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E Ink Creates Full-Color Electronic Paper Display (mashable.com) 96

Posted by BeauHD from the black-and-white dept.
SkinnyGuy writes: The reflective display company finally figured out how to make those ultra tiny balls produce 32,000 colors in one super-low-powered display. It's a breakthrough for E Ink, display advertising and, maybe someday, e-readers and digital photo frames. The new prototype display, which can be manufactured in an array of sizes, features a 20-inch, 2500 x 1600 resolution and is equally as power-efficient as the monochromatic display. E Ink Holding's Head of Global marketing Giovanni Mancini said it can be powered with solar cells used in bus stop signage, for example. Some of the limitations center around the resolution and refresh rate. As of right now, the resolution is only 150 pixels per inch (ppi), which is about half the resolution of a typical 6-inch, monochromatic E ink display. It also takes about two seconds to fully resolve images, which is pretty slow when compared to today's e-readers. The company is currently only focused on using the new color display for commercial signage.
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E Ink Creates Full-Color Electronic Paper Display More

E Ink Creates Full-Color Electronic Paper Display

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  • Wait.... Again?! (Score:5, Informative)

    by wierd_w ( 1375923 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @08:32PM (#52175655)

    I may be a little addled in my ability to remember, but I have this deeply nagging feeling at the back of my mind that they had a full color e-ink prototype waaaaaaaaaaaay back in the late 90s that used a super hydrophobic cell layer with electrically conductive partition walls.

    IIRC, the paper was made from 4 transparent layers over a white back layer. Each layer held a CMYK pigment component in the form of an aqueus solution, held into a tight microdot form by superhydrophobic coatings inside each cell. When the cell is energized, hydroelectrodynamic forces cause the droplet to spread out and cover the cell, with the applied voltage to the cell determining how fully the droplet flattens and covers the cell.

    That was waaaaaaaaaaay back though. I will dig to see if I can find the old press releases.

    • Re:Wait.... Again?! (Score:5, Informative)

      by wierd_w ( 1375923 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @08:48PM (#52175745)

      Here we go. Hot news from 1999!

      https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]

    • I have to assume that you are always the wise man in the room.

      Somebody who has a memory more voluminous than the elephant, combined with the details comparable that of the photo. Photographic memory, so to speak.

      You work for a large corporation. And you are a smart ass director.

      You either have PhD, or considered having one.

    • Re:Wait.... Again?! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @10:33PM (#52176077)

      I seem to recall that the folks behind the Kindle's e-ink screen had color versions as well, but it was prohibitively expensive to make. As I recall it used basically the same technology as the two-tone version, except instead of a uniform sheet of e-ink it had subpixels of the different colors printed in a grid. Unfortunately that made the displays FAR more expensive to produce, as it required precise alignment between the e-ink layer and the controlling electronics, unlike the greyscale models where the e-ink layer was uniform, and pixels were determined entirely by the electronics laminated to them.

      I would assume the required precision also meant that the color models couldn't benefit from the the free sub-pixel anti-aliasing that makes the greyscale screens look so incredibly crisp and smooth even at relatively low resolutions.

      • Colored subpixels arranged side by side are not very useful for a reflective display. Suppose you use R, G, and B subpixels that can vary shades between black and R, G, or B. Then you can't get any brighter than a 33% reflective gray. Maybe you misremember how it worked?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Where did you get RGB from? Isn't it way more likely that they have a white base color and a grid of CMYK subpixels?
          The colors will still look a bit washed out, but all black and all white should look acceptable.

          • For whomever might be reading this (or who modded me down): CMYK subpixels arranged side by side are just as useless, since you cannot achieve anything resembling black. C, M, Y reflect about 2/3rds of the light, so you can't get anything darker than 50% gray.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )

      I may be a little addled in my ability to remember, but I have this deeply nagging feeling at the back of my mind that they had a full color e-ink prototype waaaaaaaaaaaay back in the late 90s

      That display has colours that are not very intense. Ectaco sells a device with it. It compares with faded old comics on newsprint for colour. It's not something the advertising industry would be interested in for signs.

    • This sounds like Liquavista [liquavista.com]. It has been for a long time in the making, but it seems they didn't find yet a solution to industrialize it efficiently.

    • Technology advances. Older technology is flaky, unreliable, labor-intensive, and so forth; newer technology is cheap. For example: farmers have been growing wheat in the US since as far back as the 1790s, but they've since obsoleted 97% of the direct farming workforce [agclassroom.org] and, since as recently as 1900, have removed 75% of the workers from the front-to-back production chain (that includes all workers--right down to the oil prospectors finding crude feed stock to make fuel to power tractors). No doubt the c

  • Arduino! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MobileTatsu-NJG ( 946591 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @08:32PM (#52175661)

    I'm dying to get ahold of an e-ink display that is roughly iPad-sized that I can program with an Arduino. Why? Oh I dunno but I feel like I could come up with tons of ideas really fast.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 )

      Buy a Kindle DX and snatch the E ink display out of that.

      • Is it hard to send a signal to the e-Ink display to make it refresh?

        • You could also install listening software on the Kindle itself with some custom firmware. That sounds a lot easier, honestly, aside from having to have a USB cable sticking out of it.

      • Or, buy Onyx Boox M92. They have 9.7" eink displays and run plain old Linux with BusyBox. These guys also have examples of how to write software for it on GitHub but never checked the quality of the code. The M92 should be available for about $100-120, it's a 2011 model.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I would like some really large colour E Ink displays to cover the walls in my house. No more repainting, I could just load a new colour or picture.

    • I want to do the same with a Raspberry Pi. I could get a cheap e-ink display from an old e-reader, but I haven't figured out how to convert the video signal from a Raspberry Pi into something the e-ink can display. If I figured that out, then I can add a small bluetooth keyboard and a USB battery pack with solar panel to make an uber versatile energy efficient light-weight travel computer. I know, I could just use an Android based e-reader with browser etc instead, but that's not the point.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )

      I think that current eink prices are in a catch-22 situation. As I understand. prices are still fairly high because demand isn't high enough to really enable mass production to lower prices, and eink simply does not offer enough advantages over alternatives like oled for most people to justify paying the extra expense.

      Having color may help on the latter end, and if so, it is only a matter of time before that ends up impacting the former.

      • Yes, I'm aware that what I described is not a pure catch-22 because there is an out, while in a real catch-22 there is not. The out being feature improvement to the point that it offers advantages over alternatives that would justify the expense. My point is that such features have not been forthcoming for eink, so the result feels a lot like a catch-22.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbIII ( 701233 )
        It's a licence issue. The owners of the e-ink IP only want their stuff in "premium" products so the rest of us can apparently just go jump. Some authors, programmers etc would love a low end machine with an e-ink screen to do stuff with text but the only thing that comes close is using a Boox tablet with a bluetooth keyboard, and that's only become available a decade after sucha thing would have been possible without a lot of effort.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mark-t ( 151149 )
          That explanation seems more like unsubstantiated rumour than anything else. Vague terms like "owners of e-ink IP" are enough that make it suspect, at the very least. To be honest, it reads like a baseless conspiracy theory.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dbIII ( 701233 )
            It has been a very widely reported common complaint for the last decade and has been widely discussed even here by people other than myself more qualified to comment. Do a search on slashdot articles and you will find plenty on that topic with ease. Instead of that you decided to go for accusation of tinfoil hattery - waste of space and nasty with it.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mark-t ( 151149 )

              Sure... discussed here. In comments, by commenters, and not article submitters... and with no other reputable sources to back them up. Much like the comment to which I responded, above.

              Before I made the above comment, for what it's worth, I put the words "e ink", "licensing", "expensive" into Google, to cross check before I hit submit, and the search revealed no information that I could find anywhere that is relevant to how e-ink IP is being kept artificially high priced... and I went through about t

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      e-ink found its way into a $30 cell phone in 2006 (motofone f3), and the screen on the first pebble watch is estimated at $1.69.
      The tech is cheap. It is just that no one bothered making one for Arduinos at a reasonable price.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Pebble watch uses a Sharp Memory LCD, which is a regular trans reflective LCD with storage so it only updates the pixels that change between frames. This gets rid of the constant full-screen refresh you get from a standard LCD, which means that if you're not watching video, it uses a whole helluva lot less power. But it has the same fast response as LCD, which makes it more capable as an interactive device than eink.

        It's still miles more power consumption than e-ink when nothing is happening (it requires st

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The Pebble wasn't eInk though, it was a Sharp MemoryLCD. Basically a sunlight readable ultra low power LCD. It's so low power it's less than the self-discharge current of most batteries, but the refresh rate is that of a normal LCD. It's actually lower power than eInk for some applications.

    • Kindle DX one year after release was about $300, nowhere close to "a fucking arm, leg and half a kidney". Now they are cheaper.

      First, you didn't specify that you wanted some prepackaged display controller, hopefully you're that guy who figured it out instead of whinging about convenience and cost needing to both be inexpensive.

      Second, if $300 is literally all of those body parts, I'll give you $50 for half of your kidney, if it's in good shape. But you have to provide an installer. Because a kidney should n

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by thsths ( 31372 )

        Yes, the Kindle DX did cost "an arm and a leg". Certainly compared to competing tablets, which had colour, back light, and a higher resolution. Cost is what killed the Kindle DX, cost is what made Android tablets so popular in the low end market.

    • I expect we'll see a resurgence of e-ink in niche applications in the next few years - the patents are starting to expire (first patent was 1996). If those niche applications can generate enough commercial interest, that'll drive the price down. And maybe we'll finally get the low-cost passive displays the technology promised 20 years ago.
  • ... would certainly be fine for, I can say quite confidently that I would not be in their market.Although the 15 bit color depth is slightly disappointing, it's something that I could live with. However, the resolution needs to be kicked up a notch. Resolution is going to impact readability at close distances, so while this resolution might be fine for things like billboard ads, it's not going to be very good for books that you hold in your hands. Also, I'd want a refresh rate that's probably capable of

    • Re:While there are applications that this.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by demonlapin ( 527802 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @10:32PM (#52176069) Homepage Journal
      e-ink displays are not for skimming - they're for reading. They're a specialized market. I'd rather read on my iPad than my Kindle, generally, but the Kindle has amazing battery life and can be read in full sun. There really is no substitute for it, other than having servants who will bring you printed books on command. It's always been marketed to people who read lots of books, for that reason. E.g., my wife, who reads 2-3 books a week.

    • Actually, this tech is usable as-is. E-Ink displays are transparent/black, and so you could layer a modern Kindle e-ink display on top of a new, half-resolution color display. Refresh would first immediately draw the black lines, then slowly fill in low-resolution color. The result is a sharp image immediately, with color that gets there eventually. While the color fill-in period would be unconventional, it's far-superior to a pure-color screen with low-resolution and a two-second draw time, and only *

  • Grr commercial signage (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Areyoukiddingme ( 1289470 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @09:52PM (#52175939)

    20" high resolution color zero-power-while-not-refreshing photo frame? Shut up and take my money!

    This is precisely what a digital photo frame should be. Program it to change the photo once a week from the internal SD card and a single battery charge could last half a year, if the designers are smart enough to implement it with a microcontroller instead of an Android-running behemoth. And it should have the longevity, too. I still use my eInk bookreader I bought in 2007 daily, and it works great, after far more frequent page turns than a photo frame is likely to need.

    I would advocate for non-removable internal storage accessed via USB in order to avoid paying the Microsoft tax on FAT32, but it would be a shame not to make the storage upgradeable given that Samsung seems to be determined to make it possible to lose a terabyte in the couch cushions.

    But anyway, details. Shut up and take my money!

    • The problem with these passive display technologies as photo frames has been that reflected light (like a photo) is dim and murky. Projected light (like an LCD or OLED) is bright and lively. Talk to any film photographer from back in the old days - they prefer slides to negatives partly for this reason. If you don't believe me, take a printed photo, scan it (or take a digital photo of it), then do an auto-levels adjustment to set the photo's white point at your monitor's max white, and the black point at

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        That really didn't make much sense; you're comparing apples to oranges.

        When you take the auto-levels of the image -- all you're doing is normalizing the histogram of the image, which maximizes the dynamic range. (Bear in mind, a good photographer with a light meter will have largely done that already.)

        If you print out THAT image and compare it to the one on-screen, they won't be very different.

        If you want to see a real difference, view a (passive) reflective hologram next to a transmission hologram, the wow

    • This is precisely what a digital photo frame should be.

      Now they just need to get the colors right.

      Real:
      http://www.vdweerd.nl/wp-conte... [vdweerd.nl]

      E Ink:
      https://blueprint-api-producti... [amazonaws.com]

      • This is precisely what a digital photo frame should be.

        Now they just need to get the colors right.

        15 bit color definitely hurts.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jabuzz ( 182671 )

      Screw USB connections, of microSD/SD cards. Who the hell wants to be fiddling around changing cards, plugging laptops etc. into a picture frame?

      Personally I would like it to get the photos from a server wirelessly. I would advocate Bluetooth for the lower power requirements, but I guess WiFi would be more practical. So it wakes up every day, checks the folder on the server downloads the next picture, changes the display and then goes back to sleep.

      Oh an before you ask I would prefer it that the server was l

    • 20" high resolution color zero-power-while-not-refreshing photo frame? Shut up and take my money!

      Or, make it even bigger and make an actual smart whiteboard. Well, OK, even a 20" slate for your desk would be probably enough. Give it good interactive software and you'll have the ultimate medium for your thinking (well, except perhaps for the future computer implants in your head).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I think it will be a while before this tech is suitable for displaying photos. The colours looks quite artificial, like an old Technicolor film from the 50s, and the contrast isn't very good.

      One day we won't need photo frames, we will just use this stuff as wallpaper.

  • When I was town commissioner (probably about 6 years ago), our president was talking about getting one of those horrible LED monstrosities that you see in front of mega churches.

    I convinced the others that they'd be out of character for our historic village, and they're horrible due to causing night-blind issues.

    Unfortunately, I couldn't find a *single* company that sold an e-ink display of any considerable size. The closest was a company that packaged up tiny squares (I think they were 6"x6") that you'd a

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hattig ( 47930 )

      Giant Fresnel Lens, that's what you need :p

  • I shudder to think (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    “We have encapsulated four different things in one micro-cup.”

    So, "four girls, one micro-cup"?

  • This would be very, very nice. Currently, I'm using Pocket to save articles offline. It's integrated with Firefox plus has a dozen plugins. But more interestingly, it also comes standard on the Kobo eReaders. It's bliss -- I can read articles in bed from an eInk display with really subdued lighting.

    However photos really suck. That hasn't been a problem so far, but recently I got interested into electric cars: Nissan Leaf, Volkswagen e-Up!, Renault Zoe, etc. However.... articles on cars are nice, but much be

  • equally as power-efficient

    which I assume is marketing speak for "also uses zero power once the image is set."

  • The sample image looks simultaneously oversaturated and washed out. The article seems to suggest its basically CMYK but without the K - the black component that should contrast and depth. So black is just CMY mixed together and looking like muddy brown.

    I don't see people who want colour in an e-reader wanting this. They want to read magazines, graphic novels, comics, perhaps even web content. They expect those things to be rendered faithfully in the reader, not the way this thing appears to render them.

    • Do you remember what LCDs used to look like? They were pretty terrible. Narrow viewing angles, low contrast, high latency. Give this technology a few years (ok, decades?), and the basic principal has the potential to completely replace display technology as we know it. The only reason that I continue to use my ancient Nokia phone, is that I don't have to turn on the backlight to see the display, I can just pull it out of my pocket and see the screen without pushing any buttons. E-ink displays could increase

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        I don't see any reason to believe this technology will replace display technology as we know it. E-ink displays have never been fast and there is nothing to suppose this display will ever be any faster than mono displays. It's simply inherent to the way the technology works which is like some glorified etch-a-sketch, shaking the particles to reset them and then electrically setting them in some state.

        The comparison to LCD is particularly off. I don't know what your Nokia phone's display is, but even the e

  • But no to reader..damnnnnnnnnnnnnnn http://readnews247.com/detail/... [readnews247.com]

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