Quote:
Originally Posted by BionicGecko
I feel we should be excited about any progress being made in this area, even though imperfect. Color eInk panels today are certainly much better than the original eInk panels from the mid aughts, and nobody was complaining about them back then, except those saying it was just a fad.
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Triton was the original coloured eink in 2010. Fourteen years ago and only 5 years after 1st Sony and 3 years after first Kindle. It was a total failure in the market. Far too dark and 1/3rd resolution in one direction because it used stripes.
Kaleido uses a 2 x 2 pattern and the dots don't cover the pixels, so 1/2 resolution both ways and not as dark. Still not usable indoors without a front LED light most of the time, so you might as well use LCD and a backlight. It's from 2019, so now five years old.
Both have a theoretical 4096 shades/colours, but because the kaleido is pastel and there are really only 14 in between levels as well as black and white, the real usable range is much less. Really poor for anything other than comics that simulate 1930s limited colour range on wood pulp paper.
Because of the coloured dots in the pixels the 300 dpi mono mode has not the sharpness of ANY 300 dpi mono panel and suffers two kinds of artefacts, the "screen door effect" and if a mono pattern aligns on pixels of one colour or misses pixels of one colour you get coioured patterns. The panels could be driven at only 150 dpi for mono and that would be avoided.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BionicGecko
It is frustrating because the technology really is in fact quite good. The screen is darker…
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It's inherently poor. It would need 600 dpi mono panels to be as good as mono 300 dpi. In over 11 years E ink Corp, nor anyone else has surpassed 300 dpi. LCD, OLED, QLED, Crystal LED etc only quote the colour resolution, they never quote the 2 x 2 or 3 x 1 higher underlying resolution (which for LCD and QLED really is mono).
Quote:
Originally Posted by BionicGecko
Commercial adoption of color eInk in its early stages is a necessary step for the technology to progress, and I think this community should be cheering at the fact that color eInk panels are now a real, viable option, instead of endlessly criticizing its downsides.
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Triton is FOURTEEN years old using stripes. Kaleido is a better use of the same mono panels as other eink using a 2 x 2 pattern and it's nearly FIVE years old.
ACeP is a completely different kind of eink that's subtractive, so inherently no resolution is lost and and it could be in theory brighter. Sadly it's x10 to x20 too slow for an ereader and may not be very high resolution. It's from 2016 so now nearly EIGHT years old.
Triton was abandoned years agg in favour of Kaleido, which is "better" on average if you don't mind worse colours. Both are simply printed patterns on regular mono eink. The light pipe layer is next. Kaleido has been gradually tweaked. It won't get better, that's physics.
It's taken them years to produce volume of ACeP and anyone that uses it to build an ereader is clueless. One company at least tried. It's only good for signs.
The big growth of eink isn't ereaders, or even Kaleido ereaders, but supermarket price labels, often using the red / black / white eink. They are lower resolution than ereaders, so likely better yield. The larger A5 size panels look like Pearl displays.
The ACeP can only compete for signage where power is an issue or sunlight. LCD, OLED and now 5x brighter QLED (really LCD with quantum dots and blue LED backlight) are winning.
Kaleido is a desperate ploy by smaller ereader makers to carve a niche. There is a bigger more secure niche for mono eink. The coiour eink based on Kaleido is a dead end and it doesn't look like ACeP will ever suit ereaders.
The great thing about mono eink with the front light off is that the "colour temperature" of the panel perfectly matches ambient because it's 100% reflected ambient light. Kaleido can't do that. A decent matt surface oled or lcd will beat Kaleido if the brightness is properly adjusted and is nearly as good as mono eink with the front light off. It's just as good or better when you have to use the eink front light due to lack of ambient light (power cut or camping). Battery used to be an issue for phones / tablets but isn't so much now, especually wiith "power banks".
I was looking at designing a product using eink in 2007. I played with a Sony eInk in Ireland a year before the Kindle was released.
We had great hopes for the Qualcomm Mirasol, invented in 2004, by 2007. By 2012 it was dead. One model of ereader sold by two brands in China that didn't live up to Qualcomm hype.
The future of colour isn't even OLED, it's "Crystal LED" (real LEDs, the OLED are electroluminescent dots with phosphors) and QLED (green and red emitting quantum dots powered by blue light on an LCD).
I got a matt OLED phone just today and it beats my 5″ and 4.7″ eink ereaders for paper like quality, but I'll stick with the 8″ Sage for regular novels.