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E Ink Unveils Color E-Reader Display
Kensai7 writes with news that E Ink, the company who builds the displays used in Amazon's Kindle, Barnes and Noble's Nook, and Sony's Reader, has launched a color version of their e-reader screens. It will first be used by a Chinese company called Hanvon Technology. Other companies will be watching and evaluating how well it works before integrating it into their own designs. Quoting:
"Unlike an LCD screen, the colors are muted, as if one were looking at a faded color photograph. In addition, E Ink cannot handle full-motion video. At best, it can show simple animations. These are reasons Amazon, Sony and the other major e-reader makers are not yet embracing it. Amazon says it will offer color E Ink when it is ready; the company sees color as useful in cookbooks and children’s books, and it offers these books in color through its Kindle application for LCD devices. Sony is also taking a wait-and-see approach."
The fact that ANY consumer product (nevermind a whole category) has succeeded with black-and-white screens is remarkable, and points towards to some hard to beat advantages of the E Ink technology: they were strong enough to outweigh the fact that on first impression, the screens looks cheap.
With the addition of color (and the assumption of steady improvement to contrast and color gamut), it's entirely possible that e ink will be wrapped on all kind of things -- dashboards, airport signage, ATMs -- where power is an issue.
Make the damn thing so that we can cut it to a desired size and easily control it without needing an expensive built-in or external controller and everyone who builds arcade cabinets will finally have dynamic marquees that looks almost as real as the real thing.
LCD panels may be more bright, but you can't easily cut that. Normal marquees may be backlit but it's not quite the same as LCD.
Plus, we'll be able to have slightly rounded dynamic marquees, instead of being limited to flat ones like with LCD.
I've been waiting for years for color e-ink to mature enough to make a good digital picture frame. Something cheap, lightweight, with great viewing angles, daylight readable, non-reflective, awesome resolution, takes no power in between refreshes - heck, you could set it to only switch 1x day and run it for a year on a small battery.
Sounds like they are getting closer - keep at it, guys!
Honestly, if the color is halfway decent, use them in the digital picture frames. The color doesn't have to be spectacular, just halfway decent. The main reason I never bought a digital picture frame, much less multiple picture frames is that I couldn't rationalize running a computer monitor 24/7 just as a piece of art. Throw in an ultra low power clock and wifi so that the wifi can be turned off except on a predetermined schedule for updating the SD card, and you have a real winner.
because I doubt consumers will accept colors that don't jump out at them having been used to color LCD screens for so long.
I guess it really depends on how muted those colors are, if its like the screen is always dark or fuzzy its DOA.
I won't touch the new Nook (color LCD) or an iPad simply because battery life and usability out doors is so compromised.
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