Quote:
Originally Posted by Cyberman tM
Maybe more investment in eInk would find something completely new.
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And...
...we've circled back to the beginning.
Eink is a niche technology.
Investment in a given technology is perforce proportional to its market size, current or projected.
Eink displays and the dedicated reading gadgets they go into are low-price low-volume devices. That is a bad combination for investment, especially in "revolutionary" developments. Throwing lots of money at a product that will sell cheaply in small quanties is a good way to turn "lots of money" into "not so much money".
The thing is, all display techs new and old are niche technologies these days, except LCD. If anybody is going to invest big money in new display tech, that money will go into refining LCD not into tiny markets. Small markets will attract small investments. Which is what Qualcomm and Amazon (american companies, both) are doing. Note that asian companies are investing in LCD and Oled and european companies... well, their biggest investgents are in dual use aerospace like Galileo.
As it stands, Amazon is working on a dual layer Liquavista display that overlays medium resolution color layer atop a high resolution grayscale layer. So those that want an outdoor readable color ereader may be getting one soon... if they can stomach buying from amazon.
Finally, there already exists a low-power, fast and highly saturated, outdoors readable tech that is not too expensive to deploy. All the support electronics are widely available, too. No expensive investment needed. Several asian manufacturers stand ready to deliver screens as soon as they receive enough orders to ramp up the production line.
Vendors are not standing in line to use it.
The tech is 15-year old Transflective LCD.
Widely used in Pocket PCs and industrial tablets and instrumentation.
And vendors are not standing in line to use it because they don't see a big enough market to throw money at it. Even the companies that have money to throw.
Just because we can conceive of a cool feature or product we'd like to have doesn't mean there are enough of us that would pay a fair price to get it.
Look at Kickstarter and other crowdfunding services to see how those usually play out. Everybody hears about the success stories like the Pebbles watches but more typical are the Earls or the outright failures that never get funded.
Wanting is not getting.
Not when you live in a niche.