Quote:
Originally Posted by Hrafn
E-Ink [...] the lack of a market, until they themselves created one
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hrafn
Does a viable niche exist between E-Ink and LCD? Maybe. But each improvement on cost, clarity and power consumption on either side shrinks that potential niche just a little bit more.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
I don't think there's a viable niche between E-Ink and LCD. I would expect a better low-power reflective display technology to entirely replace E-Ink displays
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We had an up to dire need for solving the problems patched by this technology, independently of its existence: they [E-Ink] found a market.
And to solve the problem of visualizing data, talking about niches seems to assume that «E-Ink and LCD» are amply satisfactory technologies. They are not.
- LCD is absurd to use: it fights against environmental lighting. Conceptually, we had done better with paper. OLED is already much smarter, preserving the blacks as "off" - the effect is already much more fitting to expectations (and it is probably close to being the after-dusk technology) -, but still falls in the category of the "[we had no better than] torchlights".
- E-Ink's EPD has plentiful limitations: not just the low refresh rate, but also that the amount of energy to change state is substantial.
I am not sure that these technologies still allow linear improvements.
Now, the current evidence of the long-term direction is towards * heightened mobility and the need to access information anytime (so anywhere), and * increased use of video as a format to spread information - while multi-source information remains (on the erudite's desk more books remained open, in the centuries) the paradigm (ALT+TAB, Hypertext). Existing widespread technologies fall short, for either reason.
Natural-light friendly, high refresh, color, efficient smart low power consumption, good visual quality: this is still missed, and this is the goal. Of course, who gets the better placement on this vectors and on the implicit ones (cheap etc.) eats up the rest in function of the intended use.