To be clear, the displays are not created by Amazon / Lab126. Instead, they're a product of Eink Holdings, Inc.
From what I remember, most of the screen refresh algorithms etc are Eink IP. And by the way, the cost of the display module alone was eye-watering, especially when compared with LCD displays...
With e-ink, you can drive it faster, at the expense of massive power consumption or terrible ghosting / artifacting. You're not going to get the 6 weeks of use out of a battery doing that.
For reading a book, smudges / ghosting sucks, so they optimize for full screen refreshes just often enough to clear that up (that's when the screen goes black then white, followed by the update).
It's kind of a physics based fundamental limitation -- the display is closer to a mechanical display of old than an LCD.
The kindle is a product that does one thing well: display static text in any lighting condition with a similar quality to the printed page.
> Instead, they're a product of Eink Holdings, Inc. From what I remember, most of the screen refresh algorithms etc are Eink IP. And by the way, the cost of the display module alone was eye-watering
Layman here, but what you describe sounds very much like innovation held back by patents:
At the core, it’s really promising tech with actual major advantages over LCDs with applications already in many domains and possibly many more in the future; all you’d need really is incremental improvements, similar to the journey of LCD. Remember the shitty TFT(?) monitors from 20 years ago? Ghosting, low resolution, delay, low contrast, backlight bleeding, etc.
If we hypothetically had 20 companies competing the traditional way, throwing international manufacturing and material science know-how on these bad boys, I’d bet $100 that we’d see massive gains in ability at a fraction of marginal cost – from incrementalism alone – way before you reach physical limitations. And with a bit of luck, there might be a breakthrough in the core tech as well.
> It's kind of a physics based fundamental limitation -- the display is closer to a mechanical display of old than an LCD.
I hear you. But brilliant people have been wrong about these statements in all kinds of areas before. Could you share more detailed what those hard limitations might be?
>Layman here, but what you describe sounds very much like innovation held back by patents
It's not patents, it's economy of scale: LCDs ship billions per quarter and are used in phones/watches/laptops/PC monitors/TVs/car-dashes/coffee-machines/fridges/kiosks/etc etc etc, whereas e-ink screens are used in e-readers, supermarket tags, e-notes (stylus tablets), and basically nothing else.
When LCDs ship orders of magnitude more SKUs, they inevitably have lower costs. That's just economics.
Besides which, Amazon ships Kindles at-cost, there's no way they'd be price-gouged - if E-Ink tried to screw them then they'd buy E-Ink Corp. It wouldn't even be the first passive display company they bought. See: LiquaVista.
>Could you share more detailed what those hard limitations might be?
The ink in the e-ink needs to be shuffled up and down with each refresh, but if they're pushed too quickly then they pound the capsule they're in and damage it, or get permanently stuck. Either will break the display. And it's powder not a solid object, so the display needs to move all the ink, down, or you'll have ghosting.
> Besides which, Amazon ships Kindles at-cost, there's no way they'd be price-gouged - if E-Ink tried to screw them then they'd buy E-Ink Corp. It wouldn't even be the first passive display company they bought. See: LiquaVista.
Imagine you own E-Ink Corp. You know Amazon needs your screens. You can sell them the screens or you can sell them the company but you can price-gouge them either way. (Of course E-Ink Corp is a stock corporation. The ability to price-gouge amazon is priced in. There's no reason to assume Amazon would save money by buying the company.)
E-Ink has patents specifically on Microencapsulated Electrophoretic Displays, not on passive displays in general. Amazon doesn't need E-Ink, it's just their first preference. I phrased it poorly.
AFAIK manufacturing e-ink displays is still difficult.
I also have worked with e-ink displays for hobby projects and you’re flipping tiny balls of ink. Unfortunately e-ink displays are extremely slow and it only gets worse if you want colors or anything you might want in a display. E-ink displays look cool and sound cool but really suck to work with.
There are high tech eInk devices that can refresh much faster than a Kindle and that you can buy right now, but any eInk discussion on Hacker News lives in a parallel universe where those devices should never be mentioned and we should pretend that the technology is where it was 10 years ago.
With the rapid rate of development recently, I would expect eInk displays to break the "magic" 24 fps barrier in 2025 and hit the mainstream in a major way. Considering that offices worldwide have been constructed to block out sunlight to accommodate display use, this tech has the potential to change everything.
IIRC that's not the e-ink screen itself refreshing faster, it's a different display driver (hardware! not a driver like radeonsi) configuration. Having the extra chip is expensive, which is a cardinal sin in a loss-leader device that basically everyone just looks for the cheapest model of anyway.
Unless you mean stylus-drawing is higher refresh, which is completely different tech as it's driven by the stylus and can't refresh that fast without the stylus at that specific point.
Anyone seriously claiming e-ink screens can hit 24FPS (the whole screen, not refreshing individual pixels separately for an interlaced illusion of higher framerate) is simply ignorant. You're talking about a whole order of magnitude difference, when the core problem is a straightforward fight against physics.
Look into if you have some kind of problem if you cannot even talk about something such as eink displays without calling other people names. What's up with that?
The special chips enable the eink display to have a better refresh rate, but it is still the eink displaying with the faster refresh rate.
Current cutting edge is at 14fps meaning 24fps is not impossible.
People almost never use the whole screen at once. Not when typing, not when moving a cursor. And not even when watching video, because modern compression formats update the parts that are moving.
And the laws of physics do not stop anything from moving more than 14 times per second, as you might know from your car engine or smoothie blender.
> the laws of physics do not stop anything from moving more than 14 times per second,
Sorry, but this is like saying the laws of physics do not stop you from moving from Mars to Earth 14 times per second. In fact, they do. The same is true of moving ink particles within a high density high viscosity physical medium and getting them to stay at a specific location once you're done moving them.
Also "almost never use the whole screen at once" makes no difference since the rate of movement of ink is the same even if you were only trying to change 1 pixel.
>Secondly, if they can do 14RPM with current eink displays
They can't. Anyone claiming otherwise is misrepresenting tricks as actual refresh rate. You can convincingly fake higher refreshes by e.g. refreshing pixels independently, but any given pixel can't be refreshed at 14RPM, not even close.
I've tried to read manga and graphic novels on e-readers which makes EVERY page turn take longer, and it's very clear to me that e-ink latency is a huge problem. Boox is notable for having faster page turns since they're essentially just customised android tablets with an e-ink screen.
To be clear, the displays are not created by Amazon / Lab126. Instead, they're a product of Eink Holdings, Inc.
From what I remember, most of the screen refresh algorithms etc are Eink IP. And by the way, the cost of the display module alone was eye-watering, especially when compared with LCD displays...
With e-ink, you can drive it faster, at the expense of massive power consumption or terrible ghosting / artifacting. You're not going to get the 6 weeks of use out of a battery doing that.
For reading a book, smudges / ghosting sucks, so they optimize for full screen refreshes just often enough to clear that up (that's when the screen goes black then white, followed by the update).
It's kind of a physics based fundamental limitation -- the display is closer to a mechanical display of old than an LCD.
The kindle is a product that does one thing well: display static text in any lighting condition with a similar quality to the printed page.