[cmdahler]

You'll probably see some small manufacturers using Mirasol, Liquavista, and Pixel Qi late this year or early next year. It'll be quite a while before you see any big names using new tech like this. It's always the little guys that are willing to take the plunge with the new stuff; big names like Sony and Amazon and Apple have no need to be the first on the market because people buy their products just based on name and the perceived quality that goes with the big name. If those companies started using newer tech, with its associated costs, bugs, and inevitable early-run unreliability and lower quality compared with later production models, they'd lose a good deal of their user base. They'll wait until someone else has worked out the bugs and solved all the mass-market issues, and then they'll flood the market with whatever looks to be the winner of the various technologies and squash the little guys. How long was e-ink available before Sony and Amazon both finally took the plunge? The big guys can afford to wait.

To me, of the various new tech displays I've seen, Mirasol looks like it has the most promise as a dedicated e-reader screen. Liquavista looks like it has a loooong way to go to get the contrast up enough - that washed out screen looks worse than a Sony 900. Pixel Qi is ultimately not going to make it just because of power consumption issues and the fact that it's based on what is now old tech: it's still LCD, and even with the backlighting off, it still has to draw power because it still refreshes the screen at 60Hz. That one will never make it two weeks between charges. Of course, if e-ink can ever get a decent refresh rate and solve their color issues, they could also remain a contender in the field, and because of the familiarity with the underlying tech, that would probably be what the big names in e-readers would stick with.