Quote:
Originally Posted by nar001
What's the difference between the Viziplex Eink and pearl ones?
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Dramatic.
Original Viziplex is very very grey and only four levels, black, dark grey, mid grey and light grey.
Pearl has black, 14 grey levels and nearly white. Without touch or light pipe layer it's nearly as bright as Carta with added capacitive touch and light pipe. Pearl with touch often used IR as that needs no extra screen layers. Capacitive touch has transparent metallic layers which reduce brightness and contrast.
Carta then has higher resolution (up to 300 dpi rather than 167 dpi of 6″ pearl, but the 5″ viziplex and pearl may be 200 dpi) and brighter. The DX (Viziplex) and DXG (Pearl) are 9.7″ and only 150 dpi. Carta also has regal mode which is a faster update for only black and white, and unless there is grey scale image, there is less ghosting. Any grey scale (or colour) image or text on a page results in a slower full page update.
Then Carta 1200 might be integration of capacitive touch rather than a separate panel, which slightly improves brightness and contrast.
Carta 1300 is a further slight improvement.
Spectra is adding red or yellow balls. The earliest eink had a milky white liquid and multiple black balls per cell. The balls either stick to the front (black) or rear (white). Later eink added white balls (Pearl?) and then had much brighter white. The rear is partially mirrored, but you can make out a poor negative image.
Triton simply added R G B stripes to the mono panel like and LCD, but unlike LCD the mono pixels are still square (colour LCD uses slightly less than 1/3 width pixels), so at 167 dpi the horizontal resolution was only 55.7 dpi! Also very dark as the light is attenuated twice unlike LCD which is backlit.
Meanwhile higher resolution LCDs (mono panels) and OLED (which have phosphors and filters as they are not real LEDs) used a 2 x 2 CFA (Colour filter Array) and square pixels. So Eink Corp did a version with more space between the CFA printed dots laid out 2 x 2.
R G
G B
This is Kaleido.
That meant a 227 dpi panel was 113.5 dpi and 300 dpi gave 150 dpi and it was much brighter than Triton. Also you could "pretend" it was mono for a degraded full resolution with artefacts because part of the mono pixel is exposed. It means only pastel colours (washed out) and tertiary colours are poor, darker ones are murky and paler ones are white or grey. Also still too dark for indoor ambient light without the frontlight. Carta1300 mono panels give the "best" yet Kaleido, but still very poor and makes mono almost as poor as Viziplex.
ACeP is a totally different eink technology using Cyan, Yellow, Magenta in the cells subtractively. With none you have white. With all three layers you have black. It's slightly more than 10x as many shades as Kaleido or Triton (as they use 16 levels only givineg 4000+ shades), but still poor compared to LCD, OLED etc and though nearly a decade old, still x10 slower than regular eink (or worse), which is already about 100x slower than anything else.