E-Readers Finally Get a Splash of Color

E Ink, makers of the electrophoretic screens for the Kindle and Nook, are going color

By Amber Williams Posted 02.23.2012 at 10:08 am 4 Comments

Ectaco jetBook Color Claire Benoist

LCD e-readers have one big advantage over e-paper ones: color. But what makes LCD screens so vibrant is also their downfall—the backlight necessary to illuminate pixels adds heft, slashes battery life, and can strain readers’ eyes. LCDs require a protective layer, typically glass, so they suffer from extreme glare in direct light. E Ink’s new Triton e-paper display, which came out in the U.S. this year on the Ectaco jetBook Color, produces 4,096 colors (the same palette as a newspaper) with ambient light alone.

As in E Ink’s monochrome screens (reviews: $80 Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle Fire), a matrix of millions of tiny capsules filled with charged black and white pigments form the basis of the Triton display. Those pigments move up and down in the capsules when current passes under them, and ambient light illuminates whichever pigments are on top. To create the color, engineers laid a 1.9-million-pixel film on top of that layer. Each pixel is divided into quarters of red, green, blue and white. The state of the capsules below determines which colors will reflect light; for example, if monochrome capsules under the red quadrant are white and the rest black, the pixel appears red. Full-color pages refresh in 800 milliseconds or less, and monochrome ones in 120 to 250 milliseconds. In the future, E Ink will produce a display with even faster refresh times, eventually allowing e-paper to play back video.

Screen Size: 9.7 inches
Readable formats: PDF, JPEG, RTF, GIF, TXT, PNG, EPUB
Battery Life: 10,000 page turns
Weight: 19 ounces
Price: $500

Hanvon C18: Courtesy Hanvon

VIBRANT E-PAPER MADE OF GLASS

This year, two companies will launch e-readers with 5.7-inch Qualcomm Mirasol screens (a third launched one last year), which use shifting mechanical elements to reflect ambient light and display colors. Mirasol pixels are made from many microscopic glass elements. Each element consists of a reflective glass pane positioned microns above a movable reflective film. If a charge is applied to the glass, the film moves up to meet it, turning that element black. When the glass and the film are separated, the distance between them determines which light wavelengths will reflect back to the viewer—red, blue or green. The elements’ hues blend together to color each pixel.

Hanvon C18 China only; price not set

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4 Comments

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lawsonrw

02/23/12 at 10:39 am

Wonderful. We can now completely replace books, as soon as FLEXIBLE color-e-ink displays hit the market we'll be replacing the newspaper, but then again, don't most people consume their news on a phone, tablet, or computer anyway?

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marcoreid

02/23/12 at 1:32 pm

I personally won't be replacing my physical books until we actually have a far better way to trade/re-sell/lend them. Between my wife and my daughter and I, we probably go through 200 books a year. Right now the vast majority of those books can only be obtained in e-format by buying them. They range in cost, but on average we're talking about $15 per book. That would thus cost me $3,000 a year, in addition to the price of the reader. As it stands we get the vast majority of those books through borrowing them from friends/family, library lending, and as second-hand copies from places like Half. We probably spent less than $100 last year on the 200 books we got and read. We got about half of that back from reselling the second-hand books we had bought to someone else, who got to enjoy them at low cost, making our effective cost roughly $50 for the year, or $0.25 per book. Why would I want to pay 60 times as much for the same books every year by going electronic? Plus we would either have to buy 3 e-readers with as much as we read, one for each of us to have.

The publishing industry is licking its chops right now with all the e-readers coming out. They know that they can sell books for huge sums with no printing or shipping costs. Those books can almost never be resold or lent out or even given away. So they have a very juicy stream of income, and they surely aren't going to give that away easily by allowing us to lend/borrow/give away those digital books to others.

Anyone who, say, complains about high gas prices should never in a million years (at least right now) buy an e-book if they want to stay consistent in their attempts to save money. But especially those who read a lot of books.

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jakraig

02/23/12 at 4:03 pm

Ebook readers will become so cheap and common place that libraries will be able to keep hundreds or thousands of ebooks on one reader and have thousands of readers on their shelves. When you check out the reader you may want to keep it for years.

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