vice-president of global sales and marketing, Sriram Peruvemba, is unperturbed. "We are not trying to produce a more colorful picture and this product is not going to replace LCDs or OLEDs in devices that do video and gaming," he asserts. "We intend to offer this to our existing market, the electronic publishers trying to replace books with these devices."

At the same time, however, E-Ink is developing a display based on an entirely different chemistry, which according to Peruvemba, provides bright color and the all-important video speeds. "Every sub-component has been examined and re-created with new materials," he says. "We currently have displays with refresh rates of 50ms running "Cars" and "Finding Nemo", in the laboratory...and it will take up to three years to transport the processes from here to mass production."

But while E-Ink perfects its new chemistry, several companies are getting ready to challenge the industry incumbent. One key contender, Japan-based Bridgestone, is working on bi-stable, electrophoretic displays, but with a difference.

Dubbed "Quick Response - Liquid Powder Display", the Bridgestone display uses charged powder particles nestling between ribs, rather than encapsulated ink particles suspended in fluid (see Figure 2). The displays can be mounted on plastic substrates and fabricated using a cheap and efficient roll-to-roll manufacturing process. And importantly, this particular chemistry yields displays with response times of only 0.2ms, enabling video-speed applications.

Figure 2. The Bridgestone QR-LPD: When a negative voltage is applied to the upper transparent electrode, the positively charged black particles move to the upper electrode showing a black appearance. If a positive voltage is applied, white particles move upwards, leaving a white appearance.

"Our powder material behaves like a liquid, so we named it "liquid powder"," explains Ryo Sakurai, from Bridgestone"s Electronic Paper Development department. "It shows a high fluidity due to its morphology and electronic properties, and because the particles are dispersed in air, not liquid... so the [liquid powder] moves very quickly in the presence of electric fields."

Like E-Ink, the company has developed color displays using filters but has also added colored liquid pigments to the liquid powders to produce a display with a reflectivity close to recycled paper. While Sakurai says the company is deciding which technology to exploit for commercialization, it intends to launch a black-and-white, flexible electronic paper display this year, with a color version following in 2014.

Widespread in myriad mobile devices, color liquid-crystal displays that host video-speed applications are not typically used in e-readers as the screen cannot be read in sunlight and its backlight drains battery power. However a few companies are working around this.

U.S.-based Pixel Qi has developed a hybrid display that runs in two modes; the first as an LCD providing full color and video motion, and the second as a reflective, e-reader display preserving precious battery power. At the same time, Kent Displays of the U.S. is producing color plastic displays based on bi-stable liquid crystals. Already found in writing tablets, the company says the technology could also be used in e-readers.

Clearly hybrid LCDs hold promise for future e-readers, but two very different technologies promise the same vivid color and refresh rate of an LCD as well as the low battery consumption of a traditional e-reader. Both are close to commercialization.

The "Mirasol" display, developed by U.S.-based Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, works by using interferometric modulators to reflect light so that specific wavelengths interfere with each other to create color (Figure 3). The company refuses to comment on a commercial product, but recently revealed plans to build a billion-dollar fabrication plant in Taiwan. Scheduled to start operations in 2012, a device should follow soon.

Figure 3. The Mirasol display: Each modulator comprises two plates; a thin film stack on a glass substrate and a self-supporting reflective membrane. Applying a voltage collapses the membrane, altering the size of the air gap between the plates. This determines the phase difference of the wavelengths of light reflected by each plate, whether constructive or destructive interference take place, and so the color. (Click to enlarge image.)

Meanwhile, Dutch company, Liquavista, has taken electro-wetting techniques pioneered by Philips last decade and using standard LCD manufacturing processes is fabricating color displays with full-motion video. Each display pixel comprises a transparent electrode, hydrophobic insulator, colored oil layer and water, sandwiched between glass or plastic substrates. The colored oil forms a film between the water and insulator until a voltage difference is applied, moving the water into contact with the insulator to expose the underlying reflecting surface, and changing the color of the pixel (Figure 4).

Figure 4. The Liquavista display: When a voltage difference is applied across the hydrophobic insulator, water moves into contact with the insulator and the oil is pushed aside to expose the reflecting surface. By altering the voltage, the optical properties of the pixel are tuned between a colored off-state (top) and transparent on-state (bottom).

According to company founder and CTO, Johan Feenstra, the liquids can be moved very quickly so the response time of the displays is only 10ms, making video content feasible. "We"re not bi-stable but the battery will last for days," he adds. "You will see a device -- possibly color -- in the marketplace towards the end of 2011."

Liquavista has also been working with UK organic electronics pioneer, Plastic Logic, since 2008 to produce flexible e-readers that show color images and host videos. "Getting both technologies ready to produce fully flexible, color displays is not an easy challenge," says Feenstra. "Nobody has done this before, but we are making good displays and moving ahead."

But while these businesses race to deliver the future generations of e-reader, one academic has his sights firmly set on the horizon. Andrew Steckl, a professor at the Nanoelectronics Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati, hopes to use electro-wetting techniques to fabricate e-readers that you can roll or fold up, and put in your pocket.

After studying different papers with a range of surface finishes, his team has demonstrated electro-wetting action at video-rate speeds on a paper substrate, with results that, in his words, "exceeded expectations." His team"s next goal is to produce electro-wetting pixel arrays on paper, and then move onto developing a monochrome display.

"We are aiming initially for black and white -- it will have a good contrast and look appealing to the human eye," he says. "Color is somewhere beyond the horizon, I just can"t quite see it yet."

The final crucial step to fabricating a truly flexible e-reader will be to integrate all additional functionalities, from antenna to keyboard, into a sheet of paper. Can Steckl do this?

"We"ll give it a shot," he laughs. "You could have multiple layers of paper, so underneath the paper you read is another layer that contains the antenna, and underneath that layer is another that holds the battery. I think the science is easier than the engineering, but its going to be a lot of fun to integrate the form and function of paper."

Note: Several of the technologies in this article will be explored in presentations at SPIE Photonics West in Conference 7956A, E-papers and Flexible Displays.

While LCD displays are common in computer monitors and cell phones, E-Ink is rather new.  E-Ink Corporation was founded in 1997, and the first well-known product to incorporate an E-Ink display was Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, which was released in 2007.  The E-Ink display technology has certain advantages over LCD displays, namely increased battery life and reduced user eye strain.  The increased battery life is due to E-Ink only requiring power to change the image on the screen (whereas LCD displays must constantly refresh even static images) and its ability to be used without a backlight.  Use of E-Ink without a backlight is also one of the reasons for the reduction in eye strain but it therefore requires ambient light for the screen to be readable.

How exactly Apple intends to integrate these two technologies remains secretive.  The use of LCD display technology means that, barring another technological breakthrough, a backlight will remain a requirement for the LCD display to operate.  Also, with the screen able to employ both LCD and E-Ink technologies simultaneously, how an LCD style backlight will interact with an E-Ink display may cause other issues.

With this patent, Apple has once again proven to be one of the most forward thinking consumer electronics companies, but only time will tell whether this patent comes to fruition.

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