Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaitou Ace
...while it is sad to see the originator of the market (and the manufacturer of many devices that I've owned and enjoyed) leave, they dug their own grave here.
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The above and the views of some others are along the lines that Sony had to get out of E Ink readers through bungling their development.
My view is completely different in that rather than digging "their own grave" with respect to E Ink readers, they are in fact resurrecting themselves. And that about time they did. The first visual clue of this was with the T2 which is essentially the same as the T1 plus or minus a few gizmos but no innovation.
As far as I know Sony is the only large global electronic manufacture to have produced or persevered with dedicated readers and I suspect in the case of the others they came to realise early on that the market was just too small, and thus too distracting to the wider business, to be worthwhile.
With the arrival of tablets, especially now the small tablets of typical reader size, and large format smart phones the dedicated reader market is becoming a niche one. In fact, over the last 12 months in my own local area displays of dedicated readers have almost disappeared out of the stores, they being displaced by long line ups of small tablets of close to similar price, and in nearby displays the larger more expensive smartphones. People don't want to carry multiple devices around with them and for reading they like the availability of colour (not just for illustrations and text formatting but in order to set up background colour and saturation according to preference and ambient conditions).
Samsung have now brought out emissive AMOLED screened small (and larger) tablets and, as with top end phones, these Samsung emissive displays will likely turn up in other manufacturer's tablets. That puts to bed the real or imagined issues people claim with "flicker" (I suspect most issues of problems are more related to users reading with inappropriate light level, contrast and colour settings of the display) and daylight readability. AMOLED has been common on many top end phones for around 4 or 5 years (Samsung Galaxy and Nokia smart phones, for example) and is well regarded; it has a large colour palette (larger than LCD) and does grey scale excellently (far better than E Ink).
While probably hurried along by the other rationalisations going on in their empire, I suspect Sony have realised these things and those are the reasons for little recent development and exiting the to become increasingly niche E Ink reader market. It is something they are doing too late and that may be the only criticism of them. The market's writing was on the wall back when T1s were still on the shelves.
Last time I made mention of such things some E Ink fans got a little angry; perhaps such reactions are just another symptom of how niche the market is becoming.