Color E-Book Displays Coming From E Ink Next Year 219
waderoush writes "E Ink, which makes the monochrome electrophoretic screens used in the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Reader line, and other e-readers, is gearing up to supply manufacturers with the first color versions of its displays by early next year, according to an Xconomy interview with T.H. Peng, a vice president with Taiwan's Prime View International, which bought E Ink last year. Peng argues that E Ink has nothing to fear from the e-book apps on the Apple iPad and other devices with color LCDs, which, in his view, produce more eye strain and aren't as suitable for digital reading. Nonetheless, the company says its first color screens in 2011 will have newspaper-quality color, followed within a couple of years by improved versions that can handle magazine-style content."
Cool, I'll wait for the magazine quality ones. (Score:4, Interesting)
Bendable (Score:3, Interesting)
A few years ago I saw a demonstration by Philips on TV of a bendable e-ink screen. I think bendability is more important than colour. If the screen is bendable it can behave more like a real book.
Still not convinced about e-ink (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm beginning to wonder whether the difference is actually Mac vs PC and the font rendering [codinghorror.com] technologies. I use a Mac all day, reading text on LCDs, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. Perhaps it's because the fonts look nicer (yeah, I know, it's an opinion, not a fact) to my eye on the Mac. I've lost count of the number of times I've spent days poring over PDFs and somehow managed to not notice this 'eye strain' that LCDs apparently cause. I actually *prefer* to read documents on the screen rather than printed out on paper...
I'm also pretty convinced I'd get a lot more wound up over the slow refresh of the e-ink displays than the supposed eyestrain from LCDs...
Simon.
Comics (Score:4, Interesting)
This is now the ideal platform for comics. If content is moved to this format, you won't have to deal with horrible collectors if you want to read back issues.
Re:Comics (Score:4, Interesting)
s/comics/porn/g
Another Reason to wait (Score:3, Interesting)
Eye strain my hair ass (Score:5, Interesting)
LCD's aren't suitable for digital reading? You mean the LCD's I read off of 10 hours a day at work are completely unacceptable for reading now? I have a Kindle which uses the wonderful to read e-ink display and the low contrast, washed out grey text on lighter grey background, with no backlighting, slow page draws, and previous page ghosting, is NOT a superior reading experience to a decent LCD. Not even close. To claim otherwise is just bald faced LYING.
I do a LOT of ebook reading on my iphone, and on my kindle, so I actually do know the difference. e-ink displays excel in battery life and that is the ONLY category they are better than modern LCD
Re:Cool, I'll wait for the magazine quality ones. (Score:3, Interesting)
DVDs for example might not have been, or have gotten, as big as they are now if it wasn't for the people that went out and spent thousands of dollars on the original players and hundreds on the original DVDs.
DVDs were substantially better than VCR tapes.
On the other hand, e-ink vs LCD, a big "eh".
Re:I've got a better idea (Score:2, Interesting)
And when they're $125-150, you'll sit there demanding that they be $100 instead. Some people can never be pleased, and you very clearly seem to be one of them.
You mock, but this idea is one of the basic foundations of economics.
Re:Still not convinced about e-ink (Score:3, Interesting)
After an hour? No. After 12 hours a day, 5 days a week? Yes. If I've been sitting in front of a computer screen for several hours and close my eyes I can feel the muscles unwinding. It's not something I'm conciously away of until I look away from the screen, but the muscles of and around my eyes are constantly tense when reading off a monitor.
Visit an eye doctor / optometrist please. Seriously. People with healthy eyes don't have that problem. The problem is inside your eyeballs, not the monitors display technology.
You can wait, like my grandma did, of course she's blind in one eye now. Or you can get it taken care of before you're permanently disabled. Annoying as starting glaucoma eyedrops might be, it beats the hell out of blindness.
I'm serious, stop posting to slashdot about how wonderful e-ink would be, and fix yer eyes. Once you're blind, e-ink vs LCD vs CRT is all pretty irrelevant.
Re:Bendable (Score:1, Interesting)
I think any real reader would be insulted by what you said. What matters is the text, not the smell of the physical media or anything so superficial. Among the things that I really like about ebook readers is the possibility of zooming, my mother was complaining yesterday that she couldn't read a book because the font was too small, and my grandfather won't be able to read due to sight problems for the rest of his life, if only there was a way to enlarge any text...
That said, I'd really like a reader with a leather cover, perhaps with a wooden bezel, but that's just golden (ok, wooden/leather) lining, not the main point of a book at all!
Re:Still not convinced about e-ink (Score:3, Interesting)