I talked to someone building related tech in the industry and E-Ink the company has a stranglehold on suppliers and leverages that to force compliance despite the patent nearing expiration (blocking anyone else from getting access to those suppliers).
The patent has allowed them to become entrenched and all current suppliers to depend on them. This will be hard to correct even with patent expiration.
I don't remember the specific details (unfortunately) and it's second hand info, but I was disappointed to hear it from someone more involved than I.
Lots of companies do this. Amazon demands exclusivity for certain book sales, and they have contracts with sellers that make it hard for other marketplaces to undercut them. Qualcomm is famous for abusive practices. The list goes on.
In general, IMO companies should be able to compete by offering a superior product and/or a superior price point and/or a superior experience. They should not be able to compete by getting in each others’ way.
However, because Congress and the whole government is inherently illegitimate as is easily objectively measured by its constant, frequent, and persistent failure to abide by the constitution; things like industry capture of government and fraudulent regulatory bodies, is now the norm.
Consumers don't accept the disadvantages of eInk, such as the low refresh rate, the apparent low contrast, and the extremely poor color reproduction. At the same time, the advantages are rather minuscule; in fact, people have a hard time distinguishing eInk from reflective LCD. They think reflective display == eInk, while in truth many devices popularly seen as "eInk" are actually reflective LCDs (e.g. the Pebble and Garmin smartwatches).
Most companies that have made non-LCD based products are simply out-sold by LCD products and go bankrupt. I could probably name half-a-dozen non-LCD reflective technologies which are dead today without even checking Wikipedia, like Gyricon, Mirasol, the stuff the OLPC used, Flepia, etc. All of them dead or niche.
You just can't point fingers at eInk since some of these technologies faded even before eInk even existed, and some of them are owned by companies which are at least ten times larger than eInk (Qualcomm, Fujitsu, etc.). These theories claiming that eInk is the large neighborhood bully just don't many any sense whatsoever. Qualcomm, for example, _is_ a well-known bully; unlikely to be scared of eInk's portfolio. But Qualcomm released exactly 1 product with Mirasol - which completely flopped in the market - and then gave up on it.
Even price displays are usually LCDs, with only a minority being eInk, but as you can see here, casual hackers have a hard time distinguishing between them. The small displays they put on smartcards (showing a 2FA or the like) are also LCDs, and even with a practically minuscule battery they last for half a decade, and that's refreshing itself once per hour... I couldn't think of a better usecase for eInk, and yet it fails to beat a much cheaper plain old LCD, save for perhaps if you wear polarizing glasses...
Why do people make up crazy stories about banks conspiring with the bond-rating agencies to sell bogus financial products to their clients, oltimately crashing the entire market and driving themselves into bancrupsy. I mean, no rational person would do such a thing!
They still sell those on Digikey: https://sharpdevices.com/memory-lcd/
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/sharp-microelectr...
This is an LCD screen with active-power measured in micro-amps. This means that memory-lcd is more power-efficient than e-ink even if it updates once every 5 minutes. (though the less you update, the better e-ink gets).
It’s ~somewhat similar to a calculator 8 segment display in operation - low power, low resolution/pixel density, can be inverted etc. Or maybe old gameboys perhaps?
I have a very nice setup with Zotero, where I can sync papers I want to read to the tablet (running Zoo for Zotero), read and mark them up, and then sync the marked up version back to my computer.
You can set a custom screensaver image, so if what you're looking for is something truly static you might be able to do something with that.
Works well, w/ great battery life, and it really has come into its own w/ the new Kindle Scribe --- a large screen e-ink device which works as an e-reader and has useful note-taking and annotation capabilities (looking forward to seeing what competitors do w/ it --- probably would have bought an Onyx Tab Ultra if the Scribe hadn't been available).
I'd really like to see an affordable display suited to a Raspberry Pi, ideally w/ touch.
Every price tag at my local grocery store is eInk. Like there must be thousands. I'm guessing there are updated by wifi. I mean that is pretty damn good use and the refresh rate means you saw real energy over LCD.
Consider products that have their price automatically decline as they approach their expiry. Huge amounts of food would avoid wastage.
E-ink should be, but it never seems to get there. Too low-contrast and/or too expensive. It's been a Real Soon Now technology for about two decades.
There was another persistent display technology - chomeric displays. They came from a company called Chomerics, which was acquired by Parker Hannefin, which dropped the product line. Almost everything about those has disappeared from the Web, except that the former factory is now a Superfund site.[1]
[1] https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/CurSites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...