You need high volumes to drop the price and you can't get high volumes with high price. The E Ink technology has a lot of downsides compared to OLED and LCD, such as update speed, limited colors,...
We (http://www.visionect.com) have been building E Ink solutions for past decade and we just stoped convincing people that they should use E Ink where they could use LCD or OLED. E Ink is useful only as a niche solution for specific, mostly not consumer (exception being Kindle and Remarkable) products. We've sold a platform for any application and after a while we saw that it only makes sense to focus on specific niches (digital signage, transportation, bus stops) or go for finished product (see our https://getjoan.com).
In the end it is what it is - everybody says they'd use an E Ink display everyday, but almost nobody is prepared to spend the cash when they can use iPads, phones or huge LCD/OLED instead.
E Ink will have it's day in digital signage as they solve the colors as these screens will replace all paper advertising eventually, but untill the you'll see this screens on ebook readers / note takers, on conference rooms and on digital bus stops.
I recently experienced the Samsung Frame[2] which - to be clear - is NOT an E-ink panel, doesn't have the power savings, etc., but it's larger, cheaper, and has a very believable art mode. I was one of those guys who tried mounting an old flat panel to the wall to display art that I liked before realizing that it just wasn't believable. It was a nice enough effect in a well lit room, but turn the lights down in the slightest, and it's very obviously a television set, and just didn't feel at all arty. On the other hand, the Frame is extremely believable as a framed art print, to the extent that it fooled me the first time I saw one.
I haven't bought one yet, but it's much easier to imagine spending the $1000 for a Frame, mounting it vertically, and hacking out a way to format a newspaper graphic into its art mode than it is for me to imagine spending $1500 on an E-Ink display. Aside from being cheaper, if the project doesn't work out, then I can at least use the Frame for its intended purpose.
[1] - https://shopkits.eink.com/product/31-2%CB%9D-monochrome-epap...
[2] - https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/the-...
If they did it every day, that's 15 hours in a month, or 182.5 hours in a year.
If you paid that person $1500 for the year, that's $8.22 per hour, above federal minimum wage.
*I don't personally like them, but no doubt there are workers that like their jobs at doordash or uber--> not everyone doing those jobs is doing them out of desperation.
my answer might reveal a philosophical difference between our points of view, but I'd ask: would the desperate person be better with a job that covers some of their expenses or no job that coverers none of their expenses? I believe in having a social safety net of some kind (i really like negative income tax), but how useful is it for the government to ban jobs people would otherwise work?
the argument could be made that uber could just be forced to pay a living wage, instead of banning their jobs- but the difference is small. uber is already losing money- i would say that forcing them to pay a "living wage" just hastens their collapse and bankruptcy, so we're back to arguing if these jobs are better existing or not existing.
The art mode dimming is very good, it has tricked every single visitor I've had in my living room, they always say nice painting. Then their minds are blown when it's revealed it's a TV. It's very convincing at first glance.
Problem is showing personal images, it does not do as good of a job. I think it uses the same settings as other inputs.
Not applying art mode to arbitrary user pictures removes the risk of them making art mode look bad, when art mode is pretty much the main reason to buy this TV over another.
Well, that's one expensive toy expense saved I guess.
I'm not sure what 'looking natural' for a television screen might look like. Naively, if you wanted the television mode to look more like moving pictures, I'd think you'd have to figure out a way to knock down the refresh rate considerably. 15Hz ought to do it. If you're asking me if it just adjusts the television brightness to surrounding lighting conditions, I don't know, but it feels like art mode is doing more than just adjusting brightness (though possibly I'm wrong here and brightness is just much more convincing than I've experienced in the past)
Take this with grains of salt as I don't own one, don't know the interval, and couldn't guarantee that it isn't bricked without an internet connection, though I find that highly unlikely.
I really like it, but not that much!
For example, I've been dying for one of these:
https://www.padformusician.com/en/
Imagine having my entire music library in an eink tablet. Then, when I go to my parents' house I can play any of my music on their piano.
But I'm not willing to spend $900+. I'd be willing to spend up to $200
For that reason, the devices don't exist.
OK, it works for reading PDFs of things like scientific papers (which I understand is something people like the Remarkable tablet for). And it's easier to read outside. (Might be a bit cheaper too because you don't need as powerful a processor.) But you're mostly trading off a pretty general purpose device--which is getting even more so--for something that has a really narrow set of use cases. And isn't really as good as the smaller models for just reading text.
If the device could flip pages quickly, it would be an amazing device. It just can't.
Sony laughed at us, we'd never sell that many, besides (unlike TVs) they essentially made them by hand on a minimalist assembly line - we sold 25k that year.
It's the same chicken and egg thing there's not a lot of incentive to optimise the production costs until the volumes spike and that wont happen until the prices drop
That's true for general electronic and mechanical stuff and obviously not true for everything. Semiconductor, batteries etc. are much more specialised.
You'd see them roaming about the campus reading them. Eventually I think that swapped out for iPads since they could be used for non-paper things.
The technology is ridiculously low tech by the industry standards in comparison to any tft screen
I really wonder, whether there would not be more consumer interest in these devices, if there were actual offerings. What about offering the 13" display in a plastic housing with a software more crafted to the consumer/hobbyist? Perhaps powered and controlled by USB-C or optimized for the Raspberry Pi. How low could the prices go, especially with larger volumes?
Of course, it could be just me, and there is not much interest in the wider audience.
Perhaps if this was some open source play where everybody did everything for free. We tried different pricing, different positioning and we could not breakthrough into large volumes with a platform play. Everybody in the end tries to haggle you on the price / cut you out and unless you have Google-deep pockets you can't afford to lose money for a couple years to launch this wide.
I'd say that it's pretty much impossible to do a platform play in hardware if you're a startup. Even when talking about IOT, which is arguably the simplest hardware I don't remember of a platform play that went really well. Most of them are meh or random successes like the ESP WiFI (again not started by a small startup, but still could be argued that is a proper hacker platform).
If you want to play with some of our solutions, hit me up at luka dot birsa [at] visionect dot com and I'll see what I can do.
I stumbled upon the Lightphone II (https://www.thelightphone.com/), a gorgeous slab-looking phone, with an eink display, and I realized this was the way for me: battery life for days/weeks, minimal functionality, good looks.... unfortunately the price (350$) is way too high at the moment, I can't afford to put that much money into something that ultimately isn't that important.
I wish technology would improve though, because I'd really love to have a simple phone like that. No need for Android, only something like KaiOS would be more than enough.
might be something to look at.
Problem is that a 24 inch monitor takes about $15 to run 24/7 for a full year. You can run that for 50 years and still have a set-up that's hundreds of dollars cheaper with better contrast, can show colour, can show moving images etc.
And if you put a motion/use sensor on it and connect it to a smart home setup, the energy use differences (e.g. reading the paper while brushing teeth) become minimal. We're talking about pennies per year.
They're interesting as part of experimental art pieces, but as a large-scale consumer product very much unproven for these usecases.
So, emulating newsprint is a good e-ink use case, since newsprint's contrast sucks too. But black and white photos, which depend critically on effective use of contrast for a lot of their effect, will not look good on an e-ink display, any more than they would on a Game Boy.
That's only for glossy though, right? That comes with glare, which is annoying for reading.
(Anyway, why do people frame newspaper front pages? Given the total lack of archival quality in newsprint, I could see scanning and printing to frame in a way that'd hold up better over time.)
But also buy high-quality prints as well. Even though both will end up on the wall they are totally different use-cases.
Under either name, it's a major figure of merit for quality of image reproduction, and my point is that e-ink, being worst at it of any raster display technology of which I'm aware, is thus a very poor choice for displaying images if quality of reproduction is a criterion.
I am totally fine with an 8:1 contrast ratio if it gives me perfect integration into the ambient light :)
Photography would be displayed elsewhere, in a place that is meant to draw attention. I want eink because it shouldn't grab attention at all.
Maybe not the living-room centerpiece, but still.
I'd use the one in the article in a heartbeat, much more elegant and no backlight. No it won't display a photograph as good as the Samsung but it will not be cheesy or look out of place (or consume tons of energy) - which the Samsung will if it is positioned anywhere else but in front of and in eye-level of a sofa.
The only thing it is good for is as a TV, which I guess is great if you want a TV.
It's just super odd to me to think about wanting to go to all the trouble of displaying an image at that size and scale, and also being willing to accept it looking as lousy as e-ink's awful contrast will necessarily make it. Sure, it's a lot easier to change the displayed image than it is with a paper print, but what's the benefit of that when they're all going to look equally bad?
Granted I'm a photographer and I want my own work to look good, but it's not as if I had to develop that interest to want whatever I did put on my walls to look good...
I don't claim that e-ink has no use case, only that it's bad at displaying photographs. If you mean to argue otherwise, please do so with respect to statements I've made, rather than to ones I have not.
There are two comparisons between LCD displays that should properly be referencing S/N ratio instead of contrast.
With a glossy display, whatever is behind you STRONGLY affects your S/N ratio, especially in black.
In sunlight even a very bright LCD is washed out almost to unreadability (though I am surprised how well recent phones still manage to still function)
eInk is cool, and the technology continues to be developed, but it's still a niche solution applicable to limited use cases due to the slow refresh and high cost.
And of course, I am very aware of the downsides of e-ink. Readers like the kindle are pushing as far as it is possible with respect for interactivity. But for all kind of mostly static displays, it would shine.
Unfortunately, I think it's killing a whole corner of the market. I'd happily pay $500 for one of these but not $2k. At that price I'd struggle to not use something that has more colours and a higher refresh rate.
I feel like my phone often responds to my input a hell of a lot slower than the refresh rate of an e-ink display.
It's like the word 'literally' (whose bastardization is both far more egregious and hilarious)
Even Google now reflects the 'incorrect' use of beg as the primary meaning of it:
beg - raise a question or point that has not been dealt with; invite an obvious question
There is no problem here as long it isn't being applied to the wrong logical fallacy.
A guy walks into a bar with a duck on his head, which begs the question, "why is there a duck on his head?" (be asked.)
"Begging" and "asking for" are commonly used to anthropomorphize situations. "The ball spinning on the goal line was begging to be tapped in." "With John's attitude, he was was just asking to be fired."
Nothing wrong with the phrase at all. It is consistent with other common usages.
Maybe it's the phrase used in the logical fallacy that doesn't make sense.
The hweird logical-fallacy use of "begging the question" is a mistranslation.
It goes back to Aristotle, who talked about "τὸ ἐξ ἀρχῆς", meaning "asking for the first thing". That is: you're debating some proposition X, which in the rhetorical terminology of the time was called "the first thing" (imagine that you're holding an actual debate, and you start by saying: The question before us is whether X), and the logical fallacy is when, in the course of arguing for X, you assume (ask us to accept -- ask for) X, the "first thing".
So far, so good.
So after the age when Serious Thinking was done in Greek came the age when Serious Thinking was done in Latin. Aristotle's term was translated to "petitio principii". The first word means "assuming" in mediaeval Latin but "asking for" in classical Latin. The second word means "first thing", a rather literal translation of the Greek.
So far, still so good.
And then, some time in the 16th century, some genius decided to translate the term into English and (1) render "petitio" as "asking for" ("begging") rather than "assuming", and (2) render "principii" as "question" instead of "first thing". Presumably they did #1 because "asking for" is one meaning of "petitio", even though it's not the one that's relevant here. Presumably they did #2 because in a debate (which, again, was the original context for the term) "the question" means whatever proposition you're debating.
The result of which is the ridiculous term we have now. The common usage of the phrase to mean "raising the question" is a much better thing for "begging the question" to mean. Personally, I mostly avoid using the term at all because some people will think it means "raising the question" and think I'm weird and pedantic if I use it to mean "arguing in a circle", while other people will think it means "arguing in a circle" and think I'm ignorant if I use it to mean "raising the question". (So it's an example of what Fowler called a "skunked" term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunked_term.)
And the word softwares (software is correct for the plural form).
"literally" has been used to mean "figuratively" for hundreds of years, by plenty of famous authors. The idea that "literally" should only mean "actually; without exaggeration or inaccuracy" seems to be the actual recent invention.
"Literally" should be that tool. I understand that a word's meaning is, by definition, what people mean when they say it, but it is frustrating to have this communication tool drift away with nothing to replace it.
As another commenter said, this same thing happened to "very" and "really" in the past. So maybe it's time to let "literally" go and make up a new word for it?
My point is that it isn't "drifting away"—it has been used as an intensifier for hundreds of years.
(That's another one that tends to mean the opposite)
I don't think words have a point.
> What information does it convey if not to say that it is actually, without exaggeration?
Sometimes it does convey that. And sometimes it's merely an intensifier. Lots of words are like that.
See also 'fruit', and whether or not tomatoes are displayed in the vegetable aisle.
Fruits and vegetables aren't opposite things. Fruit is a term of art in botany, but it's lay usage is fairly close to that. The word vegetable can be fairly broad to include almost any edible part of a plant. This is why I'm a vegetarian and not a vegetarian and fruitarian.
Culinary vegetable is often used as a "soft opposite" of fruit because they often require different preparations and uses.
The interesting thing about "begs the question" is that it's a matter of who is doing the begging (asking). Classically your answer is asking for your premise, so you're sort of working backwards and likely circularly. In modern usage, the answer is asking for more research.
Sometimes people use it to mean dodging a question, which I'm not quite sure why and would consider wrong usage.
To "beg the question", canonically, is to argue in a way that only makes sense if whatever you're arguing to support is true. It's a difficult sort of fallacy to provide examples for because it's quite rare, so most examples you see tend to be constructed for the sake of complaining about the supposed misuse of the phrase "beg the question", and so either trivial or incomprehensible or both.
Too, the phrase "beg the question" itself relies on a rather outmoded sense of the word "beg", whose rarity in modern usage makes the prescribed meaning of the phrase very difficult to intuit compared to the supposedly incorrect one.
All of which begs the question: why should anyone care what complaints linguistic prescriptivists make in the case of this phrase, any more than in the case of any other?
"Stay away from that switch! Running the factory lights at night begs a German bomb right on top of us."
"I beg your pardon?"
"That's an interesting link, but it begs the question, 'why does an archaic idiom invalidate the plain meaning of a phrase?'"
The English language is well prepared to deal with ambiguities. There are countless words and phrases with multiple meanings. This one is not even confusing! One is always followed by the question it raises, which makes it quite obvious what they meant.
It seems that the logical fallacy definition of "begs the question" has now become a recursive example of question begging itself. The only reason it means self-referencing argument is because 10% of the population believes it does. I'm half-convinced this was all just some linguist's April Fool's prank gone awry.
The reality is the literal definition of "begs the question" is commonly accepted, well understood, and frankly, makes a hell of lot more sense. I'm fairly certain that it is the only definition for that term that is held by a majority of English speakers. If that doesn't make it the official definition, then what does? There is no English Language Preservation Organization. If most people think that is what it means, then that is what it means.
As you have one: what is the basis for sharing documents? I would mostly be using it as an ebook reader, how do you upload ebooks, what formats are supported?
As for the software/sharing, they have desktop (Win, Mac, Linux), Android and iOS apps and their own cloud hosted service for syncing documents, inks, ebooks, etc amongst your devices and the tablet. The apps are a little clunky (due to cross platform widgets) but you can quickly export a PDF of a drawing or drag in an ebook (PDF/ePUB) and it'll auto sync to your device.
P.S. The device itself is quite hacker friendly, it supports SSH over USB out of the box and they've shared their cross-compliation toolchain.
https://remarkablewiki.com/tech/start https://remarkablewiki.com/tips/start https://github.com/reMarkable
I should add that this is a relatively open platform. It runs Linux, there is an official GitHub org with code.
ReMarkable isn't cheap either: $400
Whereas there is a multitude of color display technologies with lots of prior art and overlap that would make patent disputes difficult, e-ink is so "special" in the way it works that it's easier for them to aggressively defend their patent, which means they take a huge skim off the top of anything that's produced. So there's lots of competition and innovation in the space of LCD and LED technology, because both those technologies are out of patent protection, but E-ink is a wasteland right now.
I think it's why it's so niche.
I'm with you. I can't wait until we have a proper A4 / letter sized e-reader -- or better yet 2x A5 that could close.
I haven't kept tabs on the e-ink scene outside of a little digging twice a year. Outside of refresh rates, it doesn't seem like a lot has changed. The price is still up there and the screens are still roughly half of what they should be.
I fell in love with the general idea of e-ink with the Pebble watches (Sharp's Memory LCD.) Having a device that just works and doesn't require frequent charging is such a pleasure.
What I really don't understand is why e-ink hasn't consumed the mobile market (like the Yotaphone.)
edit: proper paper sizing
> would like to have a large e-ink display for displaying b/w
> photographs.
I'm surprised that newspapers haven't picked up on this already, they could play the "we're going green" card, cut their own overheads and lock people into a platform.
Hell, they could even elbow their way into much larger markets, such as books, note taking, pictures, emails, document signing, etc.
Why the Amazon Kindle doesn't come with a newspaper is beyond me - it seems like it would be an absolutely killer feature for getting people to use their kindles every day. Doesn't Jeff Bezos own some newspaper already anyway?
Edit: actually most of the eink price tags use a button cell battery, oops
I can't wait to see a color eReader and see magazines and comic books in all their glory.
- blue LCD light (facebook's blue!), mass sleep deprivation - eyeball markets, surveillance capitalism, end of independent thought - power consumption, global warming
Conclusion, e-ink is the difference between UBI utopia and cyberpunk distopia!
C'mon, chronically anxious Brooklyn ad industry employees, this shit is easy.
People rather have a backlit display in a small form factor with a higher refresh rate than reading on an eink display.
My Phone / Tablet allows me to read and also watch movies in color but eink can't do that.
I.e. how are they worse than rink?
You can get LCDs in almost any form and size for very little money, but e-ink displays are still rare and expensive. I love my kindle (ironically even Amazon seems to be very slow in enhancing it), but I would love larger e-ink screens and display devices. Like with good old black and white displays, there is zero penalty for running them 24/7. The newspaper is a great implemantation of this, but I also would like to have a large e-ink display for displaying b/w photographs.
And of course, a reader, large enough to cover the area of an open book (so almost A3) would be a dream. Displaying a double-page of any print at 100% would make for the ultimate e-reading experience. Would be the ideal accessory to any programmers desk, but also for any scientist.
So the big question is: why does all of this not exist?