Even further, a Chinese colleague hinted that they will never sell to you if you are doing anything in the consumer space (except you are one of the big e-reader makers of course). And that the traditional display companies could retool pretty quickly to make e-ink instead, but won't. It's all very very odd to me. I would suspect a cartel, but it doesn't make any sense - e-ink is too slow and to ugly to really cannibalize laptop and monitor sales. We had good use cases: industrial PCs, outdoors informational displays, and so on. But apparantly not good enough for e-ink.
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[1] There is a look-up-table in the microcontroller that tells the display how much current to use to switch a pixel to a given color. It depends on the previous color of the pixel and the temperature. These "waveforms" or "wavetables" are proprietary and secret. It looks like they are just "good enough" and small enough to fit into the cheap MCU. I suspect you could get better results by using larger and better tuned tables, and I've seen a hobbyist actually get higher color depth by using their own waveforms.
I don't think it would cannibalize these sales, but I do think that if e-ink was cheaper and competitive with LCD, it would be everywhere.
As it stands though, LCD and probably OLED will overtake any use cases that e-ink would have had. The company behind e-ink dropped the ball there, thinking too highly and too exclusively of their own product. It's not that fancy, like, bruh.
They seem to act that way, but what would be the actual incentive? (As apposed to just bad business acumen)
There is a lot of effort required to scale up technologies to the point that it is affordable for consumers. In the software space I see it with solutions (think $500+/year/seat licensing) that could be broadly useful, but the company doesn’t want to make intuitive or bug free (enterprise software users will tolerate a lot of abuse). In the hardware space, there is a risk of building a million units of something that doesn’t sell (think Surface RT).
You are correct, it is the equivalent of me as a display engineer coming here and saying "Cray computers has an active incentive to keep it out of consumer's hands" or alleging "Microsoft is blocking progress in the operating system industry using their patent". If you examine my comment history, you'll see I've tried repeatedly before on HN to explain why the physics of electrophoresis is the dominant limitation in the industry but that is apparently harder to understand and harder to accept, whereas people saying things like "the company behind the tech has an active incentive to keep it out of consumers' hands." or "the technology is locked by a company that doesn't innovate nor mass produce their tech. " without citations or any evidence is accepted as the gospel truth. :-)
Why they can't be a dollar or two more expensive and have better components, or why they can't just release the firmware source so people can improve it, I have no idea. I would almost say they are intentionally limiting it, but I've seen the same behavior from single-board-computer vendors, for example. It's really short sighted.
Isn't kindle firmware published open source? What is in this stuff that they provide? https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
Huh? What e-ink driver board? There's no such thing inside a Kindle. It is a straight NXP SoC that drives the e-ink panel directly. There is no MCU. The driver is open source. https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable/blob/master/refer...
"Secret sauce that tells you how to drive the display cells"? You mean like a voltage table that is also present inside every LCD or OLED? The difference would be that the electrophoretic display would need a much bigger table so it would have to be kept on the SoC since it can't possibly fit into a single voltage driver circuit. That's not software, that's just a big table of voltages that's hardcoded for each unique panel. Is that what you think is "secret sauce"? Do you also want to extract that table inside each LCD drive circuit as well? I guess you could use it to make your LCD or OLED panel show brighter colors but at the risk of burning and damaging the crystals. I imagine the same risk would also be true for electrophoretic panels or anything where you can change the physical voltage that is being applied to the material.
Just curious, I previously saw claims on HN that E-Ink is a very brutal cruel company that is evil and attacks everybody. That didn't line up with how their staff, at least the materials science guys, seemed to be when I encountered them at SID. I've been asking for evidence for this on HN. Did they try to take down your tool or anything like that?
In hobbyist displays, the tables are very simple, and I'm pretty sure this is one source of quality differences.
I have no idea what you mean by "refresh so much faster and better" or what an "eink hobby display" is. To me, you can buy the same panel Kindle uses on the market and you can drive it with various different controllers and the "update latency" (electrophoretic panels don't refresh) will be different.
I don't necessarily mean to imply that the military is restricting the tech for competitive reasons; but rather just that E Ink Corporation might be price-anchoring relative to what their biggest customer is willing to pay.
(See also: why "holographic glitter" is so expensive, compared to other metallic glitters. Holo-glitter paint is an effective radar diffuser; and, more obviously, the glitter itself is literally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure) !)
EInk has a refresh time. Which is a significant mismatch to the flight speed of devices which seek to mask themselves against changing background. More to the point, optical detection is the least worry in this space. by the time it's visible in motion, its already a problem. '
For on-the-ground, its easier to put it under a canopy.
EInk does nothing for radar, or thermal imaging. So your proposed conspiracy is to defeat human eyes, which rarely if ever are the first-spotters. The circumstances where using radar breaches your own privacy are understood. I would expect an ML vision system could defeat this anyway. (and I say that as a bit of a long-term non-believer in AI)
I love a good conspiracy, but alas, I think this isn't it. The grassy knoll is just, after all, a patch of grass, and not an EInk facsimile, in my personal opinion.
(Admittedly, I was being a bit silly with the missile use-case.)
I occasionally see referrals in flow text to a Chinese claim they invented "holographic quantum" radar and can see all current stealth low echo aircraft and subs. I suspect it's bullshit but in war, if stealth was a purturbation, and deep water subs a more historical perturbation toward MAD and now, this is another perturbation much as drones have altered the symmetry for tank and mechanised ground warfare.. "shrug"
would be largely worthless as visual isn't really the primary way we detect and destroy aircraft anymore.
Accessible pricing may result in eink screens taking consumers, businesses, hobbyists and whatnot by storm. But meh...
The principle characteristics of e-ink displays are size, resolution, refresh rate, and colour gamut.
(Even B&W displays have a range of greyscale gamuts.)
Small displays are now reasonably cheap, with displays of ~6--8" available for $20--50.
Larger displays, suitable for advertising, marketing, or other commercial/industrial applications are much more expensive, as noted here. Some of that is likely cost-driven, but another element is that if a larger supply were offered, the price would fall. Absent some way of bracketing specific applications, there's little to keep, say, advertising or commercial users from making do with cheaper consumer-grade displays.
There's a somewhat similar rationale that was arrived at in the 19th century by French engineer / economist / polymath Jules Dupuit, in describing the rationale by which 3rd class rail carriages were so much poorly fitted than 2nd class --- if the 3rd class accommodations were merely sufficient then they would cannibalise 2nd class ticket sales. Instead, 3rd class was made intentionally bad.
That's a dynamic which is replicated today in both transporation (e.g., airline coach class seating) and free-tier Internet and information services.
I don't know that this is what's driving EInk's business strategy. But I have my suspicions.
Anything with a mouse pointer can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates.
Anything looking at a web page can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates.
Anything playing video can't use e-Ink because of slow refresh rates.
This leaves us with e-readers, but that market is very limited in size. Not everyone wants a dedicated book-reading device when a multipurpose device can, besides everything else, also read books.
Even smaller markets are information kiosks and "smart" price tags in supermarkets.
Of those notes: I have used mouse pointers with E-Ink and had little issue - only, I also had touchscreen so the mouse was in general unnecessary. That statement about hypertext is absurd: hypertext consumption is fine on E-Ink - provided your purpose is to read those hypertexts, instead of using the web in some "different" way, by the way alien from what it was intended. And video is usable, though suboptimal, if needed - the technology was not born for that, but just in case it can cope.
The practical verification is given: there are people who have been using large E-Ink devices, coupled with keyboards, for a long time, to work on documents.
And again let us suggest an important thing: if you actually have to work intellectually on a document, the same contents will remain in front of you for a relatively long time. This makes a technology "cheap on state retention, costly on state switch" the sensible solution.
The fact that it could be done in practice doesn’t mean that it should.
Makes no sense. What is your point? "A huge part of woodwork deals with nails, and one cannot easily use a screwdriver for that". Well, if you are into woodwork, use a hammer! Evidently, we are not talking about woodwork here. Clarify your assumptions. It may seem you wanted to state "EPD is not the best solution for [some website] users", which brings nowhere unless you contextualize the statement with some idea (very preferably a plausible one) that makes it logically productive.
> Even if we confine
Confine? A screwdriver is optimal for driving screws. To """confine""" a screwdriver to that is "proper use". Hypertext (the World Wide Web, as intended, none the less) is something meant to be /read/ and at the same time explored non sequentially: it is properly consumed with reading friendly technologies. EPD is meant to be that.
> needs scrolling
Absolutely false, and also irrelevant: scrolls have in fact disappeared as standard practice centuries ago, and we invented tablets and paging in 3300BC, in Sumer (not to mention sheep and cattle raising eight further centuries earlier, from which the folio comes): paging has been the standard for over five millennia. And when we used scrolling, it was because some technology had that as the most appropriate use. Clay? Paging then. Papyrus? Scrolling then. Paper? Flipping then. What has changed?
Hypertext and sequential text do not need scrolling - we have paged since forever. And when the user wants, scrolling is available and perfectly usable with EPD. Slower than LCD? Well LCD has a number of properties inferior to those of EPD: if you have no use for these, why should you use EPD? Clearly the balance determined by all properties changes according to use case. This is really basic.
> The fact that it could be done in practice doesn’t mean that it should
Very trivial principle, contextualize it - it can be applied to CRTs and brass plaques: there exist a number of properties for two or more technologies; some use cases will turn the balance in favour of A, others in favour of B etc. You will use a hammer when it is appropriate to use a hammer, and a screwdriver when it is appropriate to use a screwdriver, and you will do just like Ben Franklin recommended and "saw with a file and file with a saw when pressed". Again, all of this is as trivial as reasoning comes; to make the reasoning productive (and debatable), you have to add the uncommon assumptions, not the foundationals. You have confirmed the opposite point: just refer your statement to LCD!
It seems, outside analysis and towards immediacy, that you just do not see use cases for EPD: - it's you. We have tried to tell you: you do not have the need, others do. Just trust it, you will see it when you will want to see it. Some people do appreciate «working with natural light with energy efficient systems on a mainly document-based flow».
"Ah, and all the compromises then are overcome by the benefits"? Yes, that!
Someone definitely flunked the messaging on this one, and I find it very disappointing :( The key advantage to an e-ink style of display is less eye strain, because you aren't staring into a bright light source that refreshes 60 times a second. (And battery life, of course; you can put your book down and forget about it until later). And that this limits the device is fine: a lot of people do a lot of reading! People like reading! Alas, as more and more people grow up reading all sorts of things on LCDs, so the inconvenience and the discomfort is just a normal part of reading for them, that becomes a much harder sell.
LCDs update 60 times per second (or more… 120 Hz displays are becoming more common) but they don't flicker the way CRTs used to, so there's no reason to think this would contribute to eye strain. Brightness could be an issue but you can just lower the brightness of the screen to match the surroundings.
As I see it the advantages of e-ink displays lie mainly in their visibility in direct sunlight and minimal idle power consumption.
Some displays do this as a feature though (known as backlight strobing, motion blur reduction, etc.): LCDs take time to transition, so if you keep the backlight on at all times, you'll potentially see blurring from persistence of vision while the display is mid-transition. Instead, you can turn the backlight off until the screen has transitioned and then turn it back on so that you never show a partially transitioned image.
Slow refresh is a fine way of supporting healthy data dieting.
There's lots of places I would like to put an information readout, but not have it be an attention draw through anything.
More related to the fact that eink uses external lighting I suppose. Still.
Also I wish I had an eink screen for code.
Otherwise, I take from your comment that we're in agreement that "e-Ink is a solution looking for a problem".
In my experience e-ink displays reduce eye strain and attract less attention. This results in more attention being drawn to the outside world, which in turn is a good thing for safety.
I am not at all in agreement with your statement. In some contexts price is not a big issue and the qualities that e-ink brings are worth the money.
That's not true. Electronic shelf labels sold to supermarket chains and retailers, far outnumber the number of e-book readers sold to consumers. Especially that electronic price tags usually have a fixed shelf-life (~3 years or even shorter if they get damaged), so they need to be replaced often, while consumers generally keep their e-book readers for many more years.
You'd need the PUK from the manufacturer based on the device S/N to unlock them first, but the S/N of each device is tied to the store that bought it so the manufacturer will know it doesn't belong to you and not give you the unlock PUK.
Plus, at the kinds of volumes retailers are buying ESLs, I doubt they'd go through all this trouble to pair a few stolen units.