Comment by okuntilnow
3 days ago
The contrast improvement is welcome for sure, but it remains to be seen what difference 15% white reflectivity makes.
Previous Kaleido products are fundamentally flawed. I'd hoped they would bin it for something better rather than make incremental improvements. Think it's also debatable what value colour brings unless you are regularly reading full colour magazines, PDFs etc.
> Think it's also debatable what value colour brings unless you are regularly reading full colour magazines, PDFs etc.
A photo frame in your home that rotates through a set of photos. My grandmother had one to help her remember her family, but it was an LCD. A color e-ink one would be so much nicer.
Any sort of information panel/dashboard or even just graphs inside education books. There are e-ink screens with only a couple colors (like black, white, red, and yellow), which lets you do things like "make this graph red when my waterheater is broken" but a full-color display opens up the possibilities considerably! For example, having line graphs with multiple lines.
If it was high refresh rate, I would consider it for a computer display for coding. I could never give up syntax highlighting so I need color.
> A photo frame in your home that rotates through a set of photos.
The e-ink photo frames that do this pretty much all use spectra panels instead of kaleido panels. Kaleido is a grayscale eink panel with a color filter array on top, spectra uses eink cells with up to six different pigments.
Spectra ends up being much brighter/clearer and with much better color fidelity (like nice magazine print vs color newspaper), but the downside is that it can take like 30 seconds to properly refresh the panel. That's unacceptable for a tablet, but fine for a photo frame.
Isn't it gallery not spectra?
50% contrast improvement is significant, but it’s from a base of only around 1:10, so will still be fairly low in absolute terms.
I use a black and white Boox tablet, I absolutely love it. I've had it for almost four years. My workflow includes reviewing documents, I annotate heavily. I wish I had just some yellow or orange for highlighting.
A colleague has the colour version of the same tablet, with a Kaleido 3 screen. It's terrible. It's unusable indoors without the backlight.
I wouldn't say it's terrible at all. With proper lighting it's excellent. I love reading color PDFs on it. In low light, the front light built into the device with variable brightness and warmth works perfectly. I guess it would be annoying if you had a Kaleido 3 color with no front light. You'd probably want to get some kind of clip-on external front light in that case.
I have it and i'd still say it is pretty terrible. Doesn't mean it's not useful (I love reading docs and comics on it), but the contrast is so bad that I have to drive it at full backlight to get something resembling readability on Kaleido 3.
That's not great for battery life.
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If you don't want colour then any discussion about the shortcomings of this tech are moot, as you will use a display with much higher contrast.
Bringing full colour _and_ high refresh rate would move these out of the eBook world into more into every day technology. There's definitely a market for colour eInk monitors, tablets, phones, etc. but the technology just isn't there yet. More and more people are wanting to disconnect from tech or at least minimize its addictiveness and a colour eInk screen would be a great step for people. That way they can still watch youtube, take photos, scroll their apps but the experience will feel less saturated and alluring.
Not sure if you are being facetious, but how would eink displays with the same color vibrancy and refresh rates of conventional displays help "disconnect from tech"?
Not the person you responded to, but basically ereaders are more appliance-like than phones. Being able to put color-requiring documents and textbooks - which tend to require a lot of flipping back and forth, and thus need high 'refresh' rates (BTW e-ink screens don't 'refresh', they just update) - into an ereader let's you go offline more completely.
Obviously ereaders are appliance-like in part because e-ink screens have bad color and update rates, but at least they'd be practical outside in direct sunlight, and it's not like ereaders would suddenly become technically impossible to be appliance-like.
Yeah, Personally I kind of don't want fast refresh rates, that would kind of make it more difficult to disconnect as there would be less friction in scrolling stuff and youtube
I'd love to have a color e-ink reader and have been looking for one for years. Every year some company markets their great new breakthrough display tech. Every year the improvements turn out to be minimal when you actually hold the device in your hands. So I've given up waiting and being excited about announcements. If a decent color e-ink exists one day I'll hear about it by word of mouth.
I am regularly reading comics and colored PDFs; the value of color e-ink is definitely not up for debate for me.
There's no question that there's room for improvement! But if you're only reading prose or black & white documents, you'd be better served by a black & white screen. Which is not cause to say that a useful, functional technology is "fundamentally flawed".
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