hybrid e ink lcd display manufacturer

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apple recently filed a patent application titled "Systems and Methods for Switching Between an Electronic Paper Display and a Video Display," which describes a hybrid display technology capable of dynamically switching from a standard color LCD to black and white E Ink. The display would be controlled by the operating system and display switching would be done on the fly. According to the patent, the entire display or select portions of the display would switch based on the applications and content being viewed by the user. As expected, the color display would be used for rich media content, and the E Ink display would be used for text-based content from a source such as iBooks.

This is not the first time a manufacturer has envisioned a single product capable of simultaneously displaying E Ink and rich media content. Entourage took a different approach when it developed the Edge, a dual-screen clamshell tablet that has an LCD panel on one side and an E Ink display on the other. The unique tablet hit the market in 2010 and never caught on due to its older Android 1.6 operating system and bulky dual-screen design that pushed its size into netbook range. A single display solution would overcome this size problem and let users have one device that merges the best of the iPad with the Amazon Kindle.

According to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is exploring the use of color paper displays by E Ink for its future products. Kuo says that this manufacturer’s technology is particularly well suited to enabling a low-power second screen experience for a foldable form factor device.

Of course, Apple does not currently make a foldable although there have been ongoing rumors that the company is considering designs for a foldable iPad.

Back in February, both display analyst Ross Young and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman referenced a 20-inch folding MacBook/iPad design apparently in development.

What Kuo seems to be suggesting is that the e-paper panel would serve as the outward-facing display, providing a low-power accessory screen experience for users, who want to get some utility out of their foldable without having to unfold it.

For instance, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold features a 6.2-inch AMOLED cover display, which makes the device look almost like a standard phone in closed operation. The user can unfold the device to reveal the flexible 7.6-inch main screen inside. An e-ink display would not be appropriate for this design.

However, the Galaxy Z Flip features a very small 1.9-inch OLED cover screen, which acts as a simple readout for the time and notifications display. This could easily be imagined as a color e-ink surface though, extending battery life significantly as e-ink do not consume power for static content. The significantly lower refresh rate of e-ink panels, compared to OLED or LCD, does not matter too much in this context either.

This use case is closer to what Kuo describes; e-ink / e-paper could become the mainstream choice for these outer accessory displays. Of course, Apple’s plans could change it any time and it tests many different technologies continuously. At this point, anything beyond the idea that they are exploring the potential for the the technology would be mere speculation.

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We talked about Pixel Qi a couple of times in the past to mention their work on low-power displays or cheap computers. This time again Pixel Qi wants to shake things up by creating a display that is low-power (like e-ink) but that can reproduce colors and use current manufacturing technology, dominated by LCD.

This doesn’t sound like a bad plan: e-Ink is clearly not good enough and customers want color and possibly refresh rates that can sustain animation. However, it would work only if the power consumption is orders of magnitude better than current LCD screens.

In the next two years, we’re going to see a color eBook and Pixel Qi is bent on winning the race. If they succeed, the holy-grail “flexible” display will likely appear even farther down the road. A 150dpi low-power color display might mark the beginning of “good enough” for eBooks.

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.

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.

They can also be used for different purposes. If your customers want ink panels for a project, they want to buy wholesale e ink panels and other e ink panels bulk, Alibaba.com offers a wide range of e ink panels bulk, used for different purposes. If you want ink panels that are perfect for your customers or want to create their own design, the e ink board is the go-to for many, if your customers want ink panels for a different- or purpose, e ink board printing is a great and to-buy option.

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.

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Seven years of research at the University of Cincinnati has given birth to a “zero power” display technology. The University has published details of a display that it claims takes the best attributes from e-Reader and LCD technologies to create a revolutionary breakthrough. The screen offers high readability in bright sunlight and the ability to display high-speed colour content with “zero electrical power usage”.

The research, published in journal Applied Physics Letters, details the new electrofluidics design developed by the University and start-up company Gamma Dynamics. Lead researcher, Jason Heikenfel, UC associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in the college of Engineering & Applied Science, and John Rudolph, president of Gamma Dynamics, claim to be first to the table with a solution to a problem that has baffled other research teams for the last ten years.

Perhaps most importantly, the display can be manufactured with existing equipment and technology, a significant point when a new LCD plant costs approximately $2 billion (€1.4 billion) to build.

Heikenfeld said: “What we’ve developed breaks down a significant barrier to bright electronic displays that don’t require a heavy battery to power them.”

He explained that, currently, electronic devices fall into two basic camps. The first includes those devices that offer limited function and slow speed but require little power to operate. These would include e-readers like the Kindle.

In the second camp, devices like cell phones, laptops and the iPad provide high colour saturation and high-speed capability for video and other functions but at a cost of high-power usage.

Heikenfeld said: “Conventional wisdom says you can’t have it all with electronic devices: speed, brightness and low-cost manufacturing. That’s going to change with the introduction of this new discovery into the market. This idea has been in the works for a while, but we did not start really pushing the project until we thought we could make it manufacturable.”

The new “zero-power” design combines the features of both e-readers and LCD displays. It requires low power because it makes use of ambient light vs. a strong, internal light source within the device.

Two layers of liquid, oil and a pigment dispersion fluid (like an inkjet fluid), sit behind the display screen. Between the two layers are reflected electrodes that act like a reflective mirror.

Ambient light enters through the display screen through the first layer of liquid, hits the reflective electrodes and bounces back out to the viewer’s eye. That creates the perception of a bright, colour-saturated image, text or video.

A small electric charge powers the movement of these oil and pigment-dispersion liquids. The movement occurs between a bottom layer behind the reflective electrodes and a top layer in front of the reflective electrodes.

When the pigmented substance is positioned in the “top” layer (sandwiched between the ambient light and reflective electrodes), it creates a ray of coloured light, which combines with millions of ambient light rays to produce a full-colour display.

Dupont and Sun Chemical were involved in the research and partial support was provided by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Laboratory and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

E-ink, the company, holds the patents of the pigment core tech that makes "paper-like" displays possible and strongarms the display manufacturers and the users of their displays to absolute silence. Any research project or startup that comes up with a better alternative technology gets bought out or buried by their lawyers ASAP.

E-ink don"t make the display themselves, they make the e-ink film, filled with their patented pigment particles and sell it to display manufacturers who package the film in glass and a TFT layer and add a driver interface chip, all of which are proprietary AF and unless you"re the size of Amazon, forget about getting any detailed datasheets about how to correctly drive their displays to get sharp images.

In my previous company we had to reverse engineer their waveforms in order to build usable products even though we were buying quite a lot of displays.

With so much control over the IP and the entire supply chain and due to the broken nature of the patent system, they"re an absolute monopoly and have no incentive to lower prices or to bring any innovations to the market and are a textbook example of what happens to technology when there is zero competition.

So, when you see the high prices of e-paper gadgets, don"t blame the manufacturers, as they"re not price gouging, blame E-ink, as their displays make up the bulk of the BOM.

Tough, some of their tech is pretty dope. One day E-ink sent over a 32" 1440p prototype panel with 32 shades of B&W to show off. My God, was the picture gorgeous and sharp. I would have loved to have it as a PC monitor so I tried building an HDMI interface controller for it with an FPGA but failed due to a lack of time and documentation. Shame, although not a big loss as an estimated cost for that was near the five figure ballpark and the current consumption was astronomical, sometimes triggering the protection of the power supply on certain images.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I agree with this indeed, but I stand my point: the use of the word "retarded" is by all mean u