Quote:
Originally Posted by Pajamaman
People have been waiting for color for years. Now it's happening, they are, as you say, pooping on it. Sure, it has some limitations, but this an early iteration of the tech. What do they expect? Perfection from the start? I for one am excited by the development, and my next e-reader will probably be color.
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Maybe some new electronic ink will do better, but all of these colour eink screens are simply incremental variations of passive coloured dye filtering on the current eink technology which reached a plateau in visual quality years ago, with only variations in dpi and over all size and plastic vs glass substrates.
So it's a dead-end niche. Sadly Mirasol and other alternate static colour technologies were killed off by a mix of cost, royalties and over hyped performance.
It might get slightly better, but it's close to the limits of physics for static filters on a greyscale eink screen, not technology.
I've seen a lot of colour display technologies come and go since 1971 when I started seriously studying them. Some get unexpectedly abandoned, like in the 1990s they finally solved how to do the 1970s idea of a beam-indexed single gun CRT instead of shadowmask or trinatron three gun CRTs. The TFT driven LCD panel was the final doom of the CRT. OLED doesn't have the lifetime or cheapness at scale of LCD, as it doesn't use real LEDs, they are electroluminescent dots with phosphor, so wear for two reasons. Real LED panels are ether wall sized or horribly expensive (Sony calls them Crystal LED).
None of the candidates for even mono bistable displays have proven to compete well with eink types. Inherently colour needs to either be R G B bistable opaque cells or possibly Cyan, Yellow and Magenta bistable opaque when colour and transparent when not, with either a mirror or partial mirror and backlight. There is a parallax (viewing angle) issue with layered cells unless they are very thin and the two internal barriers are thin.
Colour film originally used a random R G B dyed starch particle filter (think of tiny coloured balls, mixed and then attached to glass plate with emulsion) on the monochrome film that like Triton and later colour on eink greatly reduced the light. Using Cyan, Yellow and Magenta layers was a massive breakthrough on sensitivity and resolution for colour fil.