CLEARink, latest news

[Matilo]

Another video:

[mdp]

Originally Posted by Matilo

Another video: https://youtu.be/uZeA5w6y8EY

Nice. I think I see some tinting according to camera orientation.
I would like to see some close-up high res pictures, though.
(Actually, I would like to see it in action directly.)

Matilo, you can embed the video in your post with the following syntax,
{YOUTUBE}uZeA5w6y8EY{/YOUTUBE}
replacing the curly brackets with square ones.

[Matilo]

Originally Posted by mdp

...

Matilo, you can embed the video in your post with the following syntax,
{YOUTUBE}uZeA5w6y8EY{/YOUTUBE}
replacing the curly brackets with square ones.

Thank you!

[Matilo]

[PorcupineLTD]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjJ2-cdhwMQ

Coming to market mid 2020, an 8 inch version is also in development for a customer. Higher resolution, more colors, better contrast, better display drivers, better frontlight and touch also in development.

[underscore]

Originally Posted by PorcupineLTD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjJ2-cdhwMQ

Coming to market mid 2020, an 8 inch version is also in development for a customer. Higher resolution, more colors, better contrast, better display drivers, better frontlight and touch also in development.

those added demos spread in the video are *awesome*

[mdp]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

That's odd. The contrast ratio for the B/W version is the same as for the colour version. I don't think that can be right. It ought to be higher. I wonder if their 'greyscale' display is just their colour display being driven as greyscale.

(I'd have expected the B&W version to be 454ppi and better than 1:20 contrast ratio.)

Originally Posted by PorcupineLTD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjJ2-cdhwMQ

This is already worth noting out of the new interviews:
it seems that the B/W is akin to an emulation of the EPD tech as we know it, through lowering the framerate and (maybe? Why a forced B/W is not clear) optimized subpixel control, to achieve an even greater power efficiency. The displays can go 33fps, but reduced framerate decreases power consumption. Which would confirm they are close to purely bistable displays - pixel status change has an impacting cost.
Which also suggests that the final resolution is 227ppi, and the subpixel one 454dpi. The grayscale mode is their colour display being driven as greyscale with a lower framerate.
There is no increase in contrast ratio, because the filter is still there.

The only thing we have done in the black and white mode - and we don't even have to do that to realize the black and white content - all we're doing is, to get more usage on the single charge, like get it even lower power, we're just reducing the frame rate, and that is what is necessary in those types of applications; but you could get the frame rate up and that'll not impact the contrast or the brightness or any of those. [20:18]

Also: soon after it is made clearer (as expected) that the switch is user controlled:

This particular version is not bistable: the technology has been demonstrated in a bi-stable mode but the company is not developing a bi-stable product at this point [as] the need in the market is video product. It is still significantly lower power [...] If you use it let's say for about 5 hours everyday in a reading mode it will last for a month and if you use it for 5 hours everyday in a video mode it will last for maybe nine or ten days.

[mdp]

I added the chief notes about this new batch of information to follow the parallel thread (which was initiated a few weeks before this one).

Here is the edited transcript of the interviews (for those who do not have the 24mins [et for reference, for practicality etc.]); the flow follows the interviewer's observations:

[Frank Christiaens, Chairman & CEO]

Our improvements have been recognized all over the industry: this year Lenovo became the first major customer to invest in our company, they are now on the board of our company. [...] We have today 300 million US dollars in confirmed commitments, largely for education applications, as this is seen as the future for primary and secondary education. [...] As the technology matures we will go towards high-end markets, such as the ThinkPad - we will go there later.
The social value of this technology is enormous: there's many emerging markets where there is high brightness environments [and] there is a shortage of charging points really, and we can make educational devices that will last one month on a battery charge. [...]
We've always been popular at the display week show but this year we've been totally overwhelmed: triple bookings, quadruple bookings, CTOs of all major companies taking notes... There's many non believers that were converted this week: I think the number of believers has just multiplied by five.
Our current schedule is to bring genuine products in the market in mid 2020.
We're told that ten inch range is what's preferred in education for simple textbooks (the typical e-readers are a little bit too small for textbooks) and that's why the first product will be like a 9.7''. We have one customer who is [?] for an initial 100 million dollars in revenue who wants an 8'' device and we're designing that.
It's basically like a [reflective] LCD with a much longer battery life.
It exceeds anything that's in the market available today. It is dynamically updatable, it has a better contrast ratio than anything you've ever seen.
The team believes in the mission, and the mission is to create a class of displays that stands next to LCD and OLED.
It [also] has a very important social and environmental impact: people are becoming more and more concerned about climate change, [which entails] digitize education. For example, in China for every year nine million trees are cut to print textbooks which are obsolete and out-of-date six months later that's about 715 million kilograms of paper.

[Sri Peruvemba, CMO]

This display has a contrast of 16:1 - we've actually in the lab produce even wider contrast than; 227 dpi product driven by less than 5v; 16 levels of grey. It is what we call a low-power mode: the frame rate has been deliberately reduced so that we can get much more consumption and longer read times. The white state reflectance on this actually is the best in the industry and the contrast also is excellent. So what we could do is put a color filter and create a color version of this display [...]
Because it's so fast that you can do cursive writing, and you can swipe, you can drop down menus - all of these things; particularly the fine lines - because it's a 227 dpi display you can get relatively fine lines on this screen. So you can do cursive writing in pretty much any language that you want.
That is the monochrome version of the product and here's the exact same display, in landscape mode, but the content is in color. So here the intent is to take it into applications where they want color and video.
You're not looking for 16 million colors, this particular display has 4096 colors. It's still very low-power its sunlight-readable (they're trying to mimic the Sun here by shining a lot of light), there is no front light on this particular display (there's obviously no backlight because it's a reflective display technology). It has got all the goodness of a typical traditional e-Paper but it also adds color and video to this. Now the color created on this display is through a CFA and so it is manufactured in a LCD factory and these we have using probably 80..90 percent of all the processes in LCD factory. Therefore it is fairly low cost to manufacture a product like this and it can be brought into a market a little bit sooner than building your own factory and creating exotic processes which this does not have. This is basically and LCD process for the most part.
This demo is less than 30 frames per second, but the company has been able to produce a 33fps product that has been demonstrated more internally than in external environments.
[...] Now you're going to have situations where there's not a lot of light and therefore you would need a front light: here's the front light demo. The nice thing about reflective display technologies like CLEARink 2.0 is that you don't need a very strong front light, you [just] need a very simple front light with very few LEDs to drive it. And because it's front light and not a back light there's not a lot of losses in terms of power efficiency and you only need to use it when there's not enough ambient light.
This particular one is not specifically tuned for CLEARink as yet but that is what is in the process right now; what is nice about this technology is you can tune the front line in such a way that it will take maximum advantage of the TIR structure on top of the display that's the front plane and it makes it much more efficient with that particular feature.
The CLEARink technology uses only one particle: it's got a black particle that will result in black pixels, the white pixel is pretty much given for free - you don't need to move any particles. The light reflects off of the front surface which is a micro structured material that has the total internal reflection (TIR) feature and that's what creates the white pixels so with this combination by introducing a color CFA (Color Filter Array) you're able to get these 4096 colors.
Display technologies are never easy, and this is one of the fastest developments in the display space: the company has used probably one tenth of the amount that typically display companies use to produce a technology and it's been done of much faster than anybody else. Part of the reason is that the technology is fairly simple and it is also a technology that can leverage existing LCD fabs.
Our CTO is looking at a broadening both the number of colors as well as the color gamut in terms of percentage of NTSC the work is going on in that area we will also develop you know more higher resolution displays for certain applications; right now it's at 227 dpi display which is more than ample for education. [...] Outside of this there are non display items that sort of augment, or sort of the ecosystems which is developing unique drivers for the technology, developing newer color filters that is much more tuned to this technology, front lights and touch screens and so on those activities are also ongoing in parallel.
This is the brightest reflector display to have ever been made [...]
The industry has always been looking to replicate a paper-like experience: and something that is perfectly visible outdoors in sunlight and something that consumes as little power as possible because paper doesn't consume any power. However it has many advantages over paper. Today tens of millions of trees are chopped down just to make textbooks, and you don't have that issue here. Second, there are remote parts of the world they're neither teachers nor there are universities you're not able to get information to the children there and this is a way to get very high quality content. It is not going to look as vivid as an [?] display but the idea is - it's very unnatural to shine light in your eyes, nobody ever told you to look at the Sun or look at a bright light, but that is exactly what we're doing when you look at an LCD or OLED screen. This is for children to read for longer periods of time and for adults that want to read or consume content without having to worry about a light shining in your eyes.
There is numerous applications where that feature is very beneficial: the sunlight readability is a very good opportunity for outdoor type applications - whether it is automotive, whether it is signage and so on.
And then there is also this whole aspect of low-power. Imagine carrying a device like this with an [?] display technology: by lunchtime your battery is going to be out, whereas with this you can be having this product on a single charge, that you can use for many days or many weeks or probably in the future a few months.
The only thing we have done in the black and white mode - and we don't even have to do that to realize the black and white content - all we're doing is, to get more usage on the single charge, like get it even lower power, we're just reducing the frame rate, and that is what is necessary in those types of applications; but you could get the frame rate up and that'll not impact the contrast or the brightness or any of those.
Both glossy finish or matte are available depending on the application if you are in a reading environment you would put more like a matte finish - it is very well established, everyday every display technology uses those types of options.
This particular version is not bistable: the technology has been demonstrated in a bi-stable mode but the company is not developing a bi-stable product at this point [as] the need in the market is video product and so it is still significantly lower power [...] If you use it let's say for about 5 hours everyday in a reading mode it will last for a month and if you use it for 5 hours everyday in a video mode it will last for maybe five or ten days.

[FlyHero]

All I care about is when there will be a product available for purchase. It's getting tiring seeing this drag on and on. It's been "right around the corner" for a long time now and no date I have ever seen mentioned has been met.

[leebase]

So now the big market is third world sunny climates with poor access to electricity? That’s a lucrative market just waiting for hundreds of millions of dollars in investment.

[mdp]

Originally Posted by leebase

So now the big market is third world sunny climates with poor access to electricity? That’s a lucrative market just waiting for hundreds of millions of dollars in investment.

Ever since all Countries have education. Let us see the Edu share of GDP list: Marshall Islands, Lesotho, Cuba, Kiribati, Grenada, Timor-Leste, Palau, Denmark, Moldova, Djbouti, Namibia, Botswana, Iceland, Sweden, Comoros, Bolivia, Tuvalu, Barbados, Zimbabwe, Bhutan...

So yes, as long as «impopular measures» fail to reach consensus to «strafe them with machineguns», people get educated.

Of course, this market adds to the share of 400M of the northern Americas and 750M of Europe, of the 40M of Oceania and of the 70M of Arabia, and of all the other 6500M of the 7700M, who just access information beyond academic duties.

In specific, thinking of the market of China (Lenovoland), of the famously numerous 1400M people only less than 200M are in education age primary range, owing to blessed overpopulation containment measures: over half of the total population of the USA.

Incidentally, there is no Third World anymore. Check the Roslings'.

EDIT: I did not even consider the «with poor access to electricity» part: that is, I guess, all countries - unless, I cannot be sure, they installed booths with plugs in the streets of Singapore and Hong Kong, but I am pretty sure that I did not see plugs in the gardens of Monaco. Only yesterday I was cursing Google's priorities because I could not disable battery charge and that was draining my laptop under tethering. I am in a high-GDP country, and we do not have electric plugs in the pastures. One day, maybe, with the right solar-power technology... It is a «sunny climate» here.

Now, when efficiency does not get the recognition it should immediately get, I remember among the rest Berkeley Breathed's "Martha, the fuel is so cheap, as of today, ditch the milk and feed the cat with it".

[mdp]

Originally Posted by hap124

All I care about is when there will be a product available for purchase

Sorry, but in this channel you will bear much more noise.

Originally Posted by hap124

It's been "right around the corner" for a long time now and no date I have ever seen mentioned has been met.

Go there and give a hand... ; )

[leebase]

If the sunny, poor places of the world couldn’t be reached with today’s b&w eink, they aren’t going to be reached with CLEARInk. In other words....there are a LOT of hurdles that have nothing to do with the screen technology....and aren’t going to be solved by screen technology.

B&W is plenty good enough for education of an uneducated populace....if only that were the obstacle that needed solved

[mdp]

Originally Posted by leebase

If the sunny, poor places of the world couldn’t be reached with today’s b&w eink, they aren’t going to be reached with CLEARInk. In other words....there are a LOT of hurdles that have nothing to do with the screen technology....and aren’t going to be solved by screen technology

The cost per display of E-Ink is dramatically higher than that of LCD-related displays.

And current E-Ink technology is suboptimal for interaction (even though it's doable and I probably contributed a lot around this parts on that topic).

And China, very active in new computerized solutions for education, for example, is currently not exactly a «poor places of the world», with a PPP GDP around 17..18k per head. They are convinced they do not want further economical burden with a visually impaired population.

Originally Posted by leebase

B&W is plenty good enough for education of an uneducated populace....

Colour conveys information which is important in data visualization, where B/W is crippling: stats, graphs, maps...

And it is not about «uneducated populace», why should that be: it is still equally about a 12yrs old learning History or Chemistry in Shanghai or Milan or a 21yrs old learning International Law or Algorithms in Bogota or Nairobi. Or any 33 or 121yrs old fellow doing his very normal continuous learning in mobility in LA or Dakar.

Originally Posted by leebase

if only that were the obstacle that needed solved

It's a step.

[Matilo]

@ mdp
Very good!