DIY Electronic Paper Display

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com has an article about a development kit for prototyping device displays based on electronic paper technology. The kit includes a 170dpi, 6-inch (diagonal) SVGA (800 x 600) EPD (electronic paper display) module supporting four shades of gray, and a small computer module that runs the display. EPDs provide bright, high-contrast, thin, lightweight displays that remain legible under 'any lighting condition' -- much like newsprint. Once an image has been 'printed,' no power is needed to hold it."

Comments

That's all well and good...

[Anonymous Coward]

... but can you wrap your Christmas presents with it?

More Time

[Kawahee]

At the moment, I wouldn't rush out to build this. What I am doing, is waiting for somebody in the community to make it, break it, fiddle with it and make it better and higher res. I'd really like to see contributions to E-Ink and the other digital paper methods come from the online community, and I'd really like to see myself using this technology too.

What comes to my mind is placing the paper in an 'in' tray and having it have the next item of business printed onto it.

Re:More Time

[Gordonjcp]

At the moment, I wouldn't rush out to build this. What I am doing, is waiting for somebody in the community to make it, break it, fiddle with it and make it better and higher res

Yes, I'm not going to rush out either. Neither is anyone else. But it does seem to be taking a long time for somebody to make it, break it and fiddle with it. Wonder why?

Re:More Time

[timmarhy]

you just tapped one of the major problems with open source on the head.
every bastard just sits back waiting to use someone elses hardwork for nothing.

Re:More Time

[Gordonjcp]

you just tapped one of the major problems with open source on the head.

every bastard just sits back waiting to use someone elses hardwork for nothing.

I don't think that deserves to be modded as a troll. That's exactly the problem. As a contributor to a few open source projects, that's one of the things I see quite a bit. People whinge about what stuff doesn't do, or does wrong, but they don't offer to help fix it. You don't need to be able to code to contribute to open source software, you just need to be able to clearly articulate the problems you're having, and what you'd like to see instead.

Re:More Time

[F_Scentura]

It's a piece of hardware still in development. It is not a finalized product. It is expensive to purchase. I'm no source evangelist, but that isn't a very apt comparison.

Re:More Time

[el_womble]

"you just tapped one of the major problems with open source on the head.

every bastard just sits back waiting to use someone elses hardwork for nothing."

This isn't the problem, its the reason for its success. If everyone ran out and worked on the same problem it wouldn't get done any faster. We're all creative people, and we all know that in order to be creative you need to invest in a project emotionally. You are right, people could articulate their problems with the code better, but you only need a few people to that. Thats why improved communications arn't always a good thing. Making it easier to transmit may improve the signal, but it will necessarily decrease the noise. You need the right tool for the job, you need somebody that cares enough, not just to do it, but to think about it first.

Sometimes you can buy that kind of commitment, I find it much easier to become passionate about a project when I'm hungry. I doubt, if it didn't pay well that I would ever chose to do this work. And if the conditions weren't good, I don't think I'd be as good as I am at it.

If no one is willing to pay, then its got to come from those that really want this project to succeed. If I went and bought this kit, I know that I would build it then forget about. I could be sat on a desert island for 20 years with all the tools in the world, and not come up with the solution that will eventually bring this product to market. Its not that I don't want to be a part of the ePaper revolution, I just know that I don't have the skills, and I'm not hungry enough to develop them. Its the same reason I'm fat and I can't run the hundred meters in under 11 seconds. I don't need to do it to eat, so I don't, 16 seconds is fast enough to sprint for the train - I'm happy with that.

Linford Christie however was passionate about it. He devoted a huge chunk of the prime of his life to honing his skills. Sure he was ultimately rewarded, but why did he get out of bed and start training for all years before he got paid?

Its the same thing with technology. We're just waiting for the right mind to be in the right place. Kits like this are catalysts. Maybe the next Woz will be motivated enough to convince his parents that he needs one for a science project, or look on the internet and realise they could build a better one with few parts for less money.

The real problem is that too many people are being paid to be passionate against their will. You may get results, you just have worry about the quality of those results.
There is no point blaming people for not being that mind. The trick is to keep reading and looking for that one thing that you are passionate about, and when the oppertunity is there... grab it with both arms.

Re:More Time

[networkBoy]

That works better for software.
In the realm of hardware up front costs are higher, thus people who early adopt (software) may not do so, or at least have to limit how many things they can do. I for one was thinking about pre-ordering the kit, hoping it was in the $300 range. It is actually 10X that and while I may have pinched pennies and carried a sack lunch to work for a month to get a couple hundred together had the price been say $500, I can not (and will not) buy this for the three grand, thus at least one dev will not be playing with this till it becomes a mass market item.
-nB

Re:More Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Well articulated, sir.

Re:More Time

[idlake]

People whinge about what stuff doesn't do, or does wrong, but they don't offer to help fix it. You don't need to be able to code to contribute to open source software, you just need to be able to clearly articulate the problems you're having, and what you'd like to see instead.

Generally, the fact that someone took the time to write to you, however briefly, is usually an indication that they actually want to use the software and that they generally like it, even if it sounds like "whining" to you; otherwise, they wouldn't have bothered in the first place.

When you get a bug report that's too short, you can just briefly respond "Thank you for your bug report. In order to help you, I need more information. Please supply ..."

And if you get a lot of non-bug-reports that bother you, it's probably a problem with the documentation or the error messages. You may also want to include a FAQ in the documentation that talks about features that are frequently requested but which you won't provide.

Re:More Time

[Anonymous Coward]

How about just purchasing a finished unit?
The finished unit is supposed to be $150.

http://www.jinke.com.cn/english/v8/index.asp

Re:More Time

[tricorn]

Absolutely right.

From my experience, I would say that the main problem of getting people to contribute is that a whole lot of developers seem to think that if someone asks for a feature or complains about a bug, they're whiners. If your response to such contacts is to ignore it, or tell the person to RTFM, or "yes, yes, yes, I know that's a problem, we've had 50 other reports of that, why can't you look over the other bug reports before you report something (you idiot)", then you're the problem.

It takes a LOT of effort for someone to even get to the point of being able to try to submit a bug report or feature request, or even to tell you about a spelling mistake in the documentation. Most people who have even tried have found a cold reception, and have come to the reasonable conclusion that it just isn't worth it. If you really want support from people, make it easy, and be welcoming.

If you don't have an easily searchable bug database, a searchable user forum, a developer's forum that's open for reading, a good FAQ with an active maintainer, don't complain that people aren't helping.

Something that turns off developers from helping out are your choice of language, insistence on a particular platform or development environment or model, coding style, abrasive personalities, and lack of skill. I've looked at a few projects I've been interested in, looked at the code, picked my jaw up off the floor and realized there was no way I could fix any of that code without insulting them, and there was no way I could work on that code base without fixing it up. In one case, it was just easier to take what they had, use it for what I needed it for after fixing it (without worrying about if I could merge my changes back to them) and just ignore the original project after that. I didn't even bother tracking it.

Re:More Time

[Gordonjcp]

Yes. A really good project would be a kind of standardised bug reporting form for open-source projects Something small and simple that anyone could set up, and users would get used to (but not too used to, one would hope!). Something that wouldn't be as big or complicated as, say, Bugzilla.

Re:More Time

[Kawahee]

Because those little Gumstix Linux boards come preconstructed perfectly the way you want/need/like them? And with a nice plastic container to dock everything in?

It took them long enough

[AKAImBatman]

I don't know about anyone else, but I've been looking for a dev kit like this forever. Even just as an E-Reader (what the dev kit is preconfigured for) the possibilities are tremendous!

I'm a bit annoyed that it's taken 30 years since Xerox first developed the idea, but at least it's here now. Just imagine if this technology catches on. No more need for paperback books (you can keep all the latest on your pocket reader), technical books can finally be portable now that page graphics can be shown in detail, and eye strain will reduce considerably as your eyes can lock onto something that's actually there rather than simulated by a beam of light.

Re:It took them long enough

[AKAImBatman]

Just to add to my post...

GOOD GRAVY THIS SUCKER IS EXPENSIVE! 3,000 for a DEV BOARD? Maybe if eInk thought about pricing a more reasonable dev board, they could get more hobbyists onboard. More hobbyists == more market experience. More market experience == more products made. More products made == more $$$ for eInk.

Cripes, you'd think didn't actually want people to use these things.

Re:It took them long enough

[tsa]

GOOD GRAVY THIS SUCKER IS EXPENSIVE!

Maybe this sucker is nuclear?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Re:It took them long enough

[porksoda]

3,000 for a DEV BOARD?

I would think so, considering there's no infrastructure in place to mass-manufacture these things for low cost, hence there's a very limited number of them in the world at the moment. The price will remain obscene until the R&D department is paid off no doubt.

Shitty resolution or not, I think this epaper hooked up to phone concept has serious potential, and I doubt these types of things will be rare 10 years from now.

Re:It took them long enough

[DingerX]

Yeah, $3000 for a Dev board.

And no doubt, the production Ebooks out there are pretty darn expensive too, and will be for a couple years.

But hell, if you want to slap together a startup, and have a small, dedicated team work on this sort of technology for a couple years, building and field testing some supercool apps, and learning _now_ how to harness the idiosyncrasies of the hardware, $3000 a pop is cheap.

Of course, if you're serious about a startup, you'd probly go out and get your own gumstix.

Or if you're a serious nerd, $3000 is nothing. Hell, how much did a Black Apple cost, adjusted for inflation?

Re:It took them long enough

[Erwos]

Welcome to the real world, where you actually have to spend money on cutting edge technology. $3000 sounds cheap for a company that's actually going to make a product. Certainly, if we had a product that needed eInk, we'd pay the expense without hesitation.

What's that? You're _not_ making a product, and you just want to screw around with it? Well, guess what? They're looking to stay in business, and you don't do that by selling way under cost to a bunch of guys who are never going to deliver those huge-quantity orders that eInk needs to stay in business. You do it by selling to people who are actually going to make a product out of it.

As for a "more reasonable dev board", they're using a Gumstix, which is an off-the-shelf component. It should be pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain that the majority of the costs here are either in the display or the R&D.

-Erwos

Re:It took them long enough

[GreyPoopon]

Shitty resolution or not...

Just curious... do you really think the resolution is bad? 800x600 in a 6" screen doesn't sound very bad to me, especially for new technology.

I think this epaper hooked up to phone concept has serious potential...

Agreed. The low power requirements for e-book type applications alone should make it ultimately very attractive.

Re:It took them long enough

[AKAImBatman]

I hate to break it to you, but in the "real world", an inexpensive dev board can become a product unto itself. Take the Spartan 3 Dev Kit for example. It costs $99. (Which is actually incredibly cheap for a dev board.) Xilinx probably moves thousands of these kits, making the venture actually profitable. While many of their customers may be hobbyists, those hobbyists will remember the inexpensive Xilinx solutions and recommend those for their day job. Even if they do it only as amatuers and never expect to go into the field, they *still* generate buzz about Xilinx products. And buzz == free advertising. Advertising == Product Awareness. Product Awareness == $$$.

Let me put it this way. This kit was just featured on Slashdot, a site with hundreds of thousands of members, and probably MANY more non-members. Were this board affordable (i.e. $300-$500), they'd already be moving hundreds of them from this story alone. At $1000-$1500, they'd probably still move a hundred or so boards. At $3000 everyone is going to say, "The technology is cool, but it's too expensive for the moment." and move on.

Re:It took them long enough

[Anonymous Coward]

If you mean a NeXT Cube, would cost $6500 in 1988 dollars, or $10547.15 in 2005. A Mac IIx cost $7769 in 1988, and would cost $12606.28 in 2005.

What does $11,000 buy today?
  * a low-end Intel SGI GNU/Linux system ($9000-$32,000):http://www.storejrt.com/prismdesks ide_bundles.html

  * a high-end Apple ($11,922.00)
        * Dual 2.7GHz PowerPC G5
        * 8GB DDR400 SDRAM (PC3200) - 8x1GB
        * 2x400GB Serial ATA - 7200rpm
        * ATI Radeon 9650 w/256MB DDR SDRAM
        * Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel)
        * Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel)
        * 16x SuperDrive double-layer (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)

You get the idea..

Re:It took them long enough

[Russ Nelson]

Your analysis is spot-on. Look at http://www.seetron.com./ They look like hobbyist boards, and they're priced at hobbyist prices. BUT they make a lot more money on the OEM market where presumably they get a discount, but it's not a big discount because the one-off price has a very low margin.

Okay, so they're shipping this eval board in a basically usable condition, but without a case. The lack of a case means that they won't be competing with any of their customers. So they really *could* charge a reasonable price even if it's only a break-even price, and count on the early adopters to drive the product into the hands of OEM makers who will put it into a case, get the volumes up and the cost down.

Basically, yeah, somebody needs to give the eink.com folks a swift kick in the butt. Anybody know somebody at TOPPAN Printing Co (a Japanese company?). They're eink's largest investor.
-russ

Re:It took them long enough

[Svartalf]

As a CTO of a company, I'm here to tell you that you're wrong on that.

Unless that is going to be part of your main product, $3000, especially for a smaller company
(i.e. Anyone OTHER than Sharp, Epson, IBM, etc...), is WAAAAY too much money to be spending on something that
is still almost not out of the labs. Unless I can see guarantees of something on the order of $100-300 on an
800x600 monochrome panel that size, it's not going to even be given a moment's thought. Honestly.
You can get LCD panels for about that. You can get color LCD panels for less than what they're asking for this.

I'll even bet that you could probably get a FED or OLED panel for less than this- as an engineering eval.

I don't care HOW good their tech is- $2700-2800 for the display is far, far too much to ask someone to pay.

Yes, they're entitled to recoup their R&D- just not off my back while I'm developing a product around their stuff.

Re:It took them long enough

[InvalidError]

800x600 for a 6" paper-replacement display is fairly decent... that's over 160dpi resolution, about double that of most CRTs but still a long way from yesterday's laser printers' 600dpi.

But I would be more interested in full-page tablets with 200dpi resolution, preferably touch-sensitive for easy document annotation... but I would not be surprised if those devices came with DRM to prevent people from doing annotations and highlighting too - if you want to annotate, buy the $10 more expensive annotable and highlightable version or the copy-pastable (maximum of 200 words and one image per operation) $20 more expensive version!

Let's wait and see how far ePaper will advance over the nest couple of years.

Re:It took them long enough

[RhettLivingston]

They are looking for the one company that can get 1 million+ of these into the market quickly. Hobbyists and sub 100 thousand copy apps are unlikely to even be worth considering. The problem comes in the need to build a manufacturing facility to handle millions of these things in order finally recoup development and make costs reasonable. You can't finance such an operation through hobbyist ideas. You have to have solid big business partners with dead on, low risk, mass market applications.

Re:It took them long enough

[AKAImBatman]

They've already got Sony and Phillips to that for them. Why bother selling a Dev Kit if they don't want to attract startups and hobbyists?

Re:It took them long enough

[HTH NE1]

If you mean a NeXT Cube, would cost $6500 in 1988 dollars, or $10547.15 in 2005.

My sister gave me one for Christmas a few years back. She bought the complete system for only $25, sole bidder.

The only problem with it was the seller didn't know the password. It was her ex-husband's machine. My sister tried to find out from me beforehand how to break a password, but couldn't give me any specifics as it would have spoiled the surprise. After setting up the machine, I asked one question about the seller and got in on the first try. (You can probably guess the question.)

And on top of that I was able to get a free upgrade of NEXTSTEP from Apple for Y2K compliance.

It would be interesting for me to see a NeXT Cube drive this paper display, but not $3000 interesting. At least, not $3000-from-my-pocket interesting.

Re:It took them long enough

[SparafucileMan]

I think the Gumstix is not "off-the-shelf."

There is no gumstix connection that can handle output to a LCD or CRT. I'm not sure what the connection is between the stix and the display, but the gumstix board is definatly custom board that eInk requested from gumstix; they mention this on the corporate gumstix site.

Re:It took them long enough

[HTH NE1]

if you want to annotate, buy the $10 more expensive annotable and highlightable version or the copy-pastable (maximum of 200 words and one image per operation) $20 more expensive version!

And the lucrative repair/replacement service for those users who thought they could save $10-$20 by usng pens, pencils, highlighters, or liquid paper instead.

Re:It took them long enough

[bbc]

"3,000 for a DEV BOARD?"

One of E-Ink's lead developers created a DIY ebook/mp3-player called Juicebox for which you can dl the schematics from Sourceforge. I seem to remember a price quoted of ca. 50 US$ for the parts, though I cannot find that figure now.

He made one with an E-Ink screen, though you probably couldn't buy one. There are low energy consumption LCDs though.

Re:It took them long enough

[porksoda]

Just curious... do you really think the resolution is bad? 800x600 in a 6" screen

800x600 is pretty damn impressive. my comment was meant to illustrate that shitty resolutions will not hurt this concept's popularity. Most ePaper-type things I've run across in the past have been using shitty resolutions, but you've got to start somewhere: once you have something that can demonstrate the immense potential of the technology, people will start getting paid to improve it and you're in business.

Sounds familiar

[Crixus]

I seem to recall reading about this once before. It sounds like an interesting idea, but what are the real advantages over, say, LCD?

My only other thought is: Save an eTree.

Re:Sounds familiar

[ceeam]

1. Resolution
2. No need for backlight
3. Needs power only to _change_ image, not to hold it

Re:Sounds familiar

[TheRealMindChild]

An LCD requires power for lighting. Once E-Paper has been "printed", it is like non-volitile memory... it needs no power to stay that way. E-Paper should end up being loads cheaper, thinner, lighter, more veritile than an LCD.

Re:Sounds familiar

[AKAImBatman]

To expand:

1. Hi-Res Palm Pilots are 300x300 whereas this first-gen dev kit is 800x600.

2. In theory, eInk has all the contrast of paper. In practice it often has a slightly grey background, but still plenty of contrast in comparison to computer screens.

3. This effectively means that the processor can be put in a wait state or possibly turned off when the screen isn't being updated. For ebook readers, watches, and personal organizers, there's even the possibility of using something REALLY low power like a PIC since you're only updating the screen on very rare occasions.

Re:Sounds familiar

[rxmd]

It sounds like an interesting idea, but what are the real advantages over, say, LCD?

You can wrap your french fries in ePaper. Try doing that with an LCD.

Re:Sounds familiar

[dtmos]

See eink's benefits page for an overview.

The biggest advantage for the designer of battery-powered portable devices is that an eink display need only be driven when the display contents change, while an LCD must be constantly driven (by rail-to-rail signals driving the display capacitance) even if the display contents do not change. This means that, for applications requiring infrequent updates (e.g., status displays on cell phones, pagers, Apple Nanos, etc.), the eink display driver can be turned off, saving power. Further, eink has the legibility of conventional paper, so under conditions in which ordinary paper is readable the LCD backlight is not needed, saving considerably more power.

Re:Sounds familiar

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

What are the refresh rates on this thing though? I mean, I know it'd not for personal DVD players or anything crazy like that, but if I'm flipping through pages looking for a particular paragraph...

Re:Sounds familiar

[Intosi]

The refreshrate, if it's anywhere comparable with the Sony Librié, will be 1.8 seconds per full refresh, or 0.5 fps.

Re:Sounds familiar

[Seumas]

Don't you mean PPS? :D

Re:Sounds familiar

[LiquidCoooled]

I've seen figures of around 0.5-1.0 seconds per pixel full addressing for these type of displays.
Whilst not quick enough for movies (as you point out), would be perfectly acceptable for virtual paper :)

heres a link to an article mentioning the 1second refresh
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/052301/Prototype_sho ws_electronic_paper_potential_052301.html

"In addition, although the transistors allow a switching speed of about 2.5 milliseconds, the total time for an image to change smoothly is about one second; typical LCD's pixels are refreshed 70 times a second. "Currently the electronic ink, and not the transistors, limit the speed,"

Re:Sounds familiar

[anthony_dipierro]

Hi-Res Palm Pilots are 300x300 whereas this first-gen dev kit is 800x600.

This seems to be a lot bigger than a palm pilot. Better to compare it to a tablet pc.

In theory, eInk has all the contrast of paper. In practice it often has a slightly grey background, but still plenty of contrast in comparison to computer screens.

My iPaq doesn't need a backlight, and it can do color.

This effectively means that the processor can be put in a wait state or possibly turned off when the screen isn't being updated.

That's always possible in theory. I don't see how a non-backlit screen takes up that much power. You could probably power it off a couple solar panels if you needed to.

I think this is neat technology, and might lead to something useful, but at $3000 I don't see many advantages over a tablet PC. Actually, with a few lightweight, low power tablet PCs (with just enough processing power to run VNC and a wireless connection), you'd have an adequate solution for the home and the office, to go paperless. The problem right now would be price, though it's getting closer. An office with 10 employees could get away with 30 tablet PCs, let's say $60,000. At an interest rate of 5% that's $3000/year, which will pay for about 36 toner cartriges, or one toner cartrige every 10 days. That's a bit excessive, even if you factor in the cost of paper, maintenance, and a high quality printer, but it's getting there.

Re:Sounds familiar

[krtek]

Ad. 2. Actually computer screens have much greater contrast than paper. The advantage of paper is its refelective nature which means it's better suited for changing ambient lighting conditions.

Re:Sounds familiar

[utexaspunk]

While your point #2 sorta addresses it, it should be noted that probably the greatest thing about E-ink is that it's a true reflective display, which means it works great in sunlight (unlike just about every LCD out there) and is generally easier on the eyes. My theory is that the eyes have a much harder time with light emitting displays because they are so rarely the same brightness as everything else in the room, which means the iris is constantly having to adjust. It is for similar reasons that I can't stand using my computer in a dark room. Without the sunglasses, that is :P

Re:Sounds familiar

[AKAImBatman]

Actually computer screens have much greater contrast than paper.

I was referring to LCD screens on handheld devices which rarely have good contrast. :-)

Re:Sounds familiar

[advocate_one]

4. you can read the damned thing in bright sunlight... something you can't do with current colour displays such as I have on my Tungsten E

Re:Sounds familiar

[objekt]

Nice article from 2001. :) Even if that was still the standard, it's perfectly adequate for most situations where only a small portion of the display needs to be updated. PDA's don't need 17fps refresh to prevent flicker, as the article would have you believe. If 99% of the screen isn't changing, there is no "flicker" in that 99%. But it's probably a moot point. I'm sure in 2005 there are faster e-inks than in 2001.

Re:Sounds familiar

[LiquidCoooled]

Why would you assume that?

Just because some parts of the industry move forward at phenominal pace, doesn't mean everything does.
The actual process appears limited to a physically moving object rather than a smaller die. Sure, they may eventually crack it, but 4 years isn't "that" long in real world terms.

Re:Sounds familiar

[objekt]

Why do you assume that I assume? Maybe I read this article from 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20011208013445/http://d ailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011205/tc/electronic_pap er_race_2.html" "It also refreshes at about 50 Hertz, fast enough to stream video."

Re:Sounds familiar

[LiquidCoooled]

I agree totally, and that article looks like the kind of advancement thats needed, but the article you reference says that:

For now, their device is still on glass. But they insist they've cleared the major hurdles for putting it on a flexible surface. And the circuits produce a decent picture: 64 by 64 pixels with 256 shades of grey and the contrast of black ink on paper.

Don't you think they would have announced it as a viable result by now if they could have done?

They have been trying to do this for over 30 years now, another couple of years is a drop in the ocean.

Re:Sounds familiar

[objekt]

Ah, yes. I believe I did see a follow-up article on flexible screen technology, but after several minutes of searching I'm unable to find it.

Is it worth it?

[nudeatom]

I get the weight saving, but surely a standard screen is just as cheap, if not cheaper and would have the benefit of colour. I have never heard anyone complain about the weight of their PDA, Mobile or digital watch

Re:Is it worth it?

[kmmatthews]

With E-paper, you can get a much larger chunk - 8.5x11, and it's as easy on the eyes as actual paper. Did you ever notice how much reading for 8 hours from a CRT will strain your eyes? I've even noticed it from an LCD (the backlight is straining, after all).

The power requirements are better, too - you only need power when changing the display. So, you could have an "ebook" that's maybe 1/4" thick with a nice display, plenty of memory (preferably that only needs power when being read/written) and a tiny battery - the whole thing would last quite a while. Oh, and be able to store many many books worth of data. Not to mention adding the ability to search! And a clickable table of contents/index.

Re:Is it worth it?

[nudeatom]

Well, When you put it like that... It starts to sound quite cool.

Re:Is it worth it?

[thebdj]

Like it is being said you get the benefit of less power since no power is required to maintain the image. Also if you have ever read an e-book for an extended period on an LCD with color and one without you'll no that it is generally softer on the eyes to read on the non-color screen over time. This is partially because a well made non-color screen can usually be read with ambient light while this is much more difficult with a color screen that requires a backlight. The backlight is actually rather straining on eyes at times. Trying sitting in front of an LCD all day and your eyes will get tired.

Re:Is it worth it?

[binaryDigit]

I get the weight saving, but surely a standard screen is just as cheap, if not cheaper and would have the benefit of colour

One of the biggest deals is the extremely low power draw. You are only using juice if you change what's being displayed, not to hold what is currently there. So if you're application is one that displays somewhat static information which changes somewhat infrequently over time, the power savings can be huge (electronic billboards, airport displays, etc). They are also very readable even without powerful backlights, so they are even more miserly with the juice.

Re:Is it worth it?

[fwitness]

What you are missing is that it's a niche product that has some useful applications. Stores could use them as signage on pricetags, and not ever have to worry about the extremely laborius task of relabeling everything on a price change. Hook these up via (extremely secure) Wi-Fi and prices can be changed at the press of the button.
Once they get color figured out, you can use them as an actual digital picture frame. The probelm with most digital frames today is the battery is constantly driving the display, so it must be plugged in or maintained. If you are only using power on changes, you can have a picture frame that changes every few minutes or hour, and the battery would last quite some time.

Re:Is it worth it?

[Bemmu]

In Germany they built a concept store which uses a number of new technologies, including electronic price tags. "Electronic shelf labels display current prices of goods on the shelf. Unchanging information, such as the product name, is printed on a paper label affixed beneath the LCD display. From a computer in the back room or store headquarters, prices can be changed within seconds. In fact, all 40,000 SKUs in the Future Store can be changed in less than one hour." http://www.packagingdigest.com/articles/200507/40. php

Re:Is it worth it?

[thc69]

I've seen those exact LCD price tags in at least one Wal Mart. They seem like a good idea.

ObTopic: e-ink would be perfect for that application.

Re:Is it worth it?

[Aranth Brainfire]

"Hook these up via (extremely secure) Wi-Fi...."

Hahahahahahahahahahaha.

Extremely secure wifi. Haha.

Re:Is it worth it?

[oneeyedelf1]

Lots of companies use LCD pricetags because of the heavy fines associated when something rings up differently at the counter than whats on the shelf. With just one database system, all prices will be the same.

Re:Is it worth it?

[gibson_81]

I've seen something similar in Sweden, though IIRC they use 7-segment displays (black on grayish-brown) instead ... after all, that's enough to show a price

Re:Is it worth it?

[fwitness]

You missed the part where I was constructing an "ideal world." Each electronic display is also drinkable, tastes like columbian coffee and makes you fly.

Anyway, point taken.

Re:Is it worth it?

[pipingguy]

Stores could use them as signage on pricetags, and not ever have to worry about the extremely laborius task of relabeling everything on a price change.

Would be great for gas station prices these days!

$3000.00

[Rick Richardson]

$3000.00

Re:$3000.00

[WarwickRyan]

Think of the trees. ;)

Re:$3000.00

[allanc]

Hey, they'd chop us up and make us into paper too if they had the chance.

I have no sympathy for them. Smug bastards, always just sitting there, staring at us...

three ...

[the bluebrain]

Ok, I was wondering why they didn't have the price somewhere on the web page. Clicky-look-see the order form, and you find out: they're serious when they say it's targeted at development shops, at three kilobucks.
 
/ah, darn. waited long enough for a reasonable ebook, can wait some more ...

Re:three ...

[bigpat]

"at three kilobucks."

funny, hadn't heard that before.

LibriE electronic book

[Bemmu]

I have used the LibriE electronic book mentioned in the article, which is available in Japan. I felt that it was an adequate replacement for a book, with an easily readable screen. Changing the page had some delay, but on the other hand so does changing the page of a real book. I imagine that the target audience of this are people wishing to read books on crowded Tokyo trains. Since less space is required this could be a good book replacement, after the cost comes down a bit. Biggest problem for their target group surely must be reading newspapers on the train, since they require a lot of space to open. It would be nice to see them provide newspapers for easy download to these devices.

Re:LibriE electronic book

[computechnica]

Now In Engrish:
Sony Librie - $479

Re:LibriE electronic book

[xtracto]

It would be nice to see them provide newspapers for easy download to these devices.

I think the approach will be for the newsaper providers to give the service of a device-friendly version, right now, a paper I read a lot called La Jornada has a HTML (even text only version [english translation ) for free.

So I guess the New York Times and other news will have to do the same.

Re:LibriE electronic book

[j0yb0y]

I wonder if you could buy the Librie, buy the gumstix, and Voila! $3k dev kit!

Bravo to the gumstix boys for making it in the kit!

Supposed to be good -- but what's that photo?

[putko]

I know this is supposed to be great technology -- basically, like paper, not a stupid LCD. Easier on the eyes.

And yet, when I looked at the photo, I thought -- hey, that looks like crap. I don't want that. Stay away, UGLY!

What gives? Does the E-ink display really look so bad? Or is it just a bad photo for the dev kit?

Here's a typical product that looks way more appealing:
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0007Y79B2.01._S CLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Re:Supposed to be good -- but what's that photo?

[BlueTooth]

No comment on the eInk displays looking good or not (although if you have photoshop, you can print some text at 170 dpi 2-bit to simulate the resolution and color depth in the specs) however I think the nano pic you linked has a simulated image on the screen. In fact, if you look at the product shot on the side of an iPod box, you'll see that the display is rendered at the print resoluation (probably 600 dpi) with a disclaimer indicating that the image is in fact "simulated"

Re:Supposed to be good -- but what's that photo?

[barawn]

What gives? Does the E-ink display really look so bad? Or is it just a bad photo for the dev kit?

There are a few advantages of E-ink displays over other displays, and unfortunately they're not going to really be visible in a picture. The first is contrast: the contrast can be made very, very good since the ink can be very dark, and the background very light. Much, much higher than LCDs.

The second is no backlighting. Now, this might not sound all that useful, because the first-generation GBA wasn't backlit, and that wasn't all that good, but E-ink's contrast is high enough that you don't need a backlight. Even just a small reading lamp is going to be easily enough to read by. This is the "easier on the eyes" part, and it's the one thing that current displays can't really compete with.

The third is battery life: since you don't need power to maintain the display, only to change it, the battery life is going to be measured in pages, not in time. For an e-book reader, this is perfect, because you can take as long as you want to read it. I wouldn't be surprised if a production e-book reader based on e-ink only turned on whenever you pushed a button.

There are other benefits (resolution's a biggie, but it doesn't look that great with this model, plus it's an image that's actually there, which means that it'll look good in all lighting and all angles) but I think those three are probably the biggest for the current generation.

The biggest limitation to E-ink right now is its refresh time (~ of order a second per page, or 1 fps) and its cost. But still, it's the only product which really has specifications which seriously compete with paper.

Re:Supposed to be good -- but what's that photo?

[thc69]

That looks a lot like the display was photoshopped in.

Re:Supposed to be good -- but what's that photo?

[imsabbel]

er... Wrong.
Sorry mate, but e-ink will never reach the contrast ratios of even bad lcds, because its only reflective, so your CANNOT make the dark areas really dark because of diffuse reflections inside the pannel, and simple lambertian demands limit the reflectivity of the white areas (its no mirror, you know?)

a 100:1 ratio would be a dream for this kind of technology.

Re:Supposed to be good -- but what's that photo?

[InfiniteWisdom]

Oh you're right. Reflective technologies can never have contrast ratios that are as good as luminiscent technologies like ink and paper. Oh wait never mind. Those are reflective too.

Re:Supposed to be good -- but what's that photo?

[barawn]

Sigh.

Quoted "constrast ratio" for active screens is not the same as the actual viewed contrast ratio of the LCD. That's the contrast ratio of the emitted white sections over the emitted black sections. But that's not what the eye sees, because it sees "emitted+reflected". The true contrast ratio of an active LCD varies with lighting conditions. It can be very very high in dark rooms (100:1, 500:1, etc.), but will be very very low in any sort of lit room. Outside, it'll probably be near 1:1 - i.e., unviewable. Much lower than that 100:1, 500:1. More like 4:1, or lower, in normal viewing conditions.

The contrast ratio of an E-ink display is about 10:1. Moreover, the E-ink display has about a 40% reflectance (as opposed to a 4% reflectance for LCDs), which means it's much brighter too.

CRTs have the same problem. They quote a 3000:1 contrast ratio, but the black and white sections have virtually the same reflectivity, which means that that contrast ratio only applies when the light in the room is much less than the light emitted from the CRT.

If you want to compare passive and active displays, you have to do it equally. In the same viewing conditions. Most people I know don't work inside pitch black offices.

and simple lambertian demands limit the reflectivity of the white areas (its no mirror, you know?)

E-ink displays are slightly less white state reflective than newsprint, but not much (40% compared to 60%). They have a much, much higher reflectivity than LCD displays - about 10 times higher (LCDs are 4%). With that high reflectivity, it doesn't take a lot of light for an E-ink display to have a much higher contrast ratio than an active LCD.

Re:Supposed to be good -- but what's that photo?

[putko]

OK, so I take it it was just a crappy photo? Do they not photograph well?

It just wan't compelling -- and I "know" that E-ink is supposed to be really great.

I've been looking forward to this stuff for about 10 years.

Re:Supposed to be good -- but what's that photo?

[barawn]

OK, so I take it it was just a crappy photo? Do they not photograph well?

No - what I'm trying to say is that the main benefits of E-ink you can't see in a photo - for several reasons.

For one, dim the lights, lengthen the exposure, and any LCD screen in the world will look gorgeous, and you'll be "oh my God, that's amazing". But then when you actually get the thing, and try to work on it outside, you'll be staring at the screen from half an inch away trying to read anything, because the display isn't bright enough.

Second, you really can't photograph the main benefits, because film (and CCDs) don't have the same response as your eye. Your eye is built for huge variations in light intensity. It's more than happy to see a dark closet right beside a sunlit window, and resolve structure in both. Cameras, however, have linear response, and they simply won't be able to see huge contrast. You could throw this display out on a park bench on a bright sunny day, and you can pick it up, and it's as clear to read as indoors with a light on. The high reflectivity also means you can read it in much less light (ten times less light!) than a passively lit LCD screen (like a Palm Pilot, or a first-generation GBA).

Remember that this is essentially paper. It has roughly the same properties as paper. The display they're showing doesn't have terrific resolution, but that's not the main benefit of this device. The main benefit is the fact that it's readable in all lighting conditions that paper's readable in, which is a lot.

I know that right now, with the sun behind me in my office, I can read a piece of paper clear as day, with no effort. But my laptop's LCD is washed out a lot, and my eyes are glad when the sun goes behind a cloud.

You've always seen pretty pictures of LCDs, but you must know that they look like crap in sunlight, or if they're passively lit, they look like crap in low light. This is the one device that looks good in both.

Re:Supposed to be good -- but what's that photo?

[putko]

Thanks! That makes a lot of sense.

pricey...

[Peter Simpson]

At $3K per kit, that's more than I was planning to spend for wrapping paper this year...

Re:pricey...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dang, what kind of cheapskate are you anyway? Wait, let me guess, you won't spend more than $10 million for gifts either, right? Glad I'm not on your gift list, Ebenezer!

bs

[BladeMelbourne]

that remain legible under 'any lighting condition'

This sounds misleading - I bet they haven't tested the legibility when a nuke explodes 5km away.

Re:bs

[Biogenesis]

Or perhaps a few thousand km's away from the center of a supernova explosion.

Re:bs

[maxwell demon]

Also I strongly doubt that you can read it in the lighting situation "star light at new moon night, no other light source available". Note that unlike the nearby nuke explosion, this is a situation you might face several times in your life.

Thank the lord...

[bchapp]

I can finally upgrade the second oldest technology I own - Paper.

Now all I need is a spoon with a laser level in it.

Re:Thank the lord...

[Brunellus]

And if you're really serious, a downgrade back to vellum might be in order, if you're concerned about data integrity and archival storage...

Don't underestimate the data integrity of vellum [parchment made from sheepskins]...I have handled and read 13th century missals which are in much better shape today (after much harder lives!) than books printed only 40 years ago.

Re:Thank the lord...

[Jearil]

pfft, why stop there? A downgrade to Vellum is nice and all I suppose.. but only 800 years? And what if you have no sheep? I say we downgrade even further, to a long proven technology with greater data integrity and archival storage... Rock Carvings.

Thousands upon thousands of years.. and you can even leave them outside (in an area with moderly low rainfall). See if you can do that with your silly paper or Vellum. pfft.

*goes back to carving out some C-code on his handy granite slab*

Re:Thank the lord...

[indifferent children]

That's it! We genetically engineer sheep with electronically controllable ink-resevoirs in their pores. e-Vellum!

Would love to throw $3000 to get one of these kits

[tod_miller]

I would love to make a bluetooth screen detach for my PDA... I wonder what the pixel refresh is like, can it scroll text or page it?

I am loving the idea of a simple light weight newspaper that can talk to my PC or PDA (or TV, via PC tv card, capture the captions, and place them on here... or something.. or show tv guide..)

I wonder if it is a cold screen too, something compfortable about that...

So many possibilities, so little time.

bah

I doubt that they are interested in hobbyists

[ctid]

Sad to say, I suspect that they don't care in the least about hobbyists. They want to sell to PDA/ebook/mobile phone manufacturers. They would hope to sell a couple of hundred to this market in the hope that one of their customers will make a popular product and order several thousand of the screen (without the devkit) later on.

Re:I doubt that they are interested in hobbyists

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, they're interested in serving hobbyists just like Radio Shack is (NOT!).
Many times hobbyists will come up with great uses and potentially product development ideas.
They should always treat everyone the same since they never know where any sales leads (however small) might go ...

I would have considered one if it was something like $300 or so but $3000!! No Way!

Gumstix module for this ePaper is like my old PC

[digitaldc]

Gumstix SBCs measure 3.15 x 0.79 x 0.25 inches (80 x 20 x 6.3mm) and are powered by Intel XScale PXA255s clocked at 200MHz or 400MHz. F-series models include a 60-pin high-density connector which can be used to connect audio, serial, USB, and other expansion boards. Connex models add a 92-pin bus header which can be used to attach high-speed CompactFlash and CFIO cards, such as Wi-Fi radios and 10/100Mbit Ethernet modules.
This is about as powerful as my puter from 1996.
The paper is a good idea, but the color LCD is much nicer. Let's hope they find a way to increase strength and decrease the size of a typical battery.

WHAT

[iosmart]

Wow it's $3,000 and you have to fax in the order form. I feel like we're back to 1995 when simple electronics costed a ton and everyone used the fax machine. Well I guess this isn't exactly "simple," it's probably one of the coolest displays ever. See here for details.

Re:WHAT

[Skater]

Wait...are you saying we don't have to FAX our comments in to /. any more?

Re:WHAT

[Anonymous Coward]

Fax question-mark question-mark STOP I am still using telegraph STOP paying per word sucks STOP ps first post question-mark STOP

Re:WHAT

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel like I'm back in elementary school where kids used "costed."

We're still in the early days of e-paper...

[rklrkl]

...but even so, to answer one of your criticisms, a colour version is indeed available (yes, linked to near the bottom of the original article!). Like OLEDs, it's going to be several years before these get cheap enough to consider using as an e-book (or whatever). I'm interested, also, whether this e-paper technology would scale up really large - e.g. could it eventually be used as a TV screen like they're eventually proposing for OLEDs?

Re:We're still in the early days of e-paper...

[thc69]

Not with a whopping 1 second refresh rate...

Re:We're still in the early days of e-paper...

[narcc]

It would have to be like 30 times faster...

Another block in place

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been thinking about battery life and laptops. The problem is that unlike my phone or pda, my laptop can't make it through a whole working day on one battery. I put an amp meter in the power supply line and removed the battery so I could get an idea of what the major drains were. The biggest current drain is the hard disk when it is being accessed. A flash drive would solve that problem. The display also seems to eat a lot of current. So, a laptop with a flash drive and an electronic paper display would seem to be one way to improve the battery life on laptops. Of course the price of this development kit and the fact that it is only monochrome will keep me from trying the experiment any time soon.

Re:Another block in place

[cyclomedia]

>the fact that it is only monochrome will keep me from
>trying the experiment any time soon

i take issue with this, the pda i use has a 16 grade monochrome screen. good design means that the UI has a good balance of contrast to keep it legible. what exactly precisely is "color" an "absolute requirement" for when you are organising/emailing/word processing/bloggind or slashdotting? non IMO. google needs no color, as does pretty much every website i use. it's just decoration. this display tech isnt good enough yet for real time rendering of movies so that goes out of the window. sure once we're a few years down the line and eink-ebooks become a reality then graphic novels (comics) and glossy magazines would probably very much like color but hey, >90% of current dead tree newspaper pages have been grayscale for ever and i expect there arent great swathes of people *not* buying them because the graphics are crap.

Re:Another block in place

[MichaelSmith]

what exactly precisely is "color" an "absolute requirement" for when you are organising/emailing/word processing/bloggind or slashdotting?

I recently replaced my 1996 1 MB Palm with a Zire 31. The new machine has less resolution but it does have color. Looking now at mono PDA's I don't understand how I put up with it for so long.

That said, vision varies a lot between individuals. I am sure this is the cause of a lot of arguments. If it works for you, that's fine.

Re:Another block in place

[Anonymous Coward]

surely you want to see the correct skintone on your portable-pron-player?

Re:Another block in place

[mark-t]

Why is it a requirement?

First of all, because even though color is actually needed in a minority of cases, it is still too high a figure to ignore, in light of the fact that almost every book or magazine you'll ever pick up that was printed in the past 20 years has at least _SOME_ color pages in it, somewhere.

Secondly, Fujitsu has already invented color e-paper, so it's kind of annoying to keep seeing so-called "new" technologies that are still incorporating the old, gray-scale style e-paper.

Re:Another block in place

[tricorn]

Most of the books I own have NO color in them at all. Most of them don't even have any images, drawings, graphics, figures or tables, either. Just text. I'd guess fewer than 5% of my books have any color in them. Certainly nice to have color for astronomy, geology, biology, chemistry, art, travel and the like, but I just don't have a whole lot of those compared to the rest. The most colorful part of most books is the cover.

Given that, a color e-paper would still be nice, and yes it is coming. If a color 8.5x11 costs $100 compared to $10 for a 4-gray-scale display of the same size and resolution, there will still be a big place for the cheaper one. 165 dpi 2-bit gray-scale display is actually quite good - get it up to 200 dpi and there won't be much call for any better.

news?

[roman_mir]

I've been following e-ink for at least 4 years now. This kit is not new, it has been around for at least 2 years. How is this news?

--

Then again. It's not news until it's on /.

twice.

Re:news?

[chis101]

The PDF order form was only made August 2005... maybe they had there system date set wrong in 2003? Or maybe they just didn't start selling them 2 years ago.

Re:news?

[ageforce_]

I haven't been following e-ink, but Gumstix, and Holly Gates (a guy btw) is one of the most active users on the mailing list there. He is working for e-ink, and this dev-kit is certainly the first kit containing a Gumstix.

Re:news?

[Quixote]

Maybe if you had submitted the story, we wouldn't be reading about it now... ;-)

... but then, this is /.; we probably would be reading about it now (and again in the near future).

Re:news?

[Lorphos]

Which mailing list are you referring to?

Wait, CRt strains your eyes?

[tod_miller]

With E-paper, you can get a much larger chunk - 8.5x11, and it's as easy on the eyes as actual paper. Did you ever notice how much reading for 8 hours from a CRT will strain your eyes?

I've just been reading slashdot all night for 14 hours straight, you insensitive clod!

Aaaaaaaaargh my eyes are crying blood!

It's a PDA!

[TheLoneCabbage]

This is the PDA every linux user (or maybe just me) has ever wanted. High rez, low power consuption, nice size, simple CPU. Open API. Who cares if it only has 4 levels of gray, that's all you need if your planning on doing work.

And these people think they need to sell it as a dev kit? It's a product already, just give it a shell.

On the other hand... $3000? Is that Canadian money?

Re:It's a PDA!

[ShieldWolf]

You do of course realize that the Canadian dollar has risen nearly 30% (and rising - its now $.84) against the Greenback since Bush took office don't you?

Further, since we are running a budget surplus and you a massive deficit this trend will continue. Eventually we will get back to point where we make fun of the US dollar being smaller (it was back in the 60's). :)

Re:It's a PDA!

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize as the Canadian Dollar rises vs. greenback our biggest export market (US) will shrink and cause a lot of short term pain for Canada? A stable US dollar is better! There is nothing to make fun of.

Re:It's a PDA!

[lobsterGun]

I was hoping it was in yen...

Re:It's a PDA!

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely.
On another note, I've always wanted a pda that was just a simple linux console.
I saw an eink display with alphanumeric characters rather than pixels, and it uses even less power than the active matrix ones, with a slightly higher refresh. The technology is almost identical.
Combined with a neat little keyboard and a gumstix, it would make a great little pda for VI use on the move.

article title

[SparafucileMan]

so "DIY" now means, buy a pre-built $3,000 development kit from a corporation?

Nifty, but..

[photon317]

I'd hardly call it a "DIY" kit at a cost of $3,000. And it's not shipping for at least another month. And judging by thier screenshots, even simple fonts look fairly crappy at this resolution and only 4-level grayscale. If it were $150 I'd consider it for a home project. If it were $1,000 for the devkit with a promised volume price of under $100, I might consider developing a product with it, if I already had a great idea that I was fairly confident of. But for $3,000, who's buying this first-gen technology devkit with unknown technological future and unknown (but probably high given the devkit cost) pricing?

Re:Nifty, but..

[jasongetsdown]

"But for $3,000, who's buying this first-gen technology devkit with unknown technological future and unknown (but probably high given the devkit cost) pricing?"

I'm sure there are many corporate R&D types looking at this technology. Three grand is peanuts to even a small business, and if they want to start playing around with the technology before it becomes a requisite part of mobile computers this is the ideal way to do it. I can see many product designers and engineers grabbing one of these and throwing all kinds of shit at them to see how e-paper performs first hand.

Re:Nifty, but..

[Gorbag]

$3K is very roughly the equivalent of 3 person-days of labor for a research project, corporate or even University (once you include overhead, a percentage of a professor, or research staff). I don't think anyone doing corporate research on new products is going to bat an eye; the only question is how easy they've made it to play with the technologies (how much do I have to spend in labor or additional projects in order to determine if this is the technology I need for my next product)?

Now if you were planning on a home project on the order of putting together a lisp machine from eBay scrap, well, you better be one of those real early adopters who were willing to wire wrap yourself S-100 boards, or build cars out of junk. Hobbies are not cheap! But you will be the first on your block!!

But...

[TheRealSync]

...does it run Windows?

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Could run wince, if you really wanted to - check out the gumstix-user mailing list.

Re:But...

[Jozer99]

It runs linux, but it probably could run Windows CE, opps, Windows Mobile .Net. I don't think there are any display drivers yet for eInk displays, so you would have to deal with using an operating system meant to run in color on a display with a 25ms response rate on a 4 color screen with a 1000ms response rate. Other than that, the dev board is a standard dev board you can buy elsewhere rather cheap, with an ARM processor, the same basic device in every Windows Mobile or Pocket PC PDA made in the last 4 years.

Image Update Time:

[HeavyMS]

1000 ms (grayscale mode) 500 ms (1-bit mode)

so are you an early adopter?

[mrthoughtful]

$3000 for a 800x600 B/W screen (four levels of gray)
Takes me back about 25 years.
Fair enough that it is new technology - but I guess this is for lab testing only. Unless you are a real early adopter nut!

hmmm, not exactly good value

[CubicleView]

You could literally buy a ton of regular old paper and ink for 3,000, and it would be money much better spent. I love the idea of E-Ink but 3,000! I couldn't justify spending that much on a finished E-Ink product, let alone on a bunch of components that I'd likely end up toasting by accident.

Re:hmmm, not exactly good value

[Anonymous Coward]

You could literally buy a ton of regular old paper and ink for 3,000

I think that's the general idea in such devices ... to not have to lug around a ton of regular old paper and ink.

Re:hmmm, not exactly good value

[thelonestranger]

Forget buying a ton of paper and ink, for $3000 you could buy roughly 283 actual books. So if your going to pay $3000 for something that you just use to read books on I cant really see the point. Theres just something more satisfying about having the tactile feeling of a real book, and also what happens when you fancy a read in the bath? If my paperback gets wet, to bad/ If my $250 -> $3000 Epaper unit gets wet I'm boned.

Refresh rate

[Intosi]

After reading the order-form, I noticed that the answer to your question is in there: for 1-bit operations: 2 fps, for grayscale: 1 fps.

any lighting condition???

[Anonymous Coward]

remain legible under 'any lighting condition' -- much like newsprint.

Since when is newsprint legible under 'any lighting condition'? My LCD screen is definitely way more legible in the dark than a newspaper.

Re:any lighting condition???

[RegularFry]

Yeah, but it's not when you've got the sun just over your left shoulder. EInk allows for a far, far wider range of lighting conditions than LCDs.

Goodbye to all that, then.

[Brunellus]

No more need for paperback books (you can keep all the latest on your pocket reader)

No more cheap paperbacks, either, as publishers DRM their books to "expire" after a certain amount of time or number of readings.

This will put me in the vanishingly-small number of paper lovers here on /. but for me, nothing--nothing has yet replaced the serendipity of actually browsing through bins of books or records...that's how I found a lot of my favorites. There's also something very personally touching when you find a volume of poetry, say, that had been someone's schoolbook before you were born--and find, written in the margins and fly-papers, the sonnets of some unknown schoolboy Petrarch to his Laura...now that's power to hold.

Re:Goodbye to all that, then.

[MaxQuordlepleen]

and find, written in the margins and fly-papers, the sonnets of some unknown schoolboy Petrarch to his Laura...now that's power to hold.

I like where you are going with this .. but don't you think that part of the promise of electronic books is that we can marry them up to things like Wiki? Imagine being able to read the highest-moderated comments from every person who read the "book" you are reading?

I am a used-book buyer and in practice, the stuff written in the margins is usually un-insightful rubbish. The used copy of Juvenal in my bathroom is a case-in-point. In the margins of Satire II is written "Is he protesting homosexuality among the nobility?". Now imagine if that statement of the obvious could be moderated -1, Redundant, and instead of seeing that tripe I could have seen the marginal comments rated +5 insightful :)

Re:Goodbye to all that, then.

[AKAImBatman]

Paperbacks don't last. They're for reading, then either throwing away, giving away, or keeping until they fall apart. What you're thinking of is hardcover books with decent bindings. I read eBooks myself, but I still keep a shelf full of hardcover books that are near and dear to me. That's not going to change. Ever.

Re:Goodbye to all that, then.

[RenatoRam]

Except, in less than a month someone (Jon, maybe) will release a "ebook cleaner" that removes the expiration date and versions converted to different formats will show up on P2P networks in no time.

What I want is an ebook reader with a reasonable price that accepts files in a documented format. Then I'll just drop half the Gnutenberg project in it :-)

Re:Goodbye to all that, then.

[Russ Nelson]

a Sony Librie just went for $370 on EBay. It accepts files in a documented format. What are you waiting for?
-russ

Re:Goodbye to all that, then.

[RenatoRam]

If you think that 370$ for a parallel import device with keys and software in japanese (without any support watsoever, me being outside of the USA) is a reasonable price... you have more money to burn than me :-)

Re:Goodbye to all that, then.

[Brunellus]

What you're describing is something like what happened in my university library.... It was particularly amusing to watch years of accumulated marginalia on those books--people were actually arguing with each other across the years about specific passages.

Re:Goodbye to all that, then.

[Oliver Defacszio]

Imagine being able to read the highest-moderated comments from every person who read the "book" you are reading?

If it's the same kind of moderation employed here at Slashdot, then I can't imagine anything less appealing.

"This kit is not new..."

[msauve]

Which is, I suppose, why the manufacturer says:

Kits will begin shipping on November 1, 2005. E Ink is currently accepting pre-orders for kits, which will be filled on a first-come first-served basis.

Re:"This kit is not new..."

[roman_mir]

Dude, you could buy these items from them: different width pieces of display and controllers for at least 2 years now. I believe there were kits at 600 dollars for 3 or 4 pieces of display and I honestly don't remember how much controllers went for but they were there. Maybe they are repackaging and putting these things together into a different kit but anyone could buy either these or some other form of kits from them for a couple of years now.

Re:"This kit is not new..."

[msauve]

Perhaps, but the exact claim was "This kit is not new...," which is incorrect, as has been shown. You're talking about things which are not "this kit."

Re:Uruguay

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when do we have gay ad-hominem arguments for jokes?

Slashdot, grow up.

If you're another GNAA troll with a missed opportunity, get a clue to humour yourself.

No, I get it. You have absolutely no right to give me the ritual yhbt-yhl-hand.

Go get a clue. Or a sense of humour.

Slashdot article title once again bogus

[typical]

As usual, Slashdot manages to link to a vaguely interesting article and be completely incorrect and misleading in the title and summary.

This is *not* intended to be built by you, the hobbyist -- it is no "DIY" kit.

This is intended for people like Sony who want to be selling products based on this in a year or so. For them, $3k is more than reasonable, and not particularly out of line with the dev kits for many more mundane systems.

What is cool about this from the Slashdot reader's standpoint is that:

(a) It runs Linux. Linux is becoming dominant in the embedded world. Why not? It's flexible, there are no licensing fees, it's quite powerful, it's very well tested, and there is a huge pool of application developers available to hire from when you need to write your apps. The only drawback over a custom OS is memory usage -- but, hell, memory is getting cheaper every day, and for a high-end embedded device, it's not a big chunk of the cost.

(b) With any luck, it means that companies will start shipping e-paper products within two years or so. The last crop of "ebook readers" pretty much failed, which I think is too bad -- too expensive, and people didn't like the DRM. Perhaps the lower battery requirements of e-paper will make it feasible.

(c) The display drivers are open source. The concept of making drivers open source, the idea that it's valuable to avoid being stuck with hardware in your product that has NDA requirements, may be spreading. Maybe not. It still makes me hopeful.

Re:Slashdot article title once again bogus

[thc69]

This is *not* intended to be built by you, the hobbyist -- it is no "DIY" kit.

This is intended for people like Sony who want to be selling products based on this in a year or so. For them, $3k is more than reasonable, and not particularly out of line with the dev kits for many more mundane systems.

I agree, but that begs the question...why did they include an order form and why do they accept credit cards? IANA marketer, but I thought that a technology that somebody expects to sell to the likes of Sony, generally has a phone number or an email address, so they can discuss it with the buyer.

Re:Slashdot article title once again bogus

[pqdave]

Corporate credit cards aren't just for personal travel expenses, they are frequently used when dealing with new suppliers, with infrequent suppliers, and with suppliers that aren't set up to use corporate purchase orders. It is likely that there are a lot of firms with engineers that can put $3000 on their corporate card at the engineer's discression.

$500 dev kit available

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead, you could just go for a Sony Librie ebook reader ($420 + $50 shipping). It comes packaged in a case, runs Linux, there is a dev community, and it is possible now to develop your own content for it.

Bulk

[VincenzoRomano]

The bulkier thing there seems to be the power supply.
Some more technology is needed!

hahahaha

[HEbGb]

Well, I suppose when they sink >$100m of VC money into this business, they eventually have to start showing some revenue. With $3000 development kits. Boy, I'm impressed!

LOL

Price $3000

[Anonymous Coward]

I will wait a bit, thank you.

Better late than never.

[jupiter909]

I'm all for this. Yes it is costly, but most dev kits are. I have decided to start studying again and the average number of pages each of my books has is 850. These books are massive and heavy."..no thats not a bomb in my bag, just a book officer". I can only fit two in my general purpose backpack at any given time. I travel by train 2-3h per day. I can't wait to see more of these devices out there so that I can read without having to lug around tons of books or require high power consumption like laptops do. Not all the trains here have power points. I wonder what the cost of the devkit and the devices produced are going to be like in a years time.

Re:Better late than never.

[Bad to the Ben]

Your trains have power points? I've never seen a train with a power point before. What country do you live in?

I agree with you about the books. The other advantage would be that if the book gets obsolete, you can just download the latest version onto your device. I hate when a tech book gets old, so you get a newer version and then have two dead tree monstrosities.

Re:Better late than never.

[WillerZ]

Well, as one example, the newer Virgin trains in the UK have power points.

Question: How Flexible Is This?

[SparafucileMan]

Does anyone know how flexible this eInk active-matrix display is?

The development kit looks mounted on a firm electronic board. What I am looking for is this exact development kit, but one that I can roll up.

Anyone know? Or know of any other development kits coming/already out that are basically just like this eInk product, but flexible?

Thanks!

Re:Question: How Flexible Is This?

[mark-t]

E-ink displays themselves are very flexible, and can be rolled up into a tube.

However, to the best of my knowledge, when incorporated into consumer level devices, such displays are generally affixed to hardware that is less than amiable to being rolled up (which makes some sense, since I get the impression that these types displays are easy to damage by, for example, folding or tearing).

Re:Question: How Flexible Is This?

[SparafucileMan]

Yeah that's the impression I got too. They seem to imply though that (given enough money and enough sales volume) they could put it on a nice, flexible backboard.

Interesting stuff. I want a cube. Or a sphere. Or a nude model you could display clothes on.

Missing the point...

[penguin_strut]

People complaining about the greyscale and 'lack' of other various ding-dongs and features have got it all wrong. If you wanna play Doom3, you'll need a laptop (or better yet, a desktop :P). If you wanna watch movies, the same thing goes, or one of the many portable movie players now available. These devices are not FOR that kind of thing.

The point is that reading text in notepad or from a pdf file should NOT require my laptop to be plugging along, wasting precious battery life on ubiquitous yet completely unimportant colors and movement. It's text. E-paper will open up a VAST new range of functionality, AND people seem to be forgetting that it is viewable from all angles, can (eventually) be rolled or scrolled up when not in use, and (perhaps most importantly) combats the horrible eyestrain that comes from attempting to read a full-text novel on an lcd screen. This is basically solid-state text, a book that's only one page long yet contains all the works of Tolstoy. Haven't you been lusting for this forever? Its the future, people! How long before these things are equipped with Wi-Fi, and can download the day's New York Times automatically and without the environmental and industrial cost of millions of wasted sheets of paper? How long before you're checking your email in a format that's actually READABLE at small screen sizes? How long before e-paper ASCII porn becomes the bee's knees? :P

Also, its important to note that in those other towering industrial countries (ahem, you know, OUTSIDE of the US, where we got so much of our tech to begin with), small one-application devices are MUCH more common than full-out computers for the user-on-the-go. Considering that our cell phones can do basically anything BUT display readable text, having a device that can fill that gap is beautiful. And speaking of cell phones, I'd gladly go to a monochrome e-paper display for a phone that would last me 50hrs on a charged battery...while you're clapping all 'special-needs' at your 16-kajillion color screen for the first 5 hours of the road trip, I'll be functional till we're back home. All of this goes to combat the rediculous bass-ackwards element of high-end technology - that the simple things are many times as difficult and power-consuming as the complex.

We look at technology right now in terms of best and brightest. But e-paper is a tremendous step towards what technology WILL be - an integrated, scalable, and subtle extension of our biological lives. I have NO doubt that we've got a humanistic renaissance coming up in a few years here, and we'll look back on widescreen displays and "gotta-have-it" superficial devices in the same way we shake our heads at the oily, pastelled veneer of the 80's. When technology TRULY becomes a part of our lives, when function overtakes form, wasting timeenergymoney so that we can watch Scary Movie between classes is going to seem pretty sophomoric, yes?

...and making ebooks more popular will have resonating effects on the all-important world of copyright, so even you color-luvin' movie fetishists should take note.

Re:Missing the point...

[kjfitz]

These devices are not FOR that kind of thing.

Respectfully, the current state of technology would not have happened if curious hackers had not pushed the envelope to find uses for things that they were not "FOR."

- Computers weren't FOR multiple users to use at the same time interactively.

- The internet wasn't FOR social interaction.

- Computers weren't FOR playing games.

The list is endless. Sure there are imitations in systems. This dev board has limits. Breakthroughs will be made by people who see those "limits" as challenges, not by people who see those "limits' and turn back just because "these devices are not FOR that kind of thing."

Re:Missing the point...

[tricorn]

But computers were quite capable of running multiple users interactively, eventually. They gained the ability not because a bunch of people were complaining that they couldn't, but that they got fast enough and flexible enough to do so.

The Internet wasn't FOR social interaction, but it was perfectly capable of doing that. It didn't get that ability because a bunch of people said "hey, this Internet thing doesn't have enough social interaction!".

Saying "this isn't FOR that" is simply stating a fact - the device doesn't have the capability, nor is it designed to have the capability, of playing DOOM or showing movies. If it does get fast enough to do so, it won't be because a bunch of people were saying "I sure wish this E-Ink stuff were fast enough to play DOOM", it will be because some other reason made it desirable, or at least not more difficult and expensive (and power hungry), to update faster. I think it's unlikely, that there will always be something else more suited to such uses, but it doesn't matter. It either will or won't, and it is unlikely that anyone will put a lot of effort into trying to make it more suitable as a general purpose (30 msec or faster update).

Color, of course, is a different matter - color applications are exactly what this is "FOR" - and if adding color makes it more usable for something that the designed didn't anticipate, then it will be used for that as well.

awesome. price?

[chrisxkelley]

seems like a great thing that's about to happen. i would really like to see the continued development of this, where we can have entire newspapers that change, and you only need one sheet with a wireless subscription.. this should also tie into google's wireless internet across the us (if that's ever to come). but i have a question- if it is so paper thin, how durable is it? i'd just hate for them to start marketing them at expensive prices and have stuff end up like, "Hey honey, look at this new newspaper I just got.... SHIT, just ripped it." :P

Here's a real live e-ink product

[tugfoigel]

Has everyone else forgotten already? Here is a real-live e-ink product from Seiko

Even then...

[Svartalf]

Lordy... I expected something like $1000 or so- that's typically what an engineering prototype costs you if you're not getting one gratis from the manufacturer. A gumstix isn't THAT expensive. That E-Ink panel can't be THAT expensive.

$3000 is pretty steep for what we're seeing here. I'd have difficulty signing off on something like this
if Coollogic were still 100% in that space... That thing's just too damn expensive for words right now.

Copying gets a whole new use

[CrazyWingman]

Wow - I just had this realization: One should be able to photocopy anything displayed on any of these "electronic paper displays". I'm not entirely sure why anyone would want to, given that the data is already in nice, easily-copyable digital form anyway. But, given that you can't photocopy current computer displays (well, not in the normal sense - there's always PrintScreen->Photoshop), this seems like an interesting new development.

Is there a security risk here? You can put a TPM/DRM/copy-protect chip in the device to prevent people from distributing digital copies, but you can't keep them from just running the thing through a photocopier. Perhaps it's not more of a security risk than we have right now with normal paper documents, but I just thought it was an interesting idea.

Re:Copying gets a whole new use

[Compulsion]

You can use a camera to take a picture of a computer screen. This is more of a threat than a photocopier, I would think. At least a camera can be discreet.

Re:Copying gets a whole new use

[Infinityis]

Actually, I hope this is possible. The people behind E-Ink seem to have their heads on straight (so far). They're using open development environments, trying to let people do WHATEVER they want with their product. They probably know that this will result in a quicker uptake in the hobbyist market (depsite the currently high price for hobbyists), which results in quicker uptake in the mass market.

And why shouldn't we be allowed to photocopy from an E-Ink screen? We can photocopy from a regular book, can't we? What's the difference? That fact that it's digital (oh no, DMCA!)?

Who knows, if they catch on big time because of they don't automatically require DRM and they're a superior product for reading ebooks, then who's knows, maybe MPAA/RIAA will stop assuming the end user has criminal intent by default.

Indeed... But what a price tag, eh?

[Svartalf]

The Gumstix they're bundling retails for no more than $250. What is that thing made out of? Diamond?

I'd have difficulty signing off on something like this as an Engineering eval set, even IF my company,
Coollogic, were still 100% in this space. As much as I'm VERY interested in developing things around
the tech, I can't see me spending $3000 as an early adopter for a touch-panel UI device tech. I mean,
I might do it, but that price tag gives me pause. That's a damn workstation for an employee,
folks- or two depending on the workstations I'm signing off on.

I'm having to agree with you on that one- that price tag had better come down hard and fast or they're
just not going to get people to buy off on it. No matter HOW good that something is, if it's in that
consumer electronics space, it'd better not be costing a fortune to obtain even the engineering samples
of it- people just won't buy the stuff. And if people are penny pinching on the BOM as they typically are,
those panels ought to be priced at about the $100-200 price point to get people to be using them
over LCD's and OLED panels.

Contrast still no match for ink on paper

[Anonymous Coward]

Paper to black ink contrast ratios are around 60:1 and better. This device claims a contrast ratio of 8:1. While no doubt it's a neat device for development, It's not ready for prime time.

Besides, the last thing I want is for the inevitible draconian copyright restrictions that will come with such electronic books. At least a book is mine to read whenever I want and lend to whomever I want. Also, it doesn't need batteries.

Re:Indeed... But what a price tag, eh?

[AKAImBatman]

The Gumstix they're bundling retails for no more than $250. What is that thing made out of? Diamond?

Amen. $3000 just isn't reasonable. I could grab all the parts from Digikey, design my own board for printing on Pad2Pad, pay for someone else to assemble/test it, and I'd STILL have at least $2000 in my pocket! They can't believe that anyone is going to think this device is cost effective when we can't even afford the dev board. :-/

P.S. Your Journal entries expire after a few days. No one can post there anymore. If you want to allow people to email you, create a GMail account and set it to forward to your real account. That way you can shut it down or move to a new address if it ever begins to annoy you. :-)

Relax, it is a dev. kit.

[WindBourne]

I have seen chip sets that cost 8$, but the dev kit is $120. Quit expensive. I am guessing that an e-ink interface is less than $1k in quantity. But that is still expensive.

I got some great ideas for this tech

[geekoid]

anyone want to back me for 30%?

Re:I got some great ideas for this tech

[wemmick]

I think the e-ink tech is great and I'd be willing to invest $3k for somebody to build the right company around this.

I'm not a VC, but any VC would tell you that it's the poeople who make the company. Tell us more about who you are, why you are the one who will do this right.

Then I need to know more than just "I've got some great ideas". What's the business model? Who are the customers?

The bottom line is the bottom line. Convince me that the return on my investment will be positive.

costs

[sacrilicious]

As for a "more reasonable dev board", they're using a Gumstix, which is an off-the-shelf component. It should be pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain that the majority of the costs here are either in the display or the R&D.

If so, note that they'd be unwise to try to recoup R&D costs from dev channels. Display costs, yes, but R&D costs get distributed over the (eventual) user base, which they want to have be as large as possible, which means they want to sell to devs just at materials cost (if that high).

The technology is NEW

[rpresser]

They don't yet have a plant that has been turning out thousands of these a day for three years. They don't yet have a well-defined supply chain for whatever it is that these E-ink things are made of. They don't have any of the economies-of-scale that make things cheap.

$3000 is a lot to spend on a prototype. But it's cheap considering how new this is. Consider trying to buy an IBM PC motherboard and 640K of RAM in 1977. Check out the Heathkit (sob) catalogs of the era and see what new things really cost. And don't forget to adjust those prices by inflation.

Re:The technology is NEW

[AKAImBatman]

$3000 is a lot to spend on a prototype. But it's cheap considering how new this is. Consider trying to buy an IBM PC motherboard and 640K of RAM in 1977.

You're comparing Apples to Potatos. An IBM PC Motherboard in 1977 was still a highly advanced computer board with thousands of dollars in off the shelf, but still very expensive components. The retail price for one of those things was in the range of $2500. Considering that mass production always costs less, is there any wonder that the dev boards were more than $3000?

In this case, eInk has paired their new (supposedly inexpensive) display technology with a dev board that costs less than $200. So eInk wants us to believe that their display technology costs $2800 a pop? I don't care what they say, there is no way in hell that they can mass manufacture their technology at reasonable costs if they can't produce dev units for around 2-3x the expected market price.

Re:The technology is NEW

[e_armadillo]

You aren't paying for the paper, components, newness, or anything like that. They are looking for a development relationship. They want customers that, as other earlier posts indicate, are looking to develop some mass marketed device. The $3000 is really the ante to weed out hobbyists, and other companies that are too small or not serious enough about a development like this. I work in the electronics industry, and have as both a customer and a vendor, and I have seen devkits like this go from $2500 - $5000. The people eInk wants to play with are used to this kind of expenditure, but also understand that they are getting more than a little piece of electronics attached to a piece of paper -- they are getting, as I said before, a design and development relationship, which they hope develops into a longer term relationship.

Re:The technology is NEW

[YU Nicks NE Way]

Actually, that really isn't true.

I used to work in the mobile device business, and we routinely wound up buying dev boards that might cost twenty to thirty times the cost of the final product, and sometime much more. The dev boards would be manufactured as one-offs in a high-wage environment by hand. Each was essentially hand crafted from a bag of parts. The retail devices would be made by the hundreds of thousands in a low-wge environment using a fixed (and highly optimized) assembly process. The per unit cost margins really are that different.

Re:The technology is NEW

[tricorn]

Dev kits are often much more expensive than the retail product will be. They don't WANT to sell to thousands of hobbyists at this time, they probably don't have the capacity. A real company won't even flinch at spending 3K for an advance peek at something like this, and a few hobbyists with plenty of money will also probably buy one.

Besides, where this really gets interesting is when such a display comes out at least the size of a page in a book or a piece of paper (e.g. 8.5x11, which would be about 1400x1800, at the 165 dpi this thing is apparently at). I'd really like to get an idea of what kind of price they think something like that will sell for.

Newkyuler

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pronounced "Newkyuler."

Why not?

[geekoid]

I know DIY home owners that spend far more on there tools.

Or DIY auto repair, or DIY computer building.

screen updates

[YesIAmAScript]

Actually, in most portable devices the display refreshes itself anyway, to save power. So the CPU can be stopped or even turned off when the screen isn't being updated already. So the only power being consumed is by the LCD. And LCDs are very power efficient, as anyone who has used a digital watch or similar thing can attest. eInk does remove this additional power consumption, if you don't need to change anything on the screen and don't wave the device around too much, it will retain what is on the display with no power at all.

Also, a PIC is not necessarily a good choice for this setup. Microchip (makers of the PIC) are really best at making true microcontrollers. Microcontrollers don't have any external bus, which limits your total memory in the system to the internal memory. PICs do have a decent amount of memory, but this amount of memory would rapidly be gobbled up just holding the frame buffer for this screen and the bitmapped fonts. An ARM 7 is the most likely candidate for a device using this type of screen, and it probably already has one in the eInk.

eInk does look great, the display is much like paper in that it uses reflected light well, and works from any angle. So it is quite readable.

Re:Would love to throw $3000 to get one of these k

[stienman]

I wonder what the pixel refresh is like, can it scroll text or page it?

Wonder no more. From the spec:
2 bit refresh (grayscale): 1000mS
1 bit refresh (B&W): 500mS

So no, you can't scroll. Further it takes a peak of 1800mW (760mW average) during the active portion of the refresh. This is an average current of 230mA during refresh (3.3v supply) with a peak of 545mA. Most rechargable cells will be fine with that - it's not a good load for AAA non-rechargable cells, nervermind watch batteries. Perhaps a supercapacitor can help out there.

This gives about 31,263 page refreshes using a 2AH lithium ion cell, not counting current used in other electronics.

This unit is glass, and while it may be slightly lighter than a similar LCD, users likely won't notice too much of a weight difference. The first generation is not going to be any lighter than the current generation PDA.

This type of system may work well with the sliding bar page update. As you read text slowly changes to the next page fo the parts you've already read. It appears as though there's a bar sliding down the page just above where you're reading. You go to the top of the page to continue, and the bar eventually wraps around as well. This mode may actually use more average current than changing the page all at once, but the user never pauses reading - waiting a full second for an update can take some getting used to, and during action sequences (where you tend to read faster) it can be quite abrupt to have to wait and it will seem to take longer.

There are many suitable uses for this type of display. Reading is obvious. Crossword and other "pen and paper" puzzles will be great, especially once they get pen functionality working. Taking notes would be ok. Signs, clocks, public information kiosks.

Not so great for internet use. But imagine having a "clock" on the wall with 802.11b that had sections for weather, latest headlines, and other information that one would use to plan their day. It would only need to be updated periodically. This kit could easily perform this function, and with bluetooth could even update your phone or PDA with the latest articles, emails, etc to read on the train/etc.

-Adam

Re:Would love to throw $3000 to get one of these k

[JohnFluxx]

No you can't (realistically) scroll text. it takes a whole second to draw the draw the screen. ;)

No, this sucker is electrical

[docbrown42]

No, this sucker is electrical. ;)

Do-it-Yourself How-To

[Proc6]

Step 1. Find an older CRT monitor or rear projection television.

Step 2. Connect video card output to monitor or TV.

Step 3. Load up your favorite PDF fullscreen.

Step 4. Turn off screensaver.

Step 5. Display image, unchanged, for a month.

Enjoy your new epaper! Requires no video card to remain on-screen, can be disconnected from PC for reading "on-the-go"*

*For on-the-go display, we suggest a 12" monitor or a rear projection TV with wheels.

Order Form Instructions

[macmurph]

Orders can be placed by completing and printing out the order form, and mailing or faxing the form to E Ink.

This is ironic considering what this company is trying to accomplish.

This probably isn't for hobbyists...

[lullabud]

I think DIY in the thread title is a bit misleading. I mean, come on... hobbyists? Somebody has probably mistaken the goals of this dev kit. It's a dev kit, not a hobby kit. That means the manufacturer wants *developers* to buy it, not hobbyists. Developers that work for companies with deep pockets who will expand the technology and ship millions of units. That's more money than they'd ever make from hobbyists. Besides, from my experience where I'm sitting right now, cutting edge technology usually has scarcity in hardware. A girl in the next room down from me solders components onto our boards by hand. When the device breaks I don't get a replacement. There isn't one. I take the broken board back over there and let one of the guys hook it up to an o-scope, trace to the malfunctioning part, then he gives it to her to replace that part, again by hand-soldering. So, yeah, $3,000 for a dev kit. That's what you get when you're paying a team of EE's to make these things from scratch.

My dream application...

[smithmc]

(and I hope a lot of other people's dream application) take this screen and a QWERTY keyboard of the same size, and put them together in a folding clamshell case (very thin, very light) that you can plug into a Treo or Tungsten. Notetaking, email, websurfing on the go, with a decent sized screen and keyboard, low power, persistent display, ooh ooh baby.

*soff*

[LordMyren]

Hardly. $3000 really aint bad at all. Spit in the bucket for people who actually hope to manufacture something based off this.

As for shitty resolution or no, the answer is an unequivocal absolute no. 800x600 on a 6 inch display is better DPI than all but the best laptops.

Myren

OT: Re:It's a PDA!

[pipingguy]

$3000? Is that Canadian money?

Have you checked out the exchange rate recently? These days my Google cheques are converting at about 1.15, a far cry from the 1.4 of a couple of years ago.

Here it is for $150

[Fenster Karton]

http://www.jinke.com.cn/english/v8/default.asp 290 grams with Li ion battery (just over 10 oz) 800x600 main display Plays mp3 as well USB 1.1 I/O Here it is for $150 or at least that is what was said in the newsletter (Blackmask.com)

Typically, it's NOT at the ratios we're seeing...

[Svartalf]

$2800 for the flat panel- how can they be hand making that part, it's got to be produced with some sort of production process that is mostly automated because of the sheer numbers of elements that have to be right the first time? I just don't buy that it's that expensive. I could believe $1500 or so, but not double that. I know all about engineering evals- I'm the CTO of a company that was solely in the consumer electronics space at one point. The price they're charging for supposedly an inexpensive and superior tech- supposedly cheaper than LCDs and FEDs. Not at those prices it's not.

Re:Typically, it's NOT at the ratios we're seeing.

[YU Nicks NE Way]

In my experience, for early prototypes, the chips are often hand-inserted on the PC boards, and then the patch wires are wirewrapped on the back. I would not be in the least surprised if these are just barely beyond that stage. I wouldn't be surprised if the video driver (which is being released as free software) is being custom-written by a team of people in real time. Etc. A lot of those costs are treated as sunk when you go beyond eval, but I'm betting they're trying to break even now.

Re:Typically, it's NOT at the ratios we're seeing.

[Svartalf]

This is a surface mount panel. No wire wrapping. Looking at it, the electronics aren't that complicated. Again, tell me WHY it's $2800? I can buy $1000 or so, but there's just not all that much time invested in it's assembly. I just don't see where it's coming from- and I DO know about all of that. It's my job to manage this sort of thing in the first place.

Re:Typically, it's NOT at the ratios we're seeing.

[YU Nicks NE Way]

I did say that they were past the wirewrap stage...but, all the same, I didn't notice that this was surface mount technology.

Are you counting in the 80-100% markup for a customer buying at n=1? Remember that they bought those boards retail themselves, basically.

You're looking at this like a producer. As a past consumer of this kind of junk, it doesn't seem all that bad.