Onyx is working on a color ereader

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Quoth

All eink is opaque, no matter if a cell is "on" or "off".

The top layer is just a filter. The eink cells are "milky" white liquid with black balls. The cell / pixel is black when the balls are stuck to the front. It's "white" when they are stuck to the back.
So:
1) No transparency as otherwise you'd always see the black balls.
2) The only ways to have colour are
a) A coloured filter. Obviously the underlying eink is 3x resolution in one direction or x2 resolution in both directions.
b) Cells with coloured liquid instead of white. Contrast would be terrible and the resolution in 1/3rd in one direction or 1/2 resolution in both directions compared to a same geometry mono (white only).
c) Coloured balls in the milky white liquid. This has no dark shades unless there are also interspersed normal white & black shades.

The only way to have genuine higher mono resolution (for viewing rather than driving the filter) is an active transparent display of lower resolution that mysteriously works without a colour filter.

ANY colour filter layer on top of any monochrome display reduces the effective visual resolution to that of all the colour elements needed to produce white, so either 1/3rd on one axis, or 1/2 on both axis depending on how the colour is done.

If someone had invented a new display technology, we'd have heard about it ages ago. Some prove to be too expensive or too poor. Mirasol sounded good. Royalties, yield and poor colour compared to hype killed it. One eReader with two brandings for a Chinese and Korean booksellers.

There have been coloured eink for ages using the RGB filters. They need good lighting. I've seen red/black ones but it's not clear how those work. They are sold in small sizes for label applications. Probably labels are Advanced Color ePaper (ACeP) or "E Ink Spectra". I'd be surprised if that can be used to make an ereader.
https://www.eink.com/color-technology.html

Any colour ereader would use "E Ink Triton" (out for ages) or "Print Color ePaper- E Ink Kaleido", both of which are indeed the regular eink with a colour filter, just like LCD.
Poor saturation or else the panel needs too much front lighting. The Kaleido sounds like a printed plastic rather than glass filter but otherwise the same idea as Triton.
Tri= 3, so likely a 3 x 1 colour stripe, thus 300 dpi mono is a 100dpi x 300 dpi for mono or colour.


The "E ink Prism" isn't for displays.

Have read the source articles?
They not using Triton.
They *are* teamed with Kaleida.
Carta is the background so it doesn't have to be transparent and it can't because it has the driver backplane behind it.

What *is* new here is the addressable filter layer which *can't* have so presumably it uses a grid of wires between the pixels to carry the control signals.

This is a new creature: the old stuff you know doesn't apply here.
Because if it did apply it would be as useless as Triton.
It's not LCD, it's not Triton, it's not ACeP.
It's new and it's called Kaleida because of the partnership.
And the exercise in tea leaf reading here is trying to figure out how it works based on the limited info of what it is and the broader info of of what it isn't.

As is, even with this new tech, it might still end up as a niche in a niche; the answer to a question nobody asked. 100 dpi color has some uses and so does 12 bit color but combined, in a world of cheap bright and saturated LCD it might be even as successful as SED.

[jgneff]

Originally Posted by Quoth

3 x 3 is a waste. You only need 3 x 1 or 2 x2 for colour. How the pixels are arranged makes no difference to the 4096.

My guess was based on the following constraints from the articles I've read:

• Text is 300 ppi while color is 100 ppi.
• The number of colors is 4096.
• The color animation I saw in the video was as fast as the "A2" waveform mode pure black and white animation.

[Quoth]

Kaleida is just a plastic version of Triton as far as I can see. It's just a filter. Maybe I'm wrong, but it sounds like hype and that the real resolution is 300 dpi x 100 dpi due to the stripe filter.

How is the filter layer active?

[EInklover]

iFlytek and iReader

https://m.bilibili.com/video/BV14V411r7Pz

[Nelebh]

Originally Posted by EInklover

iFlytek and iReader

https://m.bilibili.com/video/BV14V411r7Pz

Interesting. From what I understand by using Google Lens to translate the conclusions: both has the same RAM (1 GB), the iReader C6 has more vivid colors and runs a more optimized but older Android (7.0). iFlytek C1 is easier to use (thinner?) and with a flat screen, more updated Android (8.1) but worse performance and more app crashes.

The iReader C6 looks very interesting, and it has the best E-Ink color screen I've seen. It is better (more vivid colors) than the Hisense A5C too, as seen here: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV16C4y1H7PA/

I don't know how it would compare to the Hisense A5 Pro CC or the Poke2 Color. And by rooting you can run whatever app you want, anyone knows how they are doing it?

Also in this other video (https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Rz411B73V) the iReader C6 is compared to the Poke2 Color using the video released from Onyx. But without having a real side by side comparison I wouldn't draw any conclusions. The most interesting part is the latest, when the iReader C6 is shown as a PC second screen.

By the way, there isn't any news about the Poke2 Color, right? The Poke2 is on stock again: https://twitter.com/OnyxBoox/status/1273219916087336969

[mdp]

Originally Posted by Quoth

3 x 3 is a waste

Very certainly in theory, but from photos I found around it seems that the tinted parts of the filter only cover a fraction of the film.
Like a BRG/BRG/WWW .
Pls see parallel thread at
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...=329162&page=7
and previous.
It may suggest that they got better results by limiting the tinted areas.

Originally Posted by Quoth

c) Coloured balls in the milky white liquid. This has no dark shades unless there are also interspersed normal white & black shades

K balls among C, M and Y ones give dark shades. Controlling different kinds of balls in the same cell is the breakthrough of ACeP.

EDIT: though it seems that ACeP is a CMYW immersed in a K fluid

Originally Posted by Quoth

I've seen red/black ones but it's not clear how those work

I cannot check sources now (using palm instead of desktop), but I remember a three states system (like pos, neg, neu for K, R, W) which cannot allow the usual 16 shades.

[mdp]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Certain lines will create very strange artefacts if the visual resolution is too low.
Conventional 3 x 1 underlying
R G B R G B
R G B R G B
R G B R G B
R G B R G B
R G B R G B

In fact, I now suppose that the odd tilting filter pattern (skew after three rows) is due to both final effect (probability of artifacts and looks in general) and economy in manufacturing (seeing how imprecise the filter looks - they may have got more precision with longer stripes instead of e.g. dots).

Thoughts after further considerations at
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...=331888&page=2

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by jgneff

Here's my guess: it's using a pure black-and-white 3 × 3 pixel grid at 100 pixels per inch on a 300-pixel-per-inch display, along with a 3-way color filter on top. That would be 2^9 + 2^3 = 2^12 = 4096 colors. The pure black-and-white pixels let the device use its A2 animation mode, which explains why the refresh rate is fast enough even for color animation.

I think we must give you credit for being correct. And Quoth was almost right with the vertical colours. Although the actual pattern is


R B G R B G
R B G R B G
R B G R B G
G R B G R B
G R B G R B
G R B G R B
B G R B G R
B G R B G R
B G R B G R

[pdurrant]

Hmm... any signs of the ONYX color ebook reader launching anytime soon?

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by mdp

Very certainly in theory, but from photos I found around it seems that the tinted parts of the filter only cover a fraction of the film.
Like a BRG/BRG/WWW .

I think one way to to have the same mono resolution and less dark is to only filter half of each pixel. So also you only get pastel shades of colour as EVERY colour is 50% monochrome on each subpixel. So 300 x 300 monochrome but not quite as bright and slight colour fringing on vertical edges and 100 x 300 colour but 50% less saturated than a normal filter, but a lot brighter than old full colour Triton which darkens the screen more.

[leebase]

There are $50 color LCD tablets. Color eInk is NEVER going to be a thing. There just isn’t a market big enough to pay for the development as FOR SURE...any color “eInk” is going to have sucky color and high prices put out by companies that don’t have an ecosystem behind them.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by leebase

There are $50 color LCD tablets. Color eInk is NEVER going to be a thing. There just isn’t a market big enough to pay for the development as FOR SURE...any color “eInk” is going to have sucky color and high prices put out by companies that don’t have an ecosystem behind them.

More or less what I have been saying for the past 8 years.

[leebase]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

More or less what I have been saying for the past 8 years.

Smart man. Handsome too

[Crowriver]

Poke 2 Color on sale from tomorrow.

https://shop.boox.com/products/poke2color

[Question Mark]

Originally Posted by Crowriver

Poke 2 Color on sale from tomorrow.

https://shop.boox.com/products/poke2color

I enjoyed reading the note on the website that says, "*As an emerging technology, the color ePaper with rather low resolution cannot render the same delicate presentation as the black and white display, so it is more suitable for those who are keen on trying new things."

You'd think that they could come up with a better marketing pitch than that.

It will be interesting to see how it compares to the Pocketbook Color device.

However, I'll be waiting until they come out with something in an 8 inch or 10 inch size which has both finger and stylus functionality.