Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
I would expect a better low-power reflective display technology to entirely replace E-Ink displays.
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- All color reflective technology to date has worked through placing a colorising filter over B&W technology. Given the inherent complexity of baking multiple colors directly into the the reflective layer, this is unlikely to change any time soon.
- This means that any color reflective technology, for the foreseeable future will be inferior to B&W in terms of resolution, clarity and cost.
- There is a large market for eReaders for reading predominantly text-based books, particularly genre fiction, that is better met by a higher resolution, clearer, cheaper B&W display than a lower resolution, less-clear, more expensive color technology.
- This means that this B&W-dominated niche will continue to exist for the foreseeable future.
Will displays continue to improve? Most certainly. But the tightening R&D budgets mean that E-Ink's dominance is unlikely to be dethroned any time soon (building a better product
costs).
Quote:
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E-Ink didn't come into a completely fresh market area. There were already low-power reflective displays, but they just weren't very good. E-Ink pretty much killed reflective LCD displays except in the very lowest priced items.
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Existence of technology does not equate to existence of a (substantive) market. The Wright brothers invented powered flight, not commercial air travel (their occasional marketing stunt notwithstanding). The existence of a substantive/'mass' market generally requires a
mature technology, as well as considerable effort in marketing it.
Also, I misstated, slightly. It was not so much e-Ink creating the market as Amazon creating the market using E-Ink's technology. Compare sales levels before and after the advent of Amazon-EInk, and I'd be very surprised if they were not multiple orders of magnitude different.