It's the same trick that pharmaceutical companies use to extend their patents. Find a slightly new use or way that also covers the old use, and bam, exclusivity for another 20 years.
This effect in the case of eInk is clearly described by others in this thread.
The real problem is that E-Ink is a niche product that lacks economy of scale, because LCDs do everything an EPD can do and more.
I don't know if it's been patented, but E-Ink's recent Gallery 3 screen is pretty amazing, they got multi-dye color screens to refresh fast enough to use in an e-note. That's insane, that's an order of magnitude reduction! It might actually make color e-notes a viable product category.
That's a bit disingenuous and short-sighted view from people not knowing or understanding the industry, market, technology and manufacturing challenges. Sure, like any successful tech company, e-ink owns patents and controls a large part of the market more-or-less, but patents aren't the main reasons why the e-paper industry hasn't moved forward.
That's kind of like saying "ASML's and Cymer's patents are the reason the EUV lithography hasn't moved forward and why they have no competition."
No mate, that's not true. Just like EUV lithography, making e-ink tech displays, affordably, and at scale with good yields and healthy margins to keep the industry afloat, is hard, very hard, bordering on magic, which is the main reason they have no competition.
Turns out making minuscule pigment electrostatic particles that can quicky move around inside a fluid suspension and hold their position long enough at various ambient conditions, is a huge challenge, and manufacturing that at scale with very low defects and sustainable margins is even harder.
Nothing in their patents currently is holding back competition, but competition can't reach the scale and yields that would make enough profits to support a viable competitor consider even entering this field, versus OLED displays, as that's where thew real money is in display manufacturing right now and that's where the competition is heating up and where all the R&D money gets poured.
That's why there's been various alternatives to e-ink-like tech popping up from university research labs and being displayed at trade shows, but going from a research lab one-off prototype being shown at trade shows, to mass production at scale with good yields and profit margins, is the real challenge and is where e-ink has their secret sauce that nobody can successfully replicate.
Similarly how China has been showing off working home grown Xnm lithography prototype chips that can compete with TSMC, but reaching the yields and volumes of TSMC is where the impossible to cross cliff lies, and why people get confused and don't understand that the major challenge lies in manufacturing at scale and not just the core tech that makes the widget unique.
I'm not defending e-ink the company and their corporate practices, just wanted to shed some light on the technicalities of the subject and hopefully clear some of the FUD and conspiracies that get wrongfully spread around.
For clarification -- disingenuous is defined as:
> not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does
In your post, are you claiming there's a shadowy group of people who at the same time are both unknowledgeable but also conspiring to hide their own knowledge?
>In your post, are you claiming there's a shadowy group of people who at the same time are both unknowledgeable but also conspiring to hide their own knowledge?
No, I think my post was clear on what I meant despite my mistake: that people are too quick to blame e-ink the company for malice without understanding the technical challenges around industrialization of such technology and the economic factors of the e-ink-like products market (profit margins, supply/demand) that drive competition and investments, or lack thereof, in this tech.
Also, I have no reason to apologies to the commenter as he did not provide any evidence to support his claims that "e-ink is evil" in order for his integrity to be affected, to warrant an apology for my counter-arguments, nor do I think the original commenter is petty enough to be offended by my honest mistake, which I rectified later.
to me, that counts as a reason to apologize
> Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker. "disingenuous " was the wrong word in that context. I meant to use it as a synonym for "unfair" and made a mistake.
This particular mistake (assuming disingenuous means a little less than it does) is not particularly uncommon among native english speakers (or on HN, at that).
FWIW:
> you called them a liar who was pretending to be stupid
The "pretending to be stupid" is not an essential part of the definition above (merely "typically by").
Finally, Merriam-Webster offers up other definitions:
lacking in candor
giving a false appearance of simple frankness
These don't fit particularly with the strident definition you're using.
English words are complex, with contextual and flexible meanings. You've picked one definition. And then you've attacked someone's integrity on the basis of it, which is exactly what you're arguing has been done to someone else. Don't be this guy.
You're on the right track, though; it's worth asking if the people criticizing patents and their stranglehold on innovation are not being candid or sincere in doing so. (The answer IMO is "no, they're being very candid and sincere, in stark contrast to most defenders of contemporary patent law", but it's nonetheless the more relevant question).
It doesn't really make sense to say that on the one hand, it's super tough and hard to make a profit, and on the other hand the costs of accessing patented hardware is an immaterial cost.
Your post just really isn't convincing that a patent here has little effect on the ability for others to compete.
When margins are as tight as you say they are then obviously the costs of licensing are going to make the margins even thinner or next to impossible for another competitor to meet.
Love when people come out here with unironic defense here of monopolies by simply defending them as some meritocratic output of success or something.
That wasn't my point. You must have misunderstood.
But ideally, even if you think they don't deserve your explanation, considering it's a public forum you could still explain why you think there wrong for the benefit of the rest of us who maybe also don't understand your argument.
That wasn't snark from my end, I was just telling him he was wrong, as plead for him to re-read my comment again with an open mind. That's it. Actual snark would have added more fuel to his flame-bait which I didn't want to do.
> considering it's a public forum you could still explain why you think there wrong for the benefit of the rest of us who maybe also don't understand your argument
Because I don't have more information than that of my original comment, which is based on some years of experience developing products with e-ink displays and getting to know the tech and the company to a degree that allows me to have a relatively informed opinion to a degree on this topic.
And, because you can never please everyone no matter what you do, and some members can be overly contrarian and needlessly pedantic at times when it contradicts their entrenched belief that "evil corp is evil", expecting "sauce or GTFO" for every opinion on the matter (even though they themselves provided no proof for their "evil corp is evil" opinion), but I don't have or can't publicly share any documents to provide proof or more deep insight into the matter, nor the time to perform investigative journalism on the spot based on public OSS data, just to win an argument here.
Like I said, it's just my opinion based on my experience in the field, so take it as is with a pinch of salt, as an opinion of an average joe on the internet, not as a proper journalistic piece.
I'm just finishing up Schnier's - A Hacker's Mind - and it's a good example of where "hacking" happens these days. The force the book profiled hackers are working against are just the masses. Us. People. Which has always been around - but it makes me wonder if we as hackers of the 80s and 90s just developed a mental toolkit for corporations to use against us and then left our counterculture post empty.
Is there evidence of this? On every HN e-ink thread this is repeated as if it is common knowledge, but I haven't read much to back it up. Have you personally been shut down by lawyers when you try to use an eink display in a hacker kind-of-way?
And yes, there are patents, but so what? How does the company wield them? Are the licensing terms terrible? My Raspberry Pi has a Broadcom CPU. Broadcom is no stranger to patents yet there's plenty of hobbyist and hacker activity around their components.
1. Does not make any logistic sense: eInk is rather a small company versus the likes of Qualcomm, Sony, Sharp, Fujitsu, Philips, Microsoft (thanks to Wacom) all of which have way more patents in the EPD area that eInk. EPDs are literally as old as the _GUI_, and even started at the same place (Xerox). Plus, eInk relies mostly on chinese manufacture... which is well-known to generally don't give a damn.
2. Could not possibly have any motive: eInk apparently is a suicidal company that likes to torpedo its already shrinking little market so that .... what exactly? LCD manufacturers have a field day?
3. Ignores the fact that there are, indeed, multiple competitors to eInk whose panels are either indistinguishable from eInk or literally better. Many smartwatches like Pebble/Garmin don't use eInk _at all_, yet people even right here in HN still believe they are eInk. Qualcomm of all companies (an actual patent troll -- ask Apple -- and most definitely unlikely to be afraid of a minuscule company like eInk) owns a in my opinion _much_ better EPD technology called Mirasol which has zero of the slow refresh problems of eInk, much better color reproduction, much better contrast *, and is barely more expensive!
The plain truth is that majority of customers just don't care enough about these technologies, and therefore they will always be niche. At the end of the day, average customer can't distinguish the latest EPD panel to a reflective LCD from decades ago. Customers will flock towards shiny glossy LCD watch over EPD all the time. That's why Gyricon failed. That's why Mirasol failed. That's why every other electrophoretic startup folds.
* eInk contrast is still a joke and for the last decade actually degrading rather than improving, thanks to touchscreen layers, color filter layers, etc. But you see it being parroted all the time that "eink has infinite contrast". The latest color panels this year are no better than the ones I have on WindowsCE devices from the late 1990s, eInk or not. Colors still look incredibly dull, there is a ridiculously limited palette, and resolution and contrast take a sharp hit (pun not intended).