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Comment by patapong | Hacker News Reader

E-ink displays... After seeing the OLPC I expected every display would soon have the same properties of eye-strain-reduction, legibility in the sun, angle indifference and low power consumption. Yet here we are - while there does seem to be a resurgent niche of e-ink enthusiast products it seems like they never broke through to the mainstream except in ebook readers. It's a shame!

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E-ink is slooowwwwly improving, but the tech is so niche that there's nowhere near as much R&D investment as for LCDs/OLEDs/QLEDS/etc.

The biggest recent improvement in e-ink, IMO, is the fast multi-dye tech in the Gallery 3 - it enables a color screen that doesn't destroy contrast/resolution like CFA tech does, and doesn't require 10+ second refresh times like past multi-dye screens did.

I'm hoping that the color-tech in e-notes (e-ink stylus tablets) will give e-ink a broader use-case and drive economy of scale. Also I want a color e-note that's not crappy, because drawing in greyscale really limits your options, especially if you want to draw a sunset.

E-ink displays are all over the place, where they make sense: price tags at stores.

Book-reader devices are alive but very niche, because phone screens got much better.

I've never seen e-ink used to display price tags at stores. What country are you seeing that in?

In the US, best buy uses them. I think I've seen them in some airport shops too.

Whole Foods, too.

It's seem to have finally roughly hit critical mass these days. I imagine it will become somewhat ubiquitous in the next 5 years or so in most of the western world.

Inflation seems to have kicked this into high gear as I'm guessing prices update a whole lot quicker. Plus it's a lot cheaper now to fiddle with dynamic pricing and change stuff day to day based on your metrics.

Netherlands. Almost every major super market chain uses them and dynamically adjusts the prices. Here's an article from 2019 about a major chain intending to change all the price tags that year (Dutch): https://www.emerce.nl/nieuws/albert-heijn-digitaliseert-prij...

E-ink is tied up with patents so there aren’t many organizations that can work on improving it.

Anyone know when important patents will expire?

Nobody knows because the people claiming that patents are slowing down innovation never seem to actually work in that specific industry or have actual detailed knowledge. Almost makes one think they don't actually have real information and are just casuals.

People who work in the industry never talk about specific patents because patents are very vague and if you admit to being aware of something that potentially overlaps your work you're painting a target on your back. If you lose a lawsuit after that admission you're subject to 3x damages, not 1x https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treble_damages

> E-ink is tied up with patents so there aren’t many organizations that can work on improving it.

I find myself forced to repeat myself. Could you give everyone here some verifiable data? Please identify what patent you're talking about. I hope I will get a genuine response from someone who genuinely knows that industry because the last time I asked I just got a patents.google.com/search?q=eink response and a link to some random claim made as an HN comment. It is fun to blame patents. But do you think it might be because physics?

I've been seeing a lot more e-ink pricing "stickers" at stores recently. Best buy in particular.

Seems its slowly catching on.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi was an attempt.

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