As noted, we already have e-ink phones that can do both colour and video[1], while there is some ghosting it's getting to the point of usable. Just need a big display to match it.
eInk's primary advantages are power (and only if your idle period is long enough; if you have to update it with any frequence you're going to lose pretty soon to a memory LCD); and angles/polarity (specially compared to LCD), which some people also claim produces less headaches.
The company also doesn't exist and only produced 10" 1024x600 screens, which are barely usable. If you know of another usable product, or have anything to back up your claims, please do share.
I also have the Metawatch. These are purely reflective, not transflective. They boast whopping 20:1 contrast ratios -- https://www.sharpsma.com/products?sharpCategory=Memory%20LCD... . Even at its best days (carta) eInk didn't reach that 15:1 https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E_Ink_Carta , and nowadays it's more like 10:1.
I've owned two devices with them so far, and quite frankly the newer one works just as well (if not better) than E-Ink outdoors but still has a backlight when necessary. Also, it can display color and smooth motion. The minor downside I see is the lack of an ability to display an image with zero battery consumption, such as on E-Ink, but the consumption is still so low that the transflective LCD watches can last weeks with an always-on display.
With the refresh rate of e-ink, wouldn't the google play store be useless anyway? Most apps would be unbearable (games a non-starter, scrolling a no-no, etc).
Everybody would like a Ferrari/Rolex/etc., but they don't get cheaper because of it. In fact, high demand combined with a monopoly means you don't need to lower prices at all. (You lower price to raise demand, but you don't need to if you have strong demand at your current prices).
Competition does lower prices. And with patents competition is impossible. As if for a competitor to make improvements to the process/technology, while still using parts of it (they would still infringe).
In my experience in the display industry, the main driver of price is cost and the main driver of cost is volume. If a customer puts in a signed escrowed order for a million displays lilke what Apple did, then processes get scaled, factories get built, and per-unit prices go down.
That my understanding of how 6" matrix E-Ink displays went from costing thousands of dollars per display when they were being built in low volumes of hundreds of displays to costing sub-50 when they were being built for Sony, Amazon and others in volumes of hundreds of thousands of displays. The same is true of the LCD industry and the OLED industry. The same is true of the cellphone industry.
> And with patents competition is impossible
I can't understand what exactly you're talking about. Is this the E-Ink-is-expensive-because-of-patents trope? I've asked before whenever I see this trope on HN, what specific patent are you referring to? Patent thicket? This extraordinary claim requires evidence. I go to SID, never heard anyone claiming this kind of stuff. Tonnes of competition but physics, featureset, costs, volume, customer demand gets in the way. It is why even well funded companies like Liquavista-Amazon and Mirasol-Qualcom didn't make it.
I'm talking about exactly this: if a company holds patents on a technology, other companies can't improve the same technology (using parts of the patented tech and improving specific aspects with inventions of their own) without licensing it.
>This extraordinary claim requires evidence.
Nothing extraordinary, and it's not about E-ink being cheap or expensive, it's just an invariant where there are patents.
You're making a claim equivalent to saying Microsoft holds patents on operating system technologies, other companies can't improve the same technology.
I'm guessing you're not actually involved in the display industry because you chose not to reply with a clearly defined specific problem that is blocked by patents. I actually work in the display industry so I just see the repetition and self-citation claims (OP's article refers to yet another HN throwaway post) on HN as being disappointing.
No, I'm stating the fact that other companies can't improve the same exact technology (as defined in the patent).
If Microsoft has patents on aspects X, Y, Z of filesystems, other companies can still make filesystems, even improved ones.
But they can't make a filesystem that also leverages X, Y, Z (or any combination of them) unless they license, and also can't make a filesystem with an improved version of X, Y, or Z lest they infringe on the X, Y, Z pattent.
So this isn't about other companies still being able to make improved eg. OSes in the general sense, but if they can build improved OSes that also leverage the same patented techniques where needed (and they can't).
That's equivalent to saying Samsung can't improve the same exact technology used by AU Optronics. Rightfully so.
> So this isn't about other companies still being able to make improved eg. OSes in the general sense, but if they can build improved OSes that also leverage the same patented techniques where needed (and they can't)
I think I've explained my point clearly enough. I'll wait for you to give some factual evidence as to which patent you believe is giving rise to your statement of "they can't".
Well, that "rightly so" is where we disagree - and what patents were made to provide. If you are pro-patent, then that's that.
:-) I wouldn't describe myself as pro-patent. I would say I'm pro-fair play. If Alice spends years in front of a fume hood developing a new ITO coating or polymer that reduces cost and improves manufacturability of a product, then she deserves to be protected from corporate VP Big Bob getting his engineer to just reverse engineer Alice's work. If you agree that Alice's work deserves some protection for some period of time, then we both share the same concept of right/wrong. Whether patents are the best way, and how they can be made more effective and less vulnerable to turkeys and vultures, is a discussion we could have in good faith. But at the very least we would need to base the discussion on facts rather than what I see in some other posts (not alleging you have done this) where they're writing Kiplingesque just-so stories to explain display product pricing while not knowing the difference between ITO and AgNP.
Thanks for having some persecution syndrome or conspiracy theory about "the downvote brigade" and about me having "some other agenda for promoting this story".
In actually, I don't give a duck about the E-ink industry, but I do dislike the effect patents have in general, and am talking out of general principles about that.
You might be happy with E-ink patents in particular or patens in general. You might also be an E-ink industry insider (wouldn't that make you the one that is more possible to have an "agenda" ot at least a vested interest?), and have far more information that me, a mere e-ink consumer, about the impact of patents there.
You could still respond (or not respond) on a thread about the impact on patents (on e-ink and in general) without being rude and second-guessing the other person.
How about that?
I have not read such claims. What I have read are individual small-scale customers approaching base layer producers like E-Ink and being disappointed after expecting assistance in getting their product ideas to market. That's analogous to a 10,000 unit/month or less customer approaching say a liquid crystal supplier, or AU Optronics and expecting any form of support or assistance. The outcome of such an interaction is pretty much guaranteed. Even the top tier distributors won't talk to you unless you're expected to order at least 100,000 units a year. Anything less and you go through the normal OEM development path of which there's tonnes of partners. You do what everybody else who has a display product idea does, which is go to SID or maybe just CES, and talk to OEM vendors. If you've got an E-Ink product idea, probably somebody like Netronix would be your OEM partner but even they probably won't talk to you unless you're putting down big NRE. That's just how it is. Volume drives the products. You can't have small volume and cheap unless you're reusing some component that someone else has driven the volume for. That's just as true in the display industry as it is in any other tech industry, eg: LCDs, OLEDs, CPUs, memory, sensors, even passives like resistors and capacitors!
I don't follow. I also don't see how it is different than any other industry be it bricks or CPUs. Buy a few and the per unit price is high. Buy millions and the per unit price is low.
> Of course you'll give me wholesale pricing on volume in any market.
Yes.
> But are product creators scared off when a big part of each unit's cost will go to license the screen technology?
I keep seeing this claim. I believe it is wrong and asked for evidence. In response to which OP has promised to correct the article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26247268
And consumers are fairly satisfied with devices that get charged once every day, and can take a 15 minute quick-charge to add multiple hours of additional usage to them.