hybrid e ink lcd display free sample

2023-01-03 12:32:11

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.

hybrid e ink lcd display free sample

A recently unearthed patent shows that Apple has plans to fix such a problem by developing a hybrid display: part LCD or OLED, part low-power electronic ink.

Uncovered by Apple Insider, the patent, "Systems and Methods for Switching Between an Electronic Paper Display and a Video Display," illustrates a method for displaying static content in e-ink while other portions of the screen appear using standard LCD technology.

E-ink, or "electronic paper" as Apple refers to it in the filing, doesn"t rely on backlighting, resulting in a screen that is highly readable (even in bright sunlight) and low on power. The technology is dominated by the black and white displays produced by E Ink, such as the screen of the Amazon Kindle, but color e-ink displays are also on the horizon.

Apple"s method would involve a screen with "multiple composite display regions" with individually activated backlights, so content could be displayed in "electronic paper" mode if, for instance, it"s mostly text, or in "video display" mode if it involves high-resolution video or animations. The operating system would control the switching.

Such a hybrid display seems like it"d be great for extending your iPad or iPhone"s battery life, giving the backlights a break if you"re reading from iBooks or Instapaper. Not to mention a welcome breather from staring at bright, retina-searing screens all day.

hybrid e ink lcd display free sample

We"ve long pondered the possibility of an e-ink phone. One that offers enough battery life to get us to the end of the day, or maybe even the End of Days, simply by being less reliant on the power-draining frivolity of an LCD or AMOLED panel. What we didn"t envision, though, was that the first mass-produced attempt at such an idea would come from a Russian company we"d never heard of, or that it would take the particularly unusual form of the YotaPhone -- a device that does many things differently, not least in having a curved E Ink panel on its rear side. As you"re about to see, a lot of these two-faced ideas have potential, but some of them need some work -- a lot of work, in fact -- before they"re ready for prime time.

And then there"s the price tag, which may come as something of a surprise in its own right given the YotaPhone"s mid-range specs. It costs €499 in Europe, which equates to around $675 in the US (although the handset isn"t currently available there). That means you could actually buy the Yota"s two halves separately for a more affordable sum; for example, by getting a Nexus 5 and a Kindle. Nevertheless, the ability to buy the two-in-one YotaPhone is something we didn"t have a year ago, and something that isn"t offered by any other company, and so it"s worth bearing that in mind as we proceed to lay out its many flaws.

You can probably tell from the gallery above that this is a fat cuboid of a phone. It stands out for its blockiness and wide bezels, which contribute to a maximum thickness of 9.9mm (0.39 inch) and a weight of 146 grams. In terms of volume and weight, the YotaPhone is only around 15 percent bigger than the HTC One mini, which has the same 4.3-inch screen size, but it feels slightly bigger in the hand because the thickness barely tapers at the edges.

The one exception to all this rectangular-ity is to be found at the top-rear edge, which is thinner than the rest of the phone thanks to Yota Device"s most visible design flourish: a slight inward curve on the Gorilla Glass of its E Ink panel. This little detail is subtle, but people do seem to notice it -- usually around the same time that they realize they"re looking at a dual-display phone. As a result, the YotaPhone"s appearance is a great conversation-starter.

Now, chatting with strangers is nice and all, but it"s not really a reason to buy a piece of technology. Personally, we"d be a lot more ready to forgive the YotaPhone"s utilitarian appearance if its hardware lived up to that promise, but it doesn"t -- at least not in the sample we were sent for review. The wraparound plastic band that holds the two panels together has the potential to be durable, especially since it doesn"t need to make any allowance for a microSD or swappable battery, but there are visible gaps between this band and the E Ink display. The issue is worst at the top of the phone, perhaps as a knock-on effect from the curvature, to the point where you can actually see the SIM tray mechanism lurking behind the seam. Yota Devices tells us that it has fixed this issue, but we can only judge what we have in front of us. We"ll update this section when we receive an absolutely final handset, hopefully in the next few days.

For a phone that puts such a big emphasis on reading, we"d expect both displays to live up to the highest standards, but they don"t quite meet that mark. The 4.3-inch 720p LCD panel, made by Japan Display, is a lot better than some we"ve seen and it certainly feels like current technology, but its viewing angles and black levels are a touch worse than what you"d get from a bigger manufacturer like Samsung, HTC or Apple.

Things deteriorate slightly when you get to the E Ink panel on the rear. Although the contrast and 640 x 360 resolution are up to snuff, the panel occasionally suffers from severe ghosting from the previous image, such that it can look messy -- although this is more of an issue with wallpapers and other images, rather than clean text.

It"s also worth pointing out that there"s no technology here that couldn"t have been found on e-readers many years ago: no color, no video-friendly refresh rates and no glow-lighting. Neither is there touch sensitivity on this panel. This omission may have been inevitable from a manufacturing point of view, but it may determine the entire fate of this product, as it leads to all kinds of software limitations, which we"ll get to in a moment.

As a way of dealing with the lack of touch, the folks of Yota have added a capacitive area beneath the panel, which can respond to swipes, taps and holds -- gestures that mostly work OK, but which can sometimes by unresponsive. The same gestures work on an equivalent touch-sensitive area on the front face of the phone, beneath the LCD, but we eventually decided to turn on the stock Android on-screen navigation buttons instead, because, again, these swipe gestures weren"t always easy to get right.

Don"t be alarmed if you boot up the camera app only to be confronted by a black screen. It"s just your hand blocking the lens -- a lens that is placed at the bottom of the phone instead of where you"d normally find it, at the top. This may have been an inevitable consequence of the E Ink panel, which is too tall to leave space for the camera module above it, but the end result is awkward. The camera lens gets smeared more often because it"s so close to where all the swiping happens, and the border around the lens makes it hard to clean without a proper lens brush.

The camera"s position also means you have to turn the phone upside down every time you want to take a photo, and wait for the gyroscope and OS to catch up with the new orientation before you press the shutter button. Alternatively, you have to grip the phone by the edges, using just your fingertips, which doesn"t always feel quite right either.

If you can get past this early awkwardness, however, you"ll quickly come to like the stock Android camera app, which -- like the rest of YotaPhone"s operating system -- has been left largely unaltered. It"s full of speedy little shortcuts, like switching between the camera and the gallery by swiping to the left or right; and tapping and holding anywhere on the screen not only to set focus and exposure but also to bring up a radial menu for quick access to settings. The only onscreen camera buttons you need to worry about are the shutter release and a mode button to quickly switch between still photography, video and panorama. It all takes a bit of getting used to, if you"re new to stock Android, but it"s uncluttered and intelligent.

The YotaPhone"s 13-megapixel image output is of decent quality for an off-the-shelf camera module, which is a polite way of saying there"s little to report in terms of either flaws or bonuses. JPEG compression isn"t too harsh, leaving around 3.8MB of data in an average still, and the multi-exposure HDR mode usually provides images with minimal blur from handshake. Video quality is equally competent, with fast and sensible automatic adjustments, and with gentle enough compression to cope with detail and motion. The only weakness there is with the audio, which occasionally pops and also has excessive noise reduction that can make voices sound tinny. Lastly, the front-facing camera is passable, but too low-res and too highly compressed to use for anything but video chat -- output images are 1,280 x 720 and tend to be less than 200KB in size.

It"s in the software department that the YotaPhone comes alive. This is also where it dies on its feet. The predicament is simple: There"s enough pre-installed software on this phone to demonstrate that the second E Ink screen has real potential, but there"s not nearly enough support for this display to make it useful right now.

Back when the YotaPhone was still in the prototype stage, we pressed its creators over the need to somehow support Kindle and other e-reading apps. We were told that this support would come, by means of a workaround that would allow the user to trigger page-turns using swipe gestures, regardless of whether Amazon"s Kindle app ever officially supported the YotaPhone"s E Ink panel. This idea hasn"t made it through to this build, and that"s a huge limitation.

As it stands, the only way to read e-books on the YotaPhone"s E Ink screen is by means of Yota"s pre-installed app, Bookmate, which seems to only offer a handful of out-of-copyright items in English. There"s a subscription model that might help users in Russia to access a wider and more recent range of content, but it"s not available in the UK. As a result, the phone is currently useless for e-book reading -- at least until someone can find a workaround to trigger those page-turns as Yota Devices originally envisaged.(See the end of this article for a quick update on the e-book situation.)

The first method is by mirroring the LCD to the E Ink, by means of a two-finger swipe downwards on the LCD side. This is mirroring of the dumbest sort -- you"re effectively just creating a screen grab and then displaying the JPEG on the rear panel. This might have a few uses -- if you need to keep a boarding pass or some detailed info up on the screen for a while -- but those situations are rare.

The second method of sharing displays is much smarter. Apps that have been built or customized for the YotaPhone have a button in the top-right corner of the screen that triggers some function on the rear panel -- and instead of just a static image, this function can be dynamic and interactive. Equally, the YotaPhone"s customized version of Android 4.2 is able to send some notifications across automatically. The best way to illustrate this is by going through the three main pre-installed apps and functions that will be of use to an English-speaking audience.

When you get an email, text, weather alert or any other notification, the YotaPhone gives the usual audio alert and displays a summary of the notification on the rear panel. You then swipe to remove these notifications one by one.

Depending on your chosen privacy settings, you can decide how detailed a notification summary is. It can just be the number of alerts of a certain type that are awaiting your attention, or it can include sender details and the first line of content. You can also choose to treat notifications differently depending on who the sender is, by adding certain contacts to a list of people whose notifications are treated as private and kept off the permanent rear display.

You need to think carefully about the issue of privacy, because people do notice what"s written on the back of your phone -- and because the phone is so different, they often can"t help but stare. This applies to notifications, but it"s perhaps even more important with the "Organizer" app, especially if you have colleague"s appointments shown in your Google calendar.

If you can get around the privacy issue, either by keeping the phone in your pocket or just not caring about what people see on the back, then you might find it incredibly important to have an always-on agenda displayed on your phone. And this agenda is up-to-date, too: If someone adds an appointment to your calendar, it"ll show up on the E Ink panel automatically after a short delay.

The Organizer app is okay, and it offers basic control over which calendars to follow, but it can"t compete with calendar apps favored by power users. For example, there"s little ability to display to-do lists or notes alongside appointments -- they can only be shown separately, by means of a Notes app, which should really have been integrated into Organizer. This is the problem with Yota"s reliance on customized apps -- they"ll just never be up to the level of what"s available in the Google Play Store.

The YotaPhone comes with a pre-installed mapping app called MapsWithMe, which offers country-specific map downloads and seems to be relatively reliable -- at least for the small part of London geography that we tested it with. You can set pins, and home in on your position, and then hit the "Flip" button to send the map to the always-on display. From there, you can use swipe gestures to zoom in or out of the map. Unfortunately, the rate at which your position refreshes is way too slow for driving, but it"s handy enough at a walking speed.

This app can be configured to send tweets, Facebook updates and RSS feeds to your rear display. Strangely, these notifications don"t auto-update; you have to swipe to unlock the screen and then swipe again or hit the volume rocker to see the latest messages. Another limitation is that you can"t show different types of messages at the same time. This is no match for HTC"s BlinkFeed, for example, which displays tweets alongside Facebook updates and everything else. In fact, it"s hard to see how this could be called a "hub" at all.

We encountered a few bugs with our review unit. It crashed on occasion, for no obvious reason, and had to be restarted. Sometimes the lock screen was unresponsive until the display was switched off and then on again. But on the other hand, the phone"s cellular functions, WiFi, GPS and compass all seem to be reliable. The phone"s bands aren"t suited to the US, but there"s healthy support for 3G and LTE in the UK and Europe, including the key 800MHz, 1,800MHz and 2,600MHz LTE bands. On Vodafone"s LTE network in London, we had no trouble getting beyond 10 Mbps down and up with a couple bars of reception, and the phone was good at holding onto a weak LTE signal.

In terms of the main processor, we"re looking at the Snapdragon S4 Pro of yesteryear. Yota Devices originally said that the YotaPhone would come with a current-gen SoC, so we"re slightly disappointed not to get a Snapdragon 600 or even 800 in the final build. The S4 Pro"s performance isn"t bad by any stretch, with app load times and general navigation fluidity that is noticeably better than Snapdragion 400 phones like the HTC One mini, and not too far off Snapdragon 600 handsets like the Galaxy S 4 and HTC One. In fact, in terms of gaming performance as measured by 3D Mark, the YotaPhone was able to marginally beat the more recent HTC One Max, with 6987 points. Then again, a true flagship like the Sony Xperia Z1 trounces the whole lot, while also revealing that other big issue with the YotaPhone"s older processor: poor power efficiency.

With the latest chips, we"re used to seeing more than nine hours in our standard battery rundown test, rising to 12 or more hours on some flagship phones. The YotaPhone barely survived seven hours in the same test, on HSPA+ rather than LTE, and its real-world stamina was even worse. On a day with extremely light use, we"d barely make it to 11PM with any battery left. Notching up the usage slightly, by throwing in music playback over headphones, Netflix and other activities, and we struggled to make it until 8PM. It"s hard to forgive this when we"re reviewing a handset that is being sold on the basis of longer battery life.

This is an unhappy conclusion to reach, given all the technical challenges that Yota Devices has overcome in the past couple of years. But it"s unavoidable: The YotaPhone isn"t yet ready to deliver on its dual-screen promise due to various issues ranging from poor build quality to short battery life and, most importantly, an inability to make use of its rear E Ink panel except in a very limited selection of pre-installed apps. Without support for our favorite e-book and magazine platforms, or for Spotify and other streaming apps, or transport updates and Google Now (which we"re told is coming soon), there just isn"t much reason for us to flip the phone over.

What"s needed is a big push on the software front. Not just in terms of stimulating third-party app developers to take the YotaPhone seriously, but also by reducing the phone"s reliance on those developers in the first place. This might happen through better mirroring of the LCD onto the E Ink side, rather than the stagnant screengrab-mirroring we have now, alongside some kind of mapping from swipe gestures to standard navigation functions (forwards, backwards, play, pause, et cetera).

This lack of support could potentially be solved within this generation of the product, through some major software updates, but we wouldn"t rush out to buy the YotaPhone unless and until that happens. The other option is to wait for a complete hardware revision, in the hope that it"ll bring a full touch-sensitive E Ink panel or some other solution. Either way, with all the expertise Yota Devices has gained in putting this type of display into a phone, there"s a much better chance that this type of hybrid handset will one day be successful.

Update: With regards to e-book platform support on the E Ink display, Bookmate says it"s working on deals with English-language publishers in order to bring hundreds, or potentially "thousands" of copyrighted titles by mid-2014. We"re also told that the popular free Android app, FBReader, will be made to work on the YotaPhone"s rear screen any day now, bringing the ability to read non-encrypted .epub and .mobi e-books, as well as .doc and .rtf files. Meanwhile, Yota Devices says it"s "discussing potential cooperation" with Amazon in the hope of getting support for Kindle books. We"ll continue to cover these developments as and when they happen.

hybrid e ink lcd display free sample

Wow, just wow. We were about three months away from putting Pixel Qion a temporary vaporware watch, and now we couldn"t be happier about shoving this crow down our throats. The outfit"s so-called 3qi display technology -- which seamlessly integrates e-ink with LCD -- was on display this week at Computex, and there"s a beautiful video just after the break that shows it off. Put simply, we"ve never seen a laptop display look as good in broad daylight as Pixel Qi"s display, and even though there"s no striking colors in the black-and-white e-ink mode, at least you can see the thing (clearly, at that) without squinting. Seriously, hop on past the break and mash play.

hybrid e ink lcd display free sample

Sure, it"d look like badly-registered offset printing, but that only matters for small up-close displays, not large far-away displays. (And you could fix the registration with a precisely-cast diffuser layer, convolving each subpixel-cluster.)

If this was for reading rather than imagery, and you wanted to have true blacks, you could also just step one level forward in e-ink technology, and have the colored micro-capsule groups be just dual-tone (the capsule"s color plus black), giving you {C+K, Y+K, M+K, K} bitplanes.

Are e-ink display manufacturers just imprecise in the way they deposit the capsules into the panel, making it impossible to address individual capsules? (If so, that seems like something that could be solved pretty easily with modern photolithography processes, e.g. etching onto the backing electrode a grid of "buckets" for individual micro-capsules to fall into.)

This is part of what ends up giving the appearance of a higher-resolution display when rendering text, as you get some softer edges "for free." (And it"s what makes the display look "blurry" for some viewers.)

So, to your question, there"s currently no attempt with the technology to precisely place the colors on the display. The capsules are just spread all over, and the grid does the work.

Rods in eyes aren"t on a regular grid anyway, why should it matter how the pixels are distributed as long as they cover the plane and are mostly uniform?

And the upshot of that is listed in the specifications from the linked page: The refresh time on this display is 15 seconds. Which is far, far away from where it would need to be in order to be a practical option for color e-readers.

It’s fun to imagine Jesus returning in 30xx AD but this time instead of absolving the world of its accumulated sin he wipes away the accumulated technical debt of 1.5 millennia worth of corporate IT

Hell, since the writer was omnipotent and omniscient, the code was even built with the ability to perfectly modify itself when the company changed the DB on September 12, 2011 at 3:24 in the morning.

If you have 12 years" notice to make some changes, I don"t consider that technical debt: that"s the normal price of maintaining software in a changing world. It"s not "debt" that costs "extra interest" to pay back for questionable choices made previously.

Of course, you could simply make a matrix of tri-tone capsules, with white, black and colour. Then you have the contrast ratio and the colour space advantages. I don"t know why this hasn"t been done, I"m not an expert on e-Ink!

The microcapsules are not individually wired up to anything, so I don"t think it"s feasible to make each color channel independently addressable. Instead, a grid of wires behind the capsules are either positively or negatively charged, in order to attract or repel the charged colored particles in each capsule. There are only 2 charges, but by using different sizes of particles for different colors, you can finagle it so that the color you want ends up on top.

If they could address capsules individually, that would also increase the possible resolution of a black-and-white display; they"d do it if they could. But since the mechanism is about attracting and repelling charged particles, there"s probably a pretty hard limit on how much you can increase the resolution before there is interference between neighboring pixels.

OTOH I did see a 30 something inch e-ink development board for sale once and wondered if I could hack one together. It was expensive, but that didn"t particularly matter because the company made it clear they wouldn"t sell to consumers or hobbyists.

1) The rumors are that some of the display manufacturers have contracts with big device makers to not sell panels direct to consumer. I don"t have evidence to verify this, though.

2) There aren"t a lot of displays that exist _at all_ outside of the small/eReader/Big Sign categories. So there probably just aren"t the production lines out there to push those out.

3) Since refresh rates in even the best cases aren"t great, it"s unlikely to get a lot of traction in most markets, so I don"t think anyone is pursuing it heavily.

4) eInk (the company) seems very uninterested in the hobby market at all. They seem to want a few big contracts, and that"s all they"re interested in.

They were founded in 1997, so their earliest patents have probably expired. I wonder when the clones will arrive. Maybe they’ll have a better marketing and sales strategy.

As for the marketing, just don"t do any. Let the hobby market find it on their own and then just set a minimum order for anyone that wants to work directly with the company for their small project.

I think getting into the hobby market would amount to a huge long tail market of kickstarter style projects and other small products with potential to blow up.

If you want someone to invent something that uses them, you"ll have to have them in the hands of people that invent stuff. Maybe you only break even on your small scale sales to hobbyists, but eventually one of those hobbyists will be the one to invent the next big thing.

1) When you think about things like the Homebrew Computer Club or the Tech Model Railroad Club, the point is that the membership were engineers. Yes, they were hobbyists, but they were already professionals in the field. Kickstarters don"t seem to attract that engineering crowd.

2) Anybody with actual knowledge of hardware laughs at the amounts that kickstarters raise. Most engineering professionals can personally move the amounts of money that most kickstarters can raise.

Let"s say XYZ software is only available to businesses. As a professional software engineer, if I asked to buy XYZ, it"d get bought. But since I can"t use XYZ in my personal life, I"ve never even heard of it, and as a result when we"re deciding on software to buy at the company I have no familiarity with it and it doesn"t get bought.

Perhaps somewhere out there there are some 100x hardware developers, but every hardware developer I"ve met likes what they know, and a lot of what they know from a combination of personal tinkering and university. It"s hard to explain how powerful familiarity is with designing hardware. So if you"re sitting down and designing something and you need component A or B, and B uses less power and looks cool and all kinds of stuff, but you have experience with A and it works fine, well, you"ll go with A. And for good reason! Things have weird quirks and spec sheets lie and all kinds of stuff happens.

So yeah, I think that having some kind of community connection can pay absolutely massive dividends. At the end of the day, if it"s only accessible to large corporations, then it"s not even accessible to those large corporations - because the engineers at them won"t have familiarity with your thing and they"ll just pick what they know.

Furthermore, it"s not even that hard to sell to hobbyists. You make the spec sheet public, you make some example code public, you mail some units to Digikey and you"re done. You wanna go REALLY crazy, you can mail a few free units to some well known tinkerers. It"s not like you"re personally offering 24 hour phone support to everyone with an Arduino. The investment of a couple of hours to deign to mail Digikey a box is quickly recovered by the first engineer that plays with your widget at home and then suggests it at $bigco.

As an engineer whose project proposal (with proof of feasibility in the form of working and one-at-a-time manufacturable fully functional prototypes) was rejected by Kickstarter back in 2017, maybe their selection criteria are the reason.

Now then, with the linked screen"s 15 second refresh time, this is obviously not the case. But it (naively) seems like a compromise to keep the cost low, since the added tech and software to enable partial refreshes would add to both price and complexity.

I don"t need 30, 60, 120, or 144 Hz refresh rates to work with text. It would probably be impossible to see the difference. What I need is contrast and brightness settings to limit eye fatigue, and that"s where e-ink would be great.

Or even simpler -- a mouse cursor is essentially unusable on an e-ink display. Much like an old passive-matrix LCD, you"d need to implement nasty workarounds like cursor trails to restore any semblance of usability.

Even if my need for it dries up eventually, I"d still probably keep it around. Single greatest benefit of having it is ease of access to the commercial and industrial supply chain and slipping through these sorts of "no consumer or hobbyists allowed" sales positions.

The big thing is not depending on the screen keeping in perfect sync with your typing. I know this causes an issue for me when it"s related to talking - an echo off by a hundred or more milliseconds will absolutely throw me off the rails - but it doesn"t bother me so much when typing. A mental relic of writing code in terminals connected to distant servers, I"m sure.

• In monochrome panels, you can get 16 shades, and a full refresh in under a second (with partial refresh much faster, as tight as very few milliseconds for small areas, or commonly 30fps full-screen update if you’re willing to compromise a bit on image quality).

• In colour panels, you don’t seem to get shades or rapid refresh: seven colours means you get a seven colour palette, so you’ll have to use dithering to get any in-between colours; and you don’t get partial updates at all: even the fastest coloured panels take a couple of seconds to update the image, and the more colours you add the slower it is.

If I’m wrong about these and there are colour panels with more interesting colour or partial refresh, I’m interested to hear. I just haven’t seen any, and have done some looking.

The long and the short of it is that colour e-ink displays are only useful for display use, not for individual devices like ebook readers or computer displays.

They"re significantly easier on the eyes and they"re a joy to use. I don"t particularly care about color. One thing I"m wondering though, is what are the technical challenges behind building such a display?

Ideally, I"d like to be able to use an Android device that renders onto e-ink. I don"t particularly care for watching videos and such - most of my time on my phone is spent sending and reading IM"s (Signal, text, e-mail) rather than viewing media, so lower refresh rates is not something I really care about.

Where are the shortcomings causing e-ink displays to have very low refresh rate? Does it have to do with modern rendering technology being so well optimized for color displays that they simply are not performant for e-ink?

5) Now, using some clever AC patterns, you can address any "pixel" on your grid, and apply a charge there, that will attract or repel the little balls.

The trick is that moving the balls back and forth (6/7) is a physical process, and requires time. They _have_ to move a physical distance, and if that fluid lets them move too easily then they won"t keep their color. The balls will move and they"ll just drift back to some middle ground.

Also, if you"re not careful with your approach, you can mess with the charge of the balls, and they"ll no longer respond to the field the way you want. This is burn-in. (And it"s why displays do full-black-to-full-white refreshes from time to time)

So until we can figure out how to move those balls faster in the fluid, we really aren"t going to dramatically improve refresh rates with this technology.

If you want a volumetric display, maybe it will work, but the display itself will need to be the same size as the total volume of depth you want to create, e.g. digital objects can not appear outside the screen.

They"re 13.3" displays, work with Android and you can use them as an external HDMI display. However, the refresh rate is still poor, not nearly 20-30Hz. The Technology Connections Youtube channel has made two very interesting videos, showing the many caveats of the device (it"s an older model, but I"d guess most of it still applies). The main issues are poor software and slow CPU:

It didn"t look that much better (or distinguishable, for the matter) than one of those reflective LCDs (e.g. Pebble"s). And reflective "memory" LCDs also have almost negligible -- though not zero -- power consumption. Except for maybe signage products most people don"t care about this difference, and LCD is way cheaper and mainstream, so...

It"s no surprise that many manufacturers just put an LCD and try to get away by calling it "ePaper". There is a lot of geek appeal here, but I"m not really sure if we really need any new technology for "mainstream".

By the way, one thing I don"t get is why the pictures have such low saturation but the "demo" view shows really excellent saturation. Are there constraints when mixing colours perhaps?

I don"t miss color syntax highlighting, and it"s much more relaxing on the eyes. I could imagine others using it as their main monitor in a joint display setup, code in e-ink, browser in color.

Also, since the refresh rates are limited it"s not like we can build ourselves a nice external large e-ink display for our reading pleasure and for the sake of our eyes.

There"s a need gap for "Affordable E-Ink large external displays"[1], last time we discussed about it here it was pointed out that the likely reason for we not having such displays are due to IP.

More generally, I believe that the extreme minimalism, "tranquility" (or blandness) and simplicity of more contemporary styles may some day become unpopular.

So I expect that we will see trends in the opposite direction eventually. More colors. Maybe a changing facade with e-ink. Rather than simple, boxy shapes, more intricate and more organic shapes. Large-scale 3d printing could make the use of such forms more practical.

I also expect to see architecture that is more dynamic in that it will automatically reconfigure itself in response to weather changes or the day/night cycle, winter/summer, etc.

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_All_ the colors are in the capsule, but you can only truly pull a single one at a time, a true pigment-like mixing isn"t possible. If you pull the Cyan up, you"re necessarily losing the Magenta, for example.

If you had a high enough resolution addressable grid, you might be able to put the pixels close enough that you couldn"t tell, but you"d still be basically doing sub-pixel color at that point, not truly mixing the various colors at the base level.

Here"s a fascinating video on how these displays work, and how you can modify the firmware of the driver to get faster refresh rates (with an increased risk of burn-in). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw

My understanding is that modern printers actually mix those four different inks together on the page to achieve a wide range of colors. That isn"t possible with a display where colors have to remain within their own separate (sub)pixels and can"t actually mix together.

With a high enough resolution that might not matter, as your eyes would be unable to discern individual subpixels, but this display is only 600×448, and that"s with only one subpixel per pixel. (A CMYK display would need 4; maybe slightly less depending on subpixel layout.)

Furthermore, modern sRGB displays can output 255 different brightness values for each subpixel. This display can only output 7 values for each pixel. That further reduces the number of possible colors which would be possible in a CMYK subpixel-based display.

Provided all those issues could be solved though; maybe it would work? There could be other considerations I"m missing. (E.g. Can subtractive color mixing even work with subpixels in the first place?)

EDIT: 15 SECONDS PER FRAME, not 15fps. Thanks everyone for pointing that out. Still, amazingly cheap ... and almost no standby current after programming.

That refresh rate is fine if you"re using it to show the price of a rack of clothing, or various sensors - but you"re not going to get smooth-scrolling text with it. The low-power interface is for those same battery-backed retail signage applications, where you"re driving this, the microcontroller, and the wireless receiver with 3.7v from a coin cell.

I am really looking forward to the day when high refresh rate e-ink displays are common. The B&N Nook from about 8 years ago could be modified to successfully play flappy bird at about 10hz, but it was pretty ugly to use, requiring a black/white full clear of the screen to zero out the image every 30 frames or so.

Maybe it"s just me, but this seems quite expensive for a price tag. It also seems quite large for a name tag. I get that eink is useful in general for these cases, but this doesn"t seem to be the best example.

- Go the opposite route, why hide your cable? Make it stand out. Like those wall lamps with a brightly coloured / patterned cable hanging in loops down the wall. Turn it into wall art.

hybrid e ink lcd display free sample

We so often eulogise about the limitless possibilities e-paper displays enable and the exciting opportunities the technology creates for market growth, differentiation and competitive advantage — but for the uninitiated reader, we thought it might be helpful in this blog to take a step back and look at how e-paper works.

E-paper goes by many names and spellings — electronic paper, ePaper, electronic ink, e ink, electrophoretic displays, EPD — but all these terms effectively describe the same thing: an electrically-charged surface that replicates the look and experience of ink on paper.

Instead of a traditional display that uses backlighting to illuminate pixels, e-paper is based on the science of “electrophoresis” — i.e. the movement of electrically charged molecules in an electric field.

In every e-paper display there are millions of tiny microcapsules containing (negatively charged) black and (positively charged) white pigments suspended in a clear fluid. This encapsulated ‘ink’ is then printed onto a plastic film and laminated on to a layer of circuitry, or — to be even more specific — a transistor matrix layer. The circuitry forms a pattern of pixels that is then controlled by a display driver (EPD controller).

When a negative electric field is applied to the ‘ink’, the white particles move to the top of the capsule making the surface appear white at that specific spot. Reverse this process and the black particles appear at the top making the surface of the capsule appear dark. The technology can also work in colour in just the same way but using a combination of different colour pigments and electric charges, or just by adding a colour filter on top of the display.

E-paper screens are reflective — light from the environment is reflected from the surface of the e-paper display towards the user’s eyes, just like with traditional paper. This gives e-paper a wide viewing angle that is readable in direct sunlight.

E-paper screens are bi-stable — unlike conventional backlit flat panel LCD displays, which refresh about 30 times per second and require a constant power supply to maintain content, e-paper displays will hold a static image ‘forever’, even without electricity. E-paper only consumes power when the content on it changes – for example if an e-paper shelf label in a supermarket is updated with a new price. The rest of the time the display will simply show the content you want it to, where it doesn’t draw any power until the next update.

Here at Plastic Logic Germany, we took e-paper one stage further and successfully industrialised a process to create glass-free backplanes, which represents the transistor matrix layer mentioned above. We are the first company worldwide able to manufacture transistor arrays on plastic. Instead of using traditional silicon transistors, our active-matrix backplane consists of organic thin film transistors (OTFTs) made from the same plastic used to for cola bottles (PET). This means we can couple a flexible backplane with a flexible display medium, such as flexible OLED or flexible electrophoretic layer, to create a fully flexible display with limitless possibilities. In addition to the flexibility, our glass-free electrophoretic displays also more robust, shatterproof and lightweight compared to glass-based displays.

If you want to know more about flexible plastic e-paper display technology’s suitability for a given use case and to get some inspiration via the applications which are already successfully showcasing the opportunities and rewards achievable through flexible e-paper innovation check out our latest flexible e-paper whitepaper.

hybrid e ink lcd display free sample

In the early days, the most popular adoption of e-ink technology is among e-readers, most notably the Amazon Kindle. Those e-ink displays are easier to read with no backlit glare. Though you need a light source when using e-readers in dark, you will feel less strain on the eyes, unlike the LCD screens. Also, you will have better clarity in bright sunlight.

Nowadays, e-ink technology has spread to office interactive signs, IoT monitors, information dashboards, electronic shelf labels, and various digital signage applications.

For example, an IoT sensor measuring indoor environmental parameters can display the data like temperature, humidity, CO2 concentration, and TVOC on its e-ink display. E-ink displays usually do not require an extra power supply, making them easy to install in office applications.

hybrid e ink lcd display free sample

Nowadays, e-ink technology has spread to office interactive signs, IoT monitors, information dashboards, electronic shelf labels, and various digital signage applications.

hybrid e ink lcd display free sample

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hybrid e ink lcd display free sample

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hybrid e ink lcd display free sample

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 of the same features, each has its own distinct technological advantages. All electronic paper technologies face the following general challenges:

Electronic ink can be applied to flexible or rigid materials. For flexible displays, the base requires a thin, flexible material tough enough to withstand considerable wear, such as extremely thin plastic. The method of how the inks are encapsulated and then applied to the substrate is what distinguishes each company from others. These processes are complex and are carefully guarded industry secrets. Nevertheless, making electronic paper is less complex and costly than LCDs.

There are many approaches to electronic paper, with many companies developing technology in this area. Other technologies being applied to electronic paper include modifications of liquid-crystal displays, electrochromic displays, and the electronic equivalent of an Etch A Sketch at Kyushu University. Advantages of electronic paper include low power usage (power is only drawn when the display is updated), flexibility and better readability than most displays. Electronic ink can be printed on any surface, including walls, billboards, product labels and T-shirts. The ink"s flexibility would also make it possible to develop rollable displays for electronic devices.

In December 2005, Seiko released the first electronic ink based watch called the Spectrum SVRD001 wristwatch, which has a flexible electrophoretic displayPebble smart watch (2013) uses a low-power memory LCD manufactured by Sharp for its e-paper display.

In 2019, Fossil launched a hybrid smartwatch called the Hybrid HR, integrating an always on electronic ink display with physical hands and dial to simulate the look of a traditional analog watch.

In 2004, Sony released the Librié in Japan, the first e-book reader with an electronic paper E Ink display.Sony Reader e-book reader in the USA. On October 2, 2007, Sony announced the PRS-505, an updated version of the Reader. In November 2008, Sony released the PRS-700BC, which incorporated a backlight and a touchscreen.

In late 2007, Amazon began producing and marketing the Amazon Kindle, an e-book reader with an e-paper display. In February 2009, Amazon released the Kindle 2 and in May 2009 the larger Kindle DX was announced. In July 2010 the third-generation Kindle was announced, with notable design changes.

In 2020, Onyx released the first frontlit 13.3 inch electronic paper Android tablet, the Boox Max Lumi. At the end of the same year, Bigme released the first 10.3 inch color electronic paper Android tablet, the Bigme B1 Pro. This was also the first large electronic paper tablet to support 4g cellular data.

The French daily iRex iLiad. Two different processing platforms were used to deliver readable information of the daily, one based on the newly developed GPP electronic ink platform from

Flexible display cards enable financial payment cardholders to generate a one-time password to reduce online banking and transaction fraud. Electronic paper offers a flat and thin alternative to existing key fob tokens for data security. The world"s first ISO compliant smart card with an embedded display was developed by Innovative Card Technologies and nCryptone in 2005. The cards were manufactured by Nagra ID.

The Samsung Alias 2 mobile phone incorporates electronic ink from E Ink into the keypad, which allows the keypad to change character sets and orientation while in different display modes.

On December 12, 2012, Yota Devices announced the first "YotaPhone" prototype and was later released in December 2013, a unique double-display smartphone. It has a 4.3-inch, HD LCD on the front and an electronic ink display on the back.

On May and June 2020, Hisense released the hisense A5c and A5 pro cc, the first color electronic ink smartphones. With a single color display, with toggable front light running android 9 and Android 10.

E-paper based electronic shelf labels (ESL) are used to digitally display the prices of goods at retail stores. Electronic-paper-based labels are updated via two-way infrared or radio technology and powered by a rechargeable coin cell.

E-paper displays at bus or trams stops can be remotely updated. Compared to LED or liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), they consume lower energy and the text or graphics stays visible during a power failure. Compared to LCDs, it is well visible also under full sunshine.

Typically, e-paper electronic Tags integrate e-ink technology with

hybrid e ink lcd display free sample

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