Every year Charbax uploads at least one YouTube video showing the current state of E Ink with an in-depth video tour of E Ink’s latest products.
This year things are starting to become more interesting again. E Ink has a lot of products branching out into several different markets, and with advances in color E Ink the future of E Ink is looking brighter.
Among some of the more interesting products demoed is a new 42-inch E Ink whiteboard with OCR that can also display PDF files—now that’s one big ereader.
It’s called the RICOH Digital Whiteboard and it’s expected to get released next year.
There’s a quick look at some new Linfiny ereaders that Sony and E Ink co-developed. There’s a 13.3-inch model and a 10.3-inch model, but they didn’t say much about them.
E Ink is planning to release some new JustWrite devices next year for writing and drawing. E Ink has added magnetic powder to the pigment within E Ink microcapsules in order to use a magnetic stylus to move the black and white pixels when writing.
The Ratta Supernotes are shown as well, but between the high price and mediocre specs I don’t see them gaining much ground in English-speaking markets.
They give a closer look at E Ink’s Color ACeP Displays, which appear to be advancing nicely. Hopefully we’ll see another attempt at a color E Ink ereader in the near future.
Impressed.
I love this. I’ve been teased with color I-ink for forever now and eager for the day a color e reader hits shelves.
Exactly. My feeling is that the day a color e-ink tablet hits the market all dedicated e-ink readers will become obsolete overnight. This makes one wonder if e-reader companies know this are would like to see a color e-ink tablet stalled indefinitely.
Unlikely. The cost of color E Ink screens is considerably higher than monochrome E Ink screens. Plus there was a color E Ink ereader released eight years ago and nobody bought it.
This is true. But also, if you think about the reasons so many want color and read on tablets for Comics, Manga, Cookbooks, it may be counterproductive to offer the color e-ink without a considerable upgrade to the hardware to handle the larger files? I could be wrong on that, but I’d think there would need to be several upgrades to keep it reasonable as a product, which would be considerably pricey at first.
Color e-ink is a “cool” but generally unnecessary feature. If I go to any public library in the country, well over 90% of the physical books contain only black ink (mostly text) on white pages. Why should e-readers really need anything else?
Sure, color would be great for reference/school books and magazines, but generally these formats are too large for all but the biggest, most expensive e-readers to display anyway.
@David, for magazines, as you said, reference books, as you said, but also comics, graphics novels, and children’s books.
Again, those additional formats are also too large for anything smaller than an 8″ e-reader. At least for someone with nearly 60 year old eyes. 😉
@David: The idea here is that if you had,say, an apple ipad mini in e-ink you could easily toggle between black and white to read books and color for more exotic applications. Except for niche markets, no one would choose less functionality.
When are the linfiny devices coming out?
No idea. This is the first we’ve seen of them since Linfiny was announced over 2 years ago.