So I'm looking around the net, seeing large format e-readers, with touch screen, wireless connection, colour...
But didn't they learn from the EEE netbooks? People want something cheap, that fulfills the minimum, and it'll sell like hot cakes.
I want something light, small screen is fine, and under 100 euro's. Is there something like that in the pipleline?
I think we'll see something like this in 1-2 years. The color e-readers are starting to come out. Bridgestone just announced their new color e-reader.
There are several issues though:
1. The device needs to offer an open platform (i.e. Google Android).
2. consumers want video and color. Anything less would be like going back to the stone ages.The refresh rates will have to improve drastically to achieve this. E-ink is starting to produce very fast refresh rates which can almost simulate video - the color technologies are much more behind.
The problem with the colour displays yend to be that at the moment they all seem to be based on subtractive colour - filters have to be stacked and it ends up looking washed out.
keysersoze said:
The problem with the colour displays yend to be that at the moment they all seem to be based on subtractive colour - filters have to be stacked and it ends up looking washed out.
This is half true. An exception to this statement is found with electrowetting, in which red, blue and green dyed liquids that act as color filters can be individually moved to fully cover a pixel. Liquivista employs this technique.
http://www.epapercentral.com/epaper-technologies-guide#liquivista
I forgot about the electro-wetting there! I guess I was just thinking of the most recent ones I saw with a cmy colourset. I confess I don;t know much about liquivista's technology, but if they have rgb that goes a long way to being the best on the market.....if it makes it there!
I hope it makes it!
You seem very knowledgeable on the subject. What is your background? What got you interested in e-paper?
cheers,
Sasha
Thanks - I'm just finishing a PhD in a semi-related subject, but from involvement on colloids for the last 9 years, I know a fair amount about electrophoretic movements and during literature searches I have come across a lot of E-Ink work, so I just sort of slowly became aware of the technology - although as patents take so long to get out, I will always be at least 2 years behind on what they're really doing!
How about you? You know quite a lot about it too - you work in it, or just interested?
$100? Surely you jest?
The name of the game is about to change, and radically. It isn't "a nice $100 machine capable of reading the ubiquitous .pdf file and with as many bells and whistles as we can add to it."
It's "how few machine instructions can we use to take an illustrated page, preferably in colour, out of fixed memory and put it onto the screen, and what's the power required to do so?"
Answers: (a) Very few and (b) milliwatts.
Following on from which, it's: "can we do it using just a solar panel the same size as our screen, thereby liberating us from the electrical wall socket?"
Answer: Yes, we can.
-- and "How much will such a machine, which does nothing whatever but read books -- that is to say, an e-book reader -- cost the end user?"
Answer, from where I'm sitting:- $20, max, by the time it's in mass production. We should be shooting for $10.
(For that you don't get the internet, but never mind, that's actually an advantage in many places in the world.)
Cheers,
Martin Woodhouse (inventor of the e-book in 1989 or thereabouts . . .)
The concept of using a solar cell array to power an e-reader is not a new concept unfortunately - it has been around some time if I recall some patents from a few years ago. If you look at current readers and demos from the variety of companies involved in it they are almost entirely reflective displays (liquivista apart). Then you look at them and we see what we always see - black and white has a similar contrast ratio to paper (the white is usually poorer though) and colour seems washed out and very.....pastel. What is the reason for this? Not enough light reflected. If you then overlay a device on top of that which is designed to absorb light to create a usable energy what will then happen to the already washed out colours. If you have the array around the edge of the ebook, this will increase the size and the screen will look proportionally smaller - sokmething the end user does not want to see. When you look at the readers out there and see how much power they require, it is staggeringly small so the solar array may not need to be too big, but the amount of recharging is so small that I don't think it really matters.
The price will undoubtably come down, but you have to consider the amount of engineering which goes into making the ink. If you look at inkjet ink that is fantastically expensive and it takes quite a lot of work to make an ink-jettable formulation. E-Ink type concepts are exceptionally complex, then add the electronics required to drive it onto that and this is what increases the price - add solar cells to that (which are pretty expensive at the moment anyway, nevermind how inefficient they are) and you get a fantastically expensive peice of kit.
Also, not to be too negative but I'm pretty sure that e-book concepts were around long before 1989 - show me a patent and prove me wrong potentially, but I don't think I am. On this site, e-paper is reported as being designed in the early 70's - I think they would have thought of e-books quite a while before 1989.
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