Today E Ink announced that they’ve found a way to greatly improve the quality of color E Ink displays.
They are calling the new technology “Advanced Color ePaper” or ACeP for short. Basically what it means is they’ve made it so each pixel can produce full color instead of having to use a color filter like previous generations of color E Ink.
This helps make the new ACeP displays appear much brighter and more colorful, while still maintaining the low-power and outdoor readable qualities that E Ink screens are known for.
ACeP screens are able to cover the full color gamut, with the ability to display all eight primary colors down to each individual pixel.
Previous generation of color E Ink screens failed to generate much interest because the colors appeared dull and washed-out, and the added color filter made the screen appear dingy and fuzzier than black-and-white E Ink screens.
Now that they’ve solved that problem with this new advanced color E Ink, there is once again some hope for color E Ink ereaders in the future.
However, that doesn’t appear to be in their plans at the moment. The press release specifically says that digital signage is the target market for these new color screens.
E Ink has some 20-inch ACeP displays with a resolution of 1600 X 2500 (150 ppi). Slashgear posted the video below showing some of the new screens on display at SID’s Display Week. They are indeed quite impressive. It sure would be nice to see them in a 9.7-inch form. 🙂
Hi, Natan,
Doesn’t it seem to be too slow to fill the whole page with a picture? May it take turning pages much slower than it is today in the black and white e-readers?
It does look more like print and not so much like a monitor.
It’s still in proto-type form, with a year of development in, with another couple years to cook? Not bad. 🙂 Hopefully, by next year, they’ll cut down on the refresh time by some. I take it the flashing is probably an artifact of video capture and not as noticeable by eye.
Based only on that little glimpse, it has a special quality… video would look bizarrely unnatural on it… but printed media would look better than the real thing…
I’ve been wanting a color e-ink tablet for a long time.
This is impressive and a step closer to looking like a color magazine. If it’s targeted to signage then it must be expensive to manufacture and would make a color e-book reader more expensive than a comparable sized tablet. Maybe as the technology evolves it will come down the cost curve to become feasible for e-book readers.