iPad 2 as e-reader: glare still an issue

CNET Reviews: "Later this year, we should start seeing anti-reflective color display technologies such as Mirasol hit the market. These types of displays don't appear to offer quite the color saturation that the iPad 2's display does, but they are viewable in direct sunlight, which is another complaint people have about the iPad and iPad 2: they just aren't as usable as they should be outdoors on a bright day. If you've seen Amazon's sometimes entertaining Kindle ads, you know that outdoor readability is a competitive advantage Amazon likes to tout. You can expect more of those ads."

How E Ink’s Triton Color Displays Work

Gadget Lab | Wired.com: "E Ink’s new Triton line give the company’s displays a long-desired new feature: color. Most of the E Ink team is in Japan this week, demonstrating their new screens in Hanvon’s new e-reader. I spoke by phone with E Ink’s Lawrence Schwartz, who broke down the technology behind the new screens, Triton’s importance for his company, and where their displays fit into the broader ecosystem of readable screens. 'All of our screens have been building towards this,' Schwartz said. 'The contrast and brightness we were able to add to the Pearl’s black-and-white screens, paired with a color filter — that’s what lets us bring color to the display.' Schwartz emphasized that the company’s primary focus is still developing low-power, high-contrast surfaces for reading. 'What’s unique about color in reading,' he added, 'is that while most textual content is still in monochrome, we can introduce color into cover art, children’s books, newspapers, and textbooks — places still in the reading field where color is at a premium.'"

Hanvon to Introduce World’s First Color E-Ink Reader

GizmoCrave: "Chinese company Hanvon has decided to introduce the first device in the world with color display using technology from E-Ink. The company will be launching their dedicated e-Reader equipped with a 10-inch touchscreen in the Chinese markets by 2011 march. The company is likely to announce their plans on Tuesday at the FPD International 2010 trade show in Tokyo."

eReader Color vs. Black & White vs. ...

Nick Bilton, NYTimes.com:

Although it is still unclear if the color version will be a hit, William Lynch, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, said at a news conference Tuesday that the company had sold over 1 million Nooks since the device was introduced last year.

That number seems impressive until you compare it to other devices on the market that have logos of a little apple on the back. The Apple iPad, which costs $500 and up, is clearly not just an e-reader, but a computer, e-reader and Web device all rolled into one, and it has fared extremely well with consumers so far. Apple said in its latest earnings report that it had sold over 7 million iPads in six months. ...

Phil Lubell, vice president of digital reading at Sony Electronics, said in an e-mail that he believed consumers preferred “a crisp, glare-free e-ink screen that provides the most immersive reading experience possible.”

“Barnes & Noble’s new LCD tablet cannot be considered in the same category as a dedicated reading device,” Mr. Lubell said. “We’ve heard overwhelmingly from book lovers interested in e-readers that electronic paper is their No. 1 reason for choosing an electronic reading device.” (Of course, Barnes & Noble’s chief said during his news conference that customers had “asked for a color e-reader.”)

Although Sony declined to offer the exact number of e-readers it had sold to date, a Sony representative said the company had “passed the million-unit milestone a while ago.”

And of course there’s one more e-reader: the Amazon Kindle. Although not the first to enter the marketplace, the Kindle has definitely made one of the largest splashes.

An Amazon representative declined to comment about the company’s future plans for the Kindle, or the number of units the company has sold to date. Analysts believe Amazon has sold between 3 million and 6 million units since the first Kindle was introduced in 2007.

Don’t expect a color version of the scrappy Kindle anytime soon. Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, has repeatedly said that color is “not ready for prime time” when it comes to next-generation e-readers. Mr. Bezos has also said in the past that color Kindles are “multiple years” away.

Holding out for a better color technology could be beneficial for Amazon and Sony, or it could completely backfire. As consumers continue to read more content on color devices that can handle video and deliver a more magazine-like experience, dedicated black-and-white readers could quickly become a niche product. ...

Good Summary of the Current Scene re: Tech for Color eBooks

NYTimes.com:

BLACK-AND-WHITE movies have their film noir appeal, yet it’s glowing color that rules on most consumer displays these days, with one exception: the pages of e-book readers. There, color is still supplied the old-fashioned way — not by filtered pixels, but by readers’ imaginations."

Now that stronghold of austere black letters is crumbling. “We expect companies to market color e-book readers if not by the holidays, then soon after,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst specializing in consumer product strategies at Forrester, the market research company. “And some consumers will definitely opt for them.”

... Major e-reader companies like Amazon.com, which sells the Kindle, and Barnes & Noble, seller of the Nook, have not announced that they are offering color versions, or that they are committed to a specific technology for doing so. But some smaller entrants in the market have said they will be using liquid crystal displays, just as the iPad does.

The Literati by the Sharper Image, for example, has a a full-color LCD and will go on sale in October, priced at about $159. And Pandigital has said that the Novel, its full-color e-reader with an LCD touch screen, will be at retailers this month at a suggested price of about $200.

But LCD displays have disadvantages ... They consume a lot of power, he said, because they need backlighting and because much optical energy is lost as light passes through the polarizers, filters and crystals needed to create color. They are also hard to read outdoors ...
 
Other types of displays may also find a foothold with consumers — particularly low-power, reflective technologies that take advantage of ambient light and are easy to read when outside. The EInk Corporation in Cambridge, Mass., uses this reflective technology for its present product — the black-and-white displays in the Kindle, Nook and other e-readers — and will soon introduce a color version of the technology, said Siram Peruvemba, E Ink’s vice president for global sales and marketing. The technology will probably first be used for textbook illustrations and for cartoons.

The E Ink color displays, which have had many prototypes in the last two years, have not yet found favor with Kindle. “We’ve seen E Ink color displays in the lab and they aren’t ready,” Stephanie Mantello, a senior public relations manager for Kindle at Amazon.com, wrote in an e-mail.

Ken Werner of Nutmeg Consultants in Norwalk, Conn., and a specialist in the display industry, says that he has viewed the E Ink prototypes and that their reflective color technology is worthwhile.

“If you are expecting these reflective color panels to look like an LCD TV or an iPad, you’ll be disappointed,” he said. “They are not going to have that depth and range of color.” But, he said, the displays are valuable because of their low power consumption, thinness and light weight.

E Ink will ship its color displays to device makers in late fall, Mr. Peruvemba said. Hanvon Technology, in Beijing, a maker of e-book readers, will be one of the first customers, he said.

The color filters used in the displays block some of the light, but the loss is offset by an improved ink formulation that yields higher contrast, he said; the color display consumes no more power than previous monochromatic displays.

Reflective color displays from Qualcomm will also be on the market soon, said Jim Cathey, vice president for business development at the Taiwan office of Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, based in San Diego. The company’s color technology, called mirasol, will be shipped to device makers this quarter, and should be available to consumers in the first quarter of next year, he said.

Mirasol dispenses with color filters, as its name suggests — it combines the Spanish words “mira,” for look, and “sol,” for sun, into a play on the English word “mirrors.” The pixels in the display use tiny, mirrorlike elements in optical cavities to selectively reflect ambient red, green or blue light — much as sunlight bounces off a bird’s feathers. The pixels switch fast enough to run video, he said.

Ms. Epps of Forrester also thinks sales of e-book readers, whether in color or black-and-white, will withstand competition from the iPad and others. “We see the market bifurcating into two separate arenas with two different price ranges,” she said — with one group opting for multifunctional slates like the iPad, and the other for e-book readers.

Color is not likely to be the most important lure for those bookish buyers. “When you ask e-book consumers what are the features they care about, it’s not color,” she said. “Market expectations are driving that innovation. Readers care more about features like durability.”

Electrowetting: Not an Android in Diapers

Boston Globe: "... what if an e-book reader could also include color photographs and illustrations, along with color video? This is the promise of a process called electrowetting. It sounds like an android having an accident in a Philip K. Dick novel. But the process, in which electric fields govern the behavior of droplets of colored liquids, might yield brighter reflective screens, wider viewing angles, and faster switching speeds than in current e-paper devices. ... According to engineers at the Nanoelectronics Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati, electrowetting displays produce a higher contrast between text and background than most other e-paper technologies. ... In the spring, a Philips Research Labs spinout called Liquavista (www.liquavista.com) unveiled a development kit that comes with its own 6-inch and 8.5-inch EW displays, for mobile device manufacturers."

E Ink Pearl for the Revised (But Still Doomed "Odd Duck") Kindle DX

The adoption of E Ink Pearl is actually a pretty major leap, taking the Kindle family of products significantly closer to color displays. From Chris Nuttal on the Financial Times Tech Blog:

“We are in the process of building a colour display - our colour display is essentially a monochrome display with a colour filter on top,” Sri Peruvemba, head of E Ink global sales, told me.

This filter reduces the light going into the display, affecting the contrast, which is particularly noticeable on black and white text.

“We had to change the fundamental display so that we had double the contrast. Then, when we put the colour filter on top, the black and white text should look at least as good as the current product - so that’s what drove us to do this.”

E Ink has adjusted the chemistry of its black and white pigments and optimised the display to produce contrast ratios that can be better than the 50 per cent improvement claimed for the DX. ...

(Note: You'll find an excellent summary of the Pearl display technology here.) As PC Magazine observes, however, neither the new screen technology nor the DX price cut are likely to save that specific device:

The Kindle DX, of course, isn't an iPad-style tablet, nor was it designed to be. It's essentially a plus-sized e-reader with a 9.7-inch display; global 3G service for downloading e-books and a limited selection of Web-based content; and a mini-keyboard that's sufficient for limited text entry.

In short, it's a nonconformist struggling to find a niche. Want to read in coach on a cross-country flight? Lounge by the pool and indulge in a trashy bestseller? Take your e-reader to the gym? The smaller devices are a better ergonomic match for these uses. Sure, the Kindle DX has a larger screen, but its bigger form factor can be a disadvantage too. A smaller e-reader is easier to pack. It's lighter too. (Yes, we're talking a few ounces here, but those add up when you're holding a reader for hours at a time.)

Tablet shoppers? Kindle DX isn't on their radar screen. The iPad crowd wants a whiz-bang gadget for apps, games, movies, and music--and that's not the Kindle's thing. Besides, the DX looks old school, even if it isn't. ... Younger customers might think, "Hey, this would be great for my mom..."

Oh no. The stench of uncool.

Kindle DX may ultimately find its niche in vertical markets such as education, where e-textbook readers could prove an affordable alternative to conventional textbooks. (Come to think of it, anything would be more affordable than today's overpriced textbooks.) However, a trial run at Princeton University last year was a bust, with students griping about the DX's slow performance, poor annotation tools, and page-reformatting quirks. ...

DX is dead. Long live the Kindle. Soon to be color.