I'm back on the road this week and one of my stops is at the offices of E Ink in Cambridge, MA. If you're not familiar with E Ink you're not paying attention... They're the company who created the ultra cool display in your Kindle. They also produce the displays for the Sony Reader and a number of other devices.
I've been told I'll get a glimpse at some next-generation technologies. It's not clear whether I'll be able to share all the information I gather on this visit, but I'll tell you what I can.
I've got a number of questions for the E Ink team and I thought it would be a good idea to ask Kindleville readers if they have some as well. So here's your chance to use me as a messenger. Is there anything you'd like the folks at E Ink to hear about your experience with their display technology? Do you have any questions you'd like me to ask them while I'm there?
If so, you can either send them as a comment to this post or email them to me at jwikert[at]gmail.com.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
What Would You Like to Tell/Ask E Ink?
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11 comments:
What is the largest difficulty you've found in the search to increase the refresh rate of e-ink?
Given the current technologies use of a single color, and contrasting that with the modern means of replicating color via RGB or CMYK, how does E Ink plan to actually make color E Ink displays? Larger, multi-color pixels? Four-layered panels that work on either additive or subtractive blending? Something completely different?
I'd ask if there is any special attention being paid to typography on e-paper devices. Just as there are special considerations for type appearing on LCD/CRT screens, so must there be issues with e-ink. Are there any plans for designing e-ink friendly fonts? Does the screen rendering software do any hinting?
Isn't there some way to do a "smart" page refresh that doesn't require inverting the entire page during each page "turn"?
1. I have a Kindle 2, and your screen frequently has "ghosting" issues where the screen is not entirely refreshed. A second refresh usually fixes this, but at the cost of battery life. Is there any expected improvements on the software side to deal with ghosting, or will I have to wait for the next generation of hardware displays?
2. What is the expected lifetime of one of your displays? 10 years? 100 years?
I second Noam’s questions about type and hinting. In addition, are Eink displays capable of text-anti aliasing of any sort? And are any other methods being used to increase the quality of text rendered by Eink displays?
How much improvement in contrast and resolution is it reasonable to expect in the next two or three years?
I like how Lexar's flash drive has a built-in E-Ink capacity gauge. When plugged into a PC, the drive updates the display to show remaining storage space.
Can the company talk about any other upcoming innovative uses of E-Ink we might not be expecting?
Forgot my third question:
3. What was the underlying cause of the Kindle 2 "fading in sunlight" issue? Was UV light the cause? Was it a manufacturing defect? Will newer E-Ink screens not have this problem? Not all Kindle 2 screens seem to have the problem.
The rather large bezel area around the Kindle 2's screen--is that necessary due to the design of the eink display? Is it that Amazon wouldn't have been able to shrink the amount of real estate around the edges even if they'd wanted to?
Good questions. I'd like to hear them talk about how they are developing the technology to:
1. Display better photographs
2. Display on a bendable plastic surface.
Thanks. Good blog. I link to Kindleville from my blog.
http://www.wordspicturesweb.com
Thanks for all the great questions. I met with E Ink on Monday and plan to write a follow-up Kindleville post on Sunday or Monday summarizing what I learned during my visit.
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