E Ink has always been an underrated technology. It’s limitations added to the thought that E Ink has always been second-rate compared to newer LED and OLED screens. Some of the benefits of E Ink, however, keep devices like Amazon’s Kindle extremely popular. If you’ve ever read anything on a Kindle vs. an iPad, you know what those benefits are: a low-glare screen which causes virtually no eye strain, and very low power consumption meaning a truly wireless device for reading.
The obvious drawbacks have been: slow-to-load pages, low resolution, and lack of color all stemming from how the technology works. Though we seem to get “color prototypes” yearly, we always seem promised to be just one more year away from a color E Ink display for the masses.
At this year’s CES in Las Vegas, Gizmodo’s Andrew Liszewski writes that this year’s color E Ink prototype brings us one step closer to a real color display E Ink tablet.
The color E Ink displays work similarly to the black and white versions currently used in devices like the Amazon Kindle. But instead of filling the tiny microcapsules that function as an E Ink display’s pixels with just black and white pigments, the color version adds an array of colored pigments that can be activated and combined in multiple passes to slowly build up a full color image.
Gizmodo’s Andrew Liszewski
“slowly build up a full color image.”
And that load time for this wonderful new iteration of E Ink? A few seconds. Still not the instant gratification we’ve come to enjoy from our iPads, but it’s a step in the right direction, and definitely something that Kindle users (and comic book fans) can look forward to seeing in the near future.
Read more at Gizmodo.
