Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “E Ink was the next big thing. Is it finally ready?”.
Iink has come a long way from the earliest e-readers of the as to a huge array of devices in every major category and soon maybe to cars, dresses, robot pets and more there’s never been a better time to nerd out over eink Tech. But can it actually replace mainstream displays and do we even want it to first, a PSA eink is actually the name of the company that originated this Tech and Remains the dominant player. The generic term, for it is electronic paper. It’S like a Kleenex versus tissue kind of thing. Anyway.
Iink was born out of the MIT media lab and spun out as a private company in 1997. Every we were going to take over the world we’re going to do everything all by ourselves and it was going to be. You know the biggest company in history. Then the uhom crash happened and money was a little bit harder that that’s Tim, O Ali he’s responsible for overseeing I in’s North American Business and has been with the company since 2000. He says that the first 10 years were slow, goinging iink tech first found its way into a Sony e-Reader in 2004, but it was 2007 that put them on the map when the product was launched in the US Sony and Amazon Kindle that sort of had the Magic and the next 5 years were 300 % growth year over year over year.
It’S easy to understand why the Kindle took off books take up a lot of space in your house. This doesn’t it’s cheaper than your phone and the battery lasts for weeks. Maybe even months and a lot of these benefits have to do with how these displays work after the break we go microscopic thanks. Victoria eink has the potential to completely change up how we work from anywhere in the world tomorrow, but metaphor, work is already creating new ways to connect and work. Today, mixed in virtual reality helps your workers feel more connected Ed, which in turn Fosters Better Learning and creative experiences. For example, in an immersive environment, an architect cannot only walk through a building they designed, but they can also bring colleagues along way and take feedback all without ever actually taking a step on site. Now. Meta doesn’t influence our editorial videos, but they do help us make important videos like this possible all right back to the team. An eink panel basically takes thousands of microcapsules and sticks them into a thin layer inside each micro. Capsule are a bunch of negatively charged white particles and positive black particles all floating in a clear fluid. You produce an image by applying an electric field to each capsule.
A positive electric field will move the black particles to the top of the capsule. The part you see a negative field will do the opposite. Do that independently to thousands of capsules at once, and you can build whatever image you want on screen. The comparison that lots of folks use.
Is this a magnet dooodle and that’s apt. You can see the little hexes that contain magnet filings and they get pulled up to the surface when you use the stylus eing screens are just a lot denser. Needless to say, this is a whole lot, different from the way, a grid of pixels lights up in a traditional display.
So in an electronic paper display, we are physically moving particles up and down it’s not a long distance, but it’s physically moving something and then the trick is when it gets to its destination. We want to be able to unplug the display and effectively keep that image forever. There are a lot of benefit to this method.
For starters, it’s not pushing light into your eyes, like other displays, it’s actually reflecting the light. That’S around you, that’s part of why e in looks so different is easier on the eyes and looks good at any angle and because you only need power to change the display. Well, that’s why you rarely need to charge a Kindle, but there are trade-offs.
Physically moving particles around liquid makes refreshing the screen a slow and strange process compared to LEDs. Contrast was tricky to achieve too for nice, sharp, blacks and whites. You need all the particles in these micr capsules to behave.
Otherwise you get muddy Grays. You also need them to be densely packed together, though not too densely you can imagine. If you filled up your container with a lot of pigment, it wouldn’t move, it would be stuck it’d, be like a rain stick that was completely full.
You turn it over. It makes no sound so now you can see why eink first flourish with e-readers, it’s the perfect device for this Tech. It’S also why you see in in a lot of signage, at grocery stores, bus stops places where you need to consistently update information, but in a power efficient way, that’s viewable from multiple angles.
That’S neat! I in’s got its little niche. That’S that right, maybe not since the mids iink, has been charging ahead with improvements to its signature. Tack.
Just look at how the Kindle alone has changed over 15 years. The the update time is about 3 to four times faster. The contrast ratio is about 3 to four times higher, and the cost is probably about 5 to S times lower.
So there’s been a lot of a democratization of being able to bring that kind of access to everybody and Beyond the Kindle. Eink and other companies have made huge strides in adding color a very tough nut to crack, so we have got a canyan magenta, yellow white system. So that’s four particles that are shuffled like a card deck in order to get the right color and they used to teach classes. This cannot be done. It is not physically possible and when we started demonstrating it, it was surprising to many people, don’t bet against the scientists. They’Re pretty good.
All those advancements are sparking the imaginations of Hardware companies. Suddenly eink isn’t confined to e-readers. We can explore how it works on different kinds of gadgets, and it’s not bad.
Really. There are e in monitors from Onyx books and dasung. The light phone 2 is an iink phone Pebble paved the way for an eink, Smartwatch and fossil has since picked up that torch with his own hybrid we’ve got the remarkable for taking notes.
Books is currently killing it with color e in tablets, there’s also pocketbook color and more Kindles than I can count on two hands. This is a CO2 monitor that uses eink cute and, if eink has their way, this could just be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to form factors and surfaces. At CES, 2023 BMW showed off an actual color changing car. Using this exact Tech and in has found its way into a bunch of other Concepts like clothing furniture and this robot dog, but as cool as all that stuff is, can an iink display ever really compete with your phone. Just take a look at scrolling on the Onyx books, Tab mini C sure you can see a little ghosting and the colors aren’t as Punchy as it would be. On my phone. That’S said It reminds me of newspapers and that has a certain track arm to it. Look at it, you could even watch a YouTube. Video on some eink displays.
It’S obviously not great, but then again Tim says: that’s really setting eink up for failure. We’Ve shown 30 to 60 frames per. Second, it’s not nearly as good as an OLED, though.
So while we can do some of the speeds, we can’t do the quality that you’re, seeing with OLED at those speeds, and we don’t have the low power Advantage anymore either, because we don’t have it sitting still when it’s not updating. If I was going to watch YouTube, I would probably do it on my phone, so maybe the point isn’t to replace all screens and surfaces, just the ones that make sense in the case of electronic signs, traditional screens guzzle up a lot of power which ultimately isn’t Great for light pollution, electricity bills or the grid switching to eink might be a Greener solution outside of that, eink can also be applied to surfaces in a way that foldable oleds are either just too fragile or just not suited for things like your kitchen appliances, maybe You change the color scheme based on an event you’re having not something you need, but we all have favorite colors right. Why it’s purple! Look! There’S! No doubt that smartphones have changed the way that we interact with screens and not always in positive ways being online.
All the time can be distracting notification. Anxiety is real and not to mention it’s not doing any favors for your eyes. Well, most of us can’t help but covet the latest and greatest for some there’s a deep desire to bridge the intentionality of analog gadgets with the needs of the modern world. It’S easy to think that we need one, maybe two gadgets to do everything and to do everything well, but I is a good counterargument and a pitch for alternative Technologies, even when something better already exists. The winning argument to me, or the winning discussion to me, has really been around this 9 to 13 hours per day in front of a screen.
There’S zero chance that that’s going to convert to allink this way like we’re not giving up our TVs, we’re not giving up our computers, we’re not giving up our phones, it’s not happening, and so we need to recognize the world that we live in and understand the Opportunities that we have in that [ Applause ] world, you know why they chose me to host this video cuz. I have real ink in my arms. You do you know how much this this this hurt. This really hurt. .