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Originally Posted by chrisridd
Perhaps the question is, with the amount of money Amazon may be willing to throw at E-Ink, will they be able to get ACeP on par with monochrome ereader speeds and display quality. That seems like a big ask, and do Amazon really care that much?
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The original eink is only a little younger than commercial LCD (LCD effect discovered in Victorian era). Dates from 1970s Xerox.
Qualcomm abandoned Mirasol colour over 15 years ago.
The first eInk based ereader was in 2004. There were earlier decicated ereaders, not just PDAs and phones, in the 1990s. The first Kindle was 2007.
Regular eink and ACeP seem to be unrelated mechanical bistable technologies. DLP is mechanical too but at tiny scale of moving mirrors that need a projection system, so it can go really fast. There is no adequate explanation as to how ACeP works the Magenta, Yellow and Cyan particles in a cell, but E Ink Corp don't need Amazon's money to make it go faster. The explinations of regular mono eink are poor, but it's currently many black and white balls in a liquid cell for each pixel. Both are inherently slow. Obviously the subtractive colour system is x10 or more slower. The speed of regular eink has been increased to nearly x3 on some products by using massive drive power. This results in poor battery life, poorer accuracy of the 14 greys with the black and white (by mixed number of balls) and no-one says what it does to panel life.
Amazon bought one e-paper company and buried it. E ink Corp has bought and buried all the others except Qualcomm's Mirsol (which isn't eink, but more like how the scales on a butterfly's wing does colour).
Inherently any bistable display is slow. The mono eink is ideally suited to novels as the CPU can sleep and power down the display and controller while you read a page. The mono and bicolour (red, white and black) price labels are even slower to change, but might not be changed more than once at day. The ACeP (Gallery 3) is even slower but it doesn't matter for posters. The biggest market for E Ink Corp is retail and public displays (like timetables), not gadgets for ebooks.
The first eink to use a filter on the regular panel was in 2012. Triton (the approach like used on LCDs) was too dark. So colour saturation was swapped for more brightness and the RGB stripes (1/3 resolution in on axis) replaced by pastel shades in a 2 x 2 pattern (Kaleido), because eink can't do the smaller rectangular pixels used in high resolution LCD and OLED. LCD makers don't quote the mono panel resolution, only the colour. So Kaleido displays are half the resolution of the mono ones. The 300 dpi (ppi) eink came out in 2014, ten years ago. Despite marginal improvements in speed and contrast (partly by building in capacitive touch to save a layer) the resolution hasn't increased. Till the Scribe came out in September 2022 the 8″ was largest 300 dpi and larger panels were progressivly poorer resolution.
A decent colour panel using Kaleido would need to be about 450 dpi mono. No sign of it. The large 13.3″ panels are only 206 dpi (ppi), which would give 103 dpi colour.
The DX and DXG were 150 dpi
The 6" cheaper panels in early Kindles and Basic for years are 167 dpi.
I'd seriously consider a Kobo Kaleido ereader if it had at least 13″ 4:3 and 220 dpi (i.e. a 440 mono panel) and it was under €300. No way would I touch ACeP/Gallery 3.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chrisridd
It seems way more likely that badereader are just making it all up.
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Maybe.