So what I don't get, is there's no shortage of jurisdictions where intellectual property doesn't seem to be worth the paper it's printed on, and really convincing counterfeits flood some well-known markets.
Where are the e-ink knockoffs? What sort of enforcement are these folks doing that nobody else seems to be able to?
The truth is that most real consumers (as apposed to us technologists) don't want e-ink technology. It is monochrome, can't do video, limited interactive due to refresh rate and ghosting... the only real thing it has going for it is low power usage. And that pairs well with applications where you spend a long time staring at the screen, and periodically initiating a compute burst to change the screen contents. In other words, e-readers and note-taking devices.
And consumers are fairly satisfied with devices that get charged once every day, and can take a 15 minute quick-charge to add multiple hours of additional usage to them.
Power consumption is not the only thing going for e-ink. The major win for e-ink IMO is readability in direct sunlight. If it's a nice day outside I have to stay indoors (or at least in shade) in order to do work. The only reason is that I can't see my display well.
As noted, we already have e-ink phones that can do both colour and video[1], while there is some ghosting it's getting to the point of usable. Just need a big display to match it.
But other screen technologies have actually _better_ contrast than eInk in direct sunlight (e.g. reflective LCD, mirror-backed). State-of-the-art eInk technology these days has actually WORSE contrast than in the early days! -- https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2021/01/20/contrast-on-e-i... (proving how much people care about it)
eInk's primary advantages are power (and only if your idle period is long enough; if you have to update it with any frequence you're going to lose pretty soon to a memory LCD); and angles/polarity (specially compared to LCD), which some people also claim produces less headaches.
The company also doesn't exist and only produced 10" 1024x600 screens, which are barely usable. If you know of another usable product, or have anything to back up your claims, please do share.
A hybrid display, both e-ink, and either an OLED layer or an LCD layer sandwiched inside, seems like it could be done. It would be perfect for a tablet or phone format device. Active lit display when necessary, passive reflective display otherwise. It would be very expensive, but is probably already technically feasible today. I do hope something like that comes to the market affordably eventually.
A transflective LCD already does both of these to a very large degree. They're used by many watch manufacturers that prioritize outdoor use (e.g. Garmin) and/or battery life (e.g. Pebble, now defunct).
I've owned two devices with them so far, and quite frankly the newer one works just as well (if not better) than E-Ink outdoors but still has a backlight when necessary. Also, it can display color and smooth motion. The minor downside I see is the lack of an ability to display an image with zero battery consumption, such as on E-Ink, but the consumption is still so low that the transflective LCD watches can last weeks with an always-on display.
With the refresh rate of e-ink, wouldn't the google play store be useless anyway? Most apps would be unbearable (games a non-starter, scrolling a no-no, etc).
The marketing material for the display used in TFA shows a video being played at (almost) acceptable frame rates with little ghosting, for what it’s worth.
The "Patents are Bad!" trope always comes up in any e-ink thread. Not sure why. I love e-ink (I prefer to read books on a kindle), but I think if the demand were there the prices would come down, as you pointed out.
Demand doesn't bring prices down. Or not much anyway.
Everybody would like a Ferrari/Rolex/etc., but they don't get cheaper because of it. In fact, high demand combined with a monopoly means you don't need to lower prices at all. (You lower price to raise demand, but you don't need to if you have strong demand at your current prices).
Competition does lower prices. And with patents competition is impossible. As if for a competitor to make improvements to the process/technology, while still using parts of it (they would still infringe).
> Demand doesn't bring prices down. Or not much anyway.
In my experience in the display industry, the main driver of price is cost and the main driver of cost is volume. If a customer puts in a signed escrowed order for a million displays lilke what Apple did, then processes get scaled, factories get built, and per-unit prices go down.
That my understanding of how 6" matrix E-Ink displays went from costing thousands of dollars per display when they were being built in low volumes of hundreds of displays to costing sub-50 when they were being built for Sony, Amazon and others in volumes of hundreds of thousands of displays. The same is true of the LCD industry and the OLED industry. The same is true of the cellphone industry.
> And with patents competition is impossible
I can't understand what exactly you're talking about. Is this the E-Ink-is-expensive-because-of-patents trope? I've asked before whenever I see this trope on HN, what specific patent are you referring to? Patent thicket? This extraordinary claim requires evidence. I go to SID, never heard anyone claiming this kind of stuff. Tonnes of competition but physics, featureset, costs, volume, customer demand gets in the way. It is why even well funded companies like Liquavista-Amazon and Mirasol-Qualcom didn't make it.
>I can't understand what exactly you're talking about.
I'm talking about exactly this: if a company holds patents on a technology, other companies can't improve the same technology (using parts of the patented tech and improving specific aspects with inventions of their own) without licensing it.
>This extraordinary claim requires evidence.
Nothing extraordinary, and it's not about E-ink being cheap or expensive, it's just an invariant where there are patents.
> if a company holds patents on a technology, other companies can't improve the same technology
You're making a claim equivalent to saying Microsoft holds patents on operating system technologies, other companies can't improve the same technology.
I'm guessing you're not actually involved in the display industry because you chose not to reply with a clearly defined specific problem that is blocked by patents. I actually work in the display industry so I just see the repetition and self-citation claims (OP's article refers to yet another HN throwaway post) on HN as being disappointing.
>You're making a claim equivalent to saying Microsoft holds patents on operating system technologies, other companies can't improve the same technology.
No, I'm stating the fact that other companies can't improve the same exact technology (as defined in the patent).
If Microsoft has patents on aspects X, Y, Z of filesystems, other companies can still make filesystems, even improved ones.
But they can't make a filesystem that also leverages X, Y, Z (or any combination of them) unless they license, and also can't make a filesystem with an improved version of X, Y, or Z lest they infringe on the X, Y, Z pattent.
So this isn't about other companies still being able to make improved eg. OSes in the general sense, but if they can build improved OSes that also leverage the same patented techniques where needed (and they can't).
> I'm stating the fact that other companies can't improve the same exact technology (as defined in the patent).
That's equivalent to saying Samsung can't improve the same exact technology used by AU Optronics. Rightfully so.
> So this isn't about other companies still being able to make improved eg. OSes in the general sense, but if they can build improved OSes that also leverage the same patented techniques where needed (and they can't)
I think I've explained my point clearly enough. I'll wait for you to give some factual evidence as to which patent you believe is giving rise to your statement of "they can't".
:-) I wouldn't describe myself as pro-patent. I would say I'm pro-fair play. If Alice spends years in front of a fume hood developing a new ITO coating or polymer that reduces cost and improves manufacturability of a product, then she deserves to be protected from corporate VP Big Bob getting his engineer to just reverse engineer Alice's work. If you agree that Alice's work deserves some protection for some period of time, then we both share the same concept of right/wrong. Whether patents are the best way, and how they can be made more effective and less vulnerable to turkeys and vultures, is a discussion we could have in good faith. But at the very least we would need to base the discussion on facts rather than what I see in some other posts (not alleging you have done this) where they're writing Kiplingesque just-so stories to explain display product pricing while not knowing the difference between ITO and AgNP.
Thanks for taking the time to argue with this person. I withheld--despite the downvote brigade--because I presume he has some other agenda for promoting this story.
Thanks for passive aggresively talking to a third party about me as "this person" and thanking them for the courage to discuss with me.
Thanks for having some persecution syndrome or conspiracy theory about "the downvote brigade" and about me having "some other agenda for promoting this story".
In actually, I don't give a duck about the E-ink industry, but I do dislike the effect patents have in general, and am talking out of general principles about that.
You might be happy with E-ink patents in particular or patens in general. You might also be an E-ink industry insider (wouldn't that make you the one that is more possible to have an "agenda" ot at least a vested interest?), and have far more information that me, a mere e-ink consumer, about the impact of patents there.
You could still respond (or not respond) on a thread about the impact on patents (on e-ink and in general) without being rude and second-guessing the other person.
From what I read, the way eInk conducts their business, it is very difficult to launch new eInk products. This limits the available offerings which means there is no competition to drive the market priced down. I bought a reMarkable 2 because it seems to be perhaps the only device on the market which doesn't require a jailbreak or such to do even the most basic customizations. The only other alternative I have seen so far are DIY projects attaching a raw eInk screen to a Rapberry Pi.
> From what I read, the way eInk conducts their business, it is very difficult to launch new eInk products.
I have not read such claims. What I have read are individual small-scale customers approaching base layer producers like E-Ink and being disappointed after expecting assistance in getting their product ideas to market. That's analogous to a 10,000 unit/month or less customer approaching say a liquid crystal supplier, or AU Optronics and expecting any form of support or assistance. The outcome of such an interaction is pretty much guaranteed. Even the top tier distributors won't talk to you unless you're expected to order at least 100,000 units a year. Anything less and you go through the normal OEM development path of which there's tonnes of partners. You do what everybody else who has a display product idea does, which is go to SID or maybe just CES, and talk to OEM vendors. If you've got an E-Ink product idea, probably somebody like Netronix would be your OEM partner but even they probably won't talk to you unless you're putting down big NRE. That's just how it is. Volume drives the products. You can't have small volume and cheap unless you're reusing some component that someone else has driven the volume for. That's just as true in the display industry as it is in any other tech industry, eg: LCDs, OLEDs, CPUs, memory, sensors, even passives like resistors and capacitors!
Thank you for your comment. I updated the article and did a strikethrough in the sentence about e-ink and patents, 'Correction, this is an unsubstantiated claim.'
This sounds like a chicken or egg argument. Of course you'll give me wholesale pricing on volume in any market. But are product creators scared off when a big part of each unit's cost will go to license the screen technology?
I don't follow. I also don't see how it is different than any other industry be it bricks or CPUs. Buy a few and the per unit price is high. Buy millions and the per unit price is low.
> Of course you'll give me wholesale pricing on volume in any market.
Yes.
> But are product creators scared off when a big part of each unit's cost will go to license the screen technology?
I don't know what you're asking. What does "license e-ink technology" mean specifically? It would be equivalent to asking how much does it cost to license Microsoft technology or Google technology? I hope you can see how the question is unanswerable.
I think it comes up whenever there's the opportunity because patents are legitimately bad. And I think it's the other way around - if prices were low and volumes were high lots of people would make cool marginal products with them.
They apparently buy up any competition to keep the market small. There have been other similar tech promised by startups but they buy them up. Pretty interesting! Infuriating too, of course. But the system is what it is. I'm surprised they can't make more money by cross licensing the tech and just granting royalties. I'm no economics expert though.
> "They apparently buy up any competition to keep the market small."
Which companies / patents did they buy up? I keep seeing this rumor floating around but their Wikipedia article lists exactly one acquisition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink#Acquisition) and a casual Google doesn't show any others.
The PixelQi display spun from the OLPC project was really good and clearly affordable, considering the original target market. Granted, E-ink is superior in many aspects, but I'd settle for a sunlight readable, low power monochrome LCD display. As an added benefit it updates much faster than E-ink.
> The PixelQi display spun from the OLPC project was really good and clearly affordable,
I am curious if you work in the display industry. Do you know what the pricing for PQi displays actually was? Did you actually use a PixelQi display on a daily basis yourself? To be clear, I'm not attempting to be negative, but I actually work in the display industry and found the PixelQi display on the OLPC-XO-1 to be unusable. My perception of the display was one with very low quality color with backlight; and terrible viewing angle and unreadable contrast levels in bright sunlight. It also had low resolution. The XO-1 display I had access to had lots of pixel defects. If I am not mistaken (as I do not know actual pricing that Quanta got for the PixelQi displays) they were more expensive than LCDs and required additional parts that made managing their supply chain overall difficult. Most experts in my industry that I talked to expressed the opinion that it was a reality-distortion field type charismatic executive who managed to convince people at OLPC to try that idea. It was funded by UN and money from developing countries budgets who were excited by the promise of being able to educate their masses. Sadly it looks as if those countries were taken for a ride, rather than benefiting from a genuinely merit based idea.
So I am very interested to hear what details you will share to back up the "really good" and "clearly affordable" parts of your claim. If your claim is true then it would suggest that my whole industry ought to abandon our current design and architectural roadmaps and switch to Jepsen's design! :-D I say that in a humourous context because last I heard in 2019 Jepsen abandoned badmouthing the entire display industry and switched to talking about telepathy and VR.
This is absurd. Not only we have no evidence whatsoever that any patents whatsoever are hampering e-ink in any way, but not only this does not prevent people here on HN from continuously claiming that, but in fact the very TFA's only source for this claim is HN ITSELF!
What's next, people will continue to repeat this bullshit while citing this article as source? Will we go full circle?
Yikes, sorry. There only seems to be a vague notion of supposed “limited market use” for e-ink which means that volume is low and therefore R&D investment is low and so on. Patents are a convenient scapegoat, for lack of something more convincing. I admit my opinion was shaped by the HN peanut gallery.
It seems kind of obvious to me that if it was cheaper people would reach for it more often and find cool uses for it. There’s some more circular logic for you.
When does the patent actually end? I see it noted here that the invention was 1997 and a typical patent is 20 years? What's the missing variable? (I know nothing about patents nor e-ink besides my paperwhite)
It is sad to see that this article itself is literally citing a throwaway HN comment about patents and E-Ink as if it was a fact. I questioned the veracity of that claim and never got a response from the poster.
I'll paste what I last commented about this because I'm already giving up trying to get any form of sane discussion on it.
"
As I have stated, I was looking for evidence or proof for OP's claim about patents and did not find it, nor does OP appear to be able or willing to back up his/her claim. My opinion is that display pricing is driven primarily by volume, and secondarily by a lot of other rapidly fluctuating variables related to ITO/TFT manufacturing costs. I'm sure patents has some effect on the industry, but most likely negligible as I've never heard companies being impacted by it. At least not in my corner of the industry.
To be frank, I believe OP's claim about patents is wrong and is just some kind of worldview that for some reason has caught on recently in HN and is getting repeated without being challenged.
The simplest evidence I can give that volume is the main driver of pricing is to compare EPD 6" matrix display pricing between 2007 where it was 100x more expensive than it is today. Patents haven't changed. Volume has. That was driven by large scale buyers like Sony, Amazon, and others.
