I'm one of the founders, E Ink displays have their display drivers on their glass substrate, meaning you would have a border that on a single key display would be too significant. We went with one large display with only one driving board for the entirety of the keys. This greatly reduced the unit cost to have one large EPD than 80+ small ones.
The contrast on the new displays are much better, the spec for E readers (encarta) displays are more forgiving given the application.
Mini caps would be expensive and also not a good look as each display has an IC driver bonded to the glass substrate so you would have this large border for each key.
I totally would want to get my hands / of fingers on one before selling too.
I'm one of the founders of Visionect (http://www.visionect.com), that focuses on EPD solutions. We offer a bunch of development kits (6"-32") that can be easily productivized (our customers are building bus stops, traffic signs, museum signage, room booking systems,...)
There are no technological limitations in terms of the panel size (backplane technology is practically the same as TFT), but its rather a volume question.
We see this "personal display" theme pop-up quite often on our email, but the pricing is prohibitive (even compared to high quality and high resolution LCD consumer panel) and the refresh rate does impose a lot of limitations on what you can do.
I think that E Ink is best used for displaying information and use cases that benefit from E Ink itself (think high contrast, outdoor scenarios, indoor units that work 24/7, applications where you can power a display with a battery and reduce installation complexity).
The physical connector is unfortunately not an indicator that the hardware and software needed to drive an e-Ink display will be similar to an LCD. Sadly, e-Ink displays require custom drivers to function at all, and in particular partial refresh (needed to get sub-second updates) requires targeting known dirty regions of the display and updating just those…hence the extra ghosting in the higher-speed mode of most ebook readers & etc. that use EPDs.
It is good to hear from someone in the display industry!
Please do provide some evidence. (not a snark)
So often here on HN we hear from experts in some field that common wisdom is wrong but we do not see the evidence. (HFT insiders come to mind)
I have been hearing the lamentations on the consumer side of eink for over 10 years .
My observation is that there is a dearth of competition and innovation in e-ink display industry.
What are the causes? Physics okay, but what else?
My hypothesis is that it is caused by Eink corporation choosing to go after a big slice of a relatively small pie. They are trying to grow this pie very slowly in a controlled matter not willing to sacrifice any market share.
I would love to hear otherwise.
Why are we as consumers only now getting one choice of a 20+ inch eink screen?
Analogy would be Mac:PC in the 1980s and their experiences with compatibles. Both Apple and IBM regretted allowing compatible devices.
There is also Xerox and before-mentioned 3D printing.
So to me it seems E-ink has taken those lessons(closed system good/open bad) to heart.
It's almost certainly a single display. Mini-caps would be expensive and very difficult to build reliably.
The e-ink displays I've seen aren't brilliant at black. It's usually somewhere between 50% to 75% gray. That may well be enough, but I think a lot of people are going to want to see a production sample before buying.
We have working prototypes of smaller displays in house, but I do not think E Ink offers large format solution. There is one caveat with color - the refresh rates are still not quite there yet (we've seen ~5-10s for the 4096 color version), but we've seen considerable improvment recently.
I think it's just a good use-case away. Perhaps we'll see the screens break out in the education space first and then the rest of industry as well, but we're looking at various applications with color and we might be first.
E-ink gets exponentially more expensive with size, and an e-ink panel in this keyboard would have to have a fairly decent resolution and refresh rate, whereas the price tags are usually 1-bit color, low res, and barely have to refresh
Perhaps someone more familiar with the technology can help me understand. Why are e-ink displays either tiny (tablet-sized or smaller) or huge (for digital signage)? I always thought it would be cool to have an x-teen or 20 something inch e-ink monitor to make reading docs, specs, etc. much easier. I realize the refresh rate on these things is pretty low, but I've read accounts of some screens being clocked to around 20hz which may not be enough to watch videos or play games, but it would be ok for reading and scrolling.
OTOH I did see a 30 something inch e-ink development board for sale once and wondered if I could hack one together. It was expensive, but that didn't particularly matter because the company made it clear they wouldn't sell to consumers or hobbyists.
Access to panels is possible, you just need to find the right distributor. But getting the display is just a small part of the story. You need to build your driving electronics and figure out how to drive the display. 3-4 inches are also usually much simpler to drive, you can use a TCON and there's no waveform management, etc...
The fact that this is much harder than it seems (hardware is non-mainstream, access to documentation is limited, support is very hard to get, displays need special driving chips) actually prompted us to provide a development platform for E Ink. It took us years to figure everything out and for somebody wanting to prototype something this is a show stopper.
As far as pricing goes, the 6" panels are priced approachable, while the large displays still need to hit the mass production price points. Obviously if you buy from us in bulk we can provide you much better pricing than a price for a development kit, but E Ink is not cheap.
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