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Color E-Book Displays Coming From E Ink Next Year
waderoush writes "E Ink, which makes the monochrome electrophoretic screens used in the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Reader line, and other e-readers, is gearing up to supply manufacturers with the first color versions of its displays by early next year, according to an Xconomy interview with T.H. Peng, a vice president with Taiwan's Prime View International, which bought E Ink last year. Peng argues that E Ink has nothing to fear from the e-book apps on the Apple iPad and other devices with color LCDs, which, in his view, produce more eye strain and aren't as suitable for digital reading. Nonetheless, the company says its first color screens in 2011 will have newspaper-quality color, followed within a couple of years by improved versions that can handle magazine-style content."
How about you first find a better process for making monochrome e-ink displays so the devices that use them aren't ridiculously priced?
Living With a Nerd
We'll be able to physically feel and turn the pages of these color books. Makes notes in the margin and who knows, with advances on the DRM front be able to actually pass these books onto our children!
Just read from E-Ink screen to feel the difference. I was skeptical about E-Ink too before having tried it out. It looks almost exactly like the real paper. So, now I can't imagine using LCD for prolonged reading when you can use E-Ink device or (even better!) good old paper book.
By the way, another key advantage of E-Ink is energy consumption: it doesn't use battery when static, and uses quite a small amount of energy to redraw the page. Due to this feature, eBooks can run for weeks or even months on a single charge.
How about you first find a better process for making monochrome e-ink displays so the devices that use them aren't ridiculously priced?
Why? Mono is probably a dead end technology. It may be better to get to color as quickly as possible and then concentrate on process improvements. A color Kindle would be a much better commercial product. It is difficult to imagine textbooks moving to electronic media without color. Regarding the possibility of reduced eye strain with mono, perhaps a reader app on a color device could choose to only show black and white for pure text content.
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Perpenso Calc for iPhone and iPod touch, scientific and bill/tip calculator, fractions, complex numbers, RPN
After an hour? No. After 12 hours a day, 5 days a week? Yes. If I've been sitting in front of a computer screen for several hours and close my eyes I can feel the muscles unwinding. It's not something I'm conciously away of until I look away from the screen, but the muscles of and around my eyes are constantly tense when reading off a monitor.
As for the refresh rate of e-ink, for me it is almost exactly equal to the time it takes my eyes to travel from the bottom to the top of the page. The only time I notice it is if I need to go back/forward several pages, then the slow refresh is frustrating since you have to wait for a page to display before you can move to the next one.
"Peng argues that E Ink has nothing to fear from the e-book apps on the Apple iPad and other devices with color LCDs, which, in his view, produce more eye strain and aren't as suitable for digital reading. "
LCD's aren't suitable for digital reading? You mean the LCD's I read off of 10 hours a day at work are completely unacceptable for reading now? I have a Kindle which uses the wonderful to read e-ink display and the low contrast, washed out grey text on lighter grey background, with no backlighting, slow page draws, and previous page ghosting, is NOT a superior reading experience to a decent LCD. Not even close. To claim otherwise is just bald faced LYING.
I do a LOT of ebook reading on my iphone, and on my kindle, so I actually do know the difference. e-ink displays excel in battery life and that is the ONLY category they are better than modern LCD