Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisHistorian76
How far do you all think we are from a color e-ink tablet that's advanced enough to make watching a movie a pretty good experience? Is it even a reasonable expectation (at a price point that's not thousands of dollars)?
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No closer than mirasol, announced maybe 2008. Two Chinese booksellers used the same ereader with the panel. It's dead. A bistable mems device like Mirasol (but colour was poor) is best chance for video.
Basically a mechanical display (other than mem based) that maintains state with no power (all kinds of colour eink are) is going to be slow.
One kind of colour eink is simply the mono panel with a colour filter. You inherently lose mono resolution and brightness and contrast. Due to the 14 shades, white and black, there are less than 4096 shades/colours. Various Triton and Kaleido models. Colour is either 1/3 by 1 of mono panel or 1/2 by 1/2 resolution of mono panel.
There are also eink with white/ black /red for price labels. They seem to be quite low resolution. Now in Lidl, Aldi and Centra here.
The "Gallery Advanced Colour Electronic Paper" does use Cyan, Yellow and Magenta in each cell so has more colours and is brighter, but is even slower. About 1.5 seconds for full refresh. Signage, though one optimistic outfit is trying to make an ereader (nicer comics & graphic novels and picture books if the screen was 11" to 14").
We'll see less stressful to watch LCD, OLED and QLED (really LCD with quantum dots for red and green) sooner. My LG 23" 4K LCD is no more tiring than eink, and better even for mono. Then the only advantage of eink will be low power consumption when reading text. The colour eink has much higher consumption in practise than mono due to more often page turns with comics (those eat power) and much higher frontlight consumption. I don't actually use my front light much.
So colour eink is a niche now, and IMO likely to remain so.