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.

Jason Perlow: Nook, Kindle and Other Dedicated eReaders Headed the Way of the Dinosaur

Writing on ZDNet, Jason Perlow foretells the mass extinction of the dedicated, unitasking eReader as a class of hardware, with the long-term market moving to the iPad, etc. and also inexpensive Android devices. A very interesting and informed analysis, which starts with a reference to this week's price-slashes for Kindles and Nooks:

Where is that bottom? I don’t know exactly, but I can tell you that it is very close to device manufacturing cost, which is somewhere between $90 and $125.

And unfortunately, Amazon and Barnes & Noble will be unable to sustain a business on the devices when it hits that low, because the price of the most important and expensive component of those Black & White e-ink readers, the Vizplex display, is controlled by a company that exclusively manufactures and owns the rights to the electrophoretic technology used in these devices, E Ink Corporation.

The “give away the razors and sell the blades” model doesn’t work with dedicated e-book readers because Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s customer base is increasingly becoming iPad and iPhone users, and shortly will also be Android phone and tablet users.

In which case, there’s no reason to sell “razors” at all, especially since Android Tablets will be made out of commodity parts, will use cheap LCD display technology and will be far more capable, and many will be priced in the $200-$300 range and well within striking distance of the current price of dedicated e-readers.

Indeed, e-ink may be superior for daytime reading, and at least for the time being, the hardcore reader types, most of which are Boomers, will go out and buy Kindles and Nooks for their content consumption this summer at the beach.

But the Millennials will only be interested in their iPhones, iPads and Droids, with brilliant and sharp color displays, and the App versions of these e-book stores will suit most of these people fine, at least for the remaining ones that still like to read books.

In the next year Vizplex e-Ink will almost certainly be revved to color technology, but for the dedicated reading device, it will be too late.

By then, different competing high-performance transflective LCD displays will be on the scene, manufactured in huge volumes ...