E Ink
E-readers like Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite have nice battery life and are straightforward on the eyes, however they nonetheless have one large shortcoming: They’re solely able to black-and-white output. The E Ink Company, the corporate behind the display screen tech that powers most e-readers, provides colour merchandise, however most of them have suffered from odd colour casts, lengthy refresh instances, and low pixel density.
That might change with the introduction of Gallery 3, a brand new colour E Ink show expertise that guarantees higher colour replica and dramatically quicker web page refresh instances than its predecessor. The primary E Ink Gallery show took two seconds to refresh a web page of black-and-white content material and 10 seconds to refresh a colour web page—that is acceptable should you’re utilizing it for signage, nevertheless it’s an eternity should you’re making an attempt to learn {a magazine} or graphic novel. Gallery 3 guarantees refresh instances of simply 0.5 seconds in its quickest low-quality colour mode or 1.5 seconds in its high-quality colour mode.
Gallery 3’s 300 PPI pixel density can be similar to present black-and-white e-reader screens, and each textual content and pictures will seem visibly sharper than they did on previous-generation 150 PPI screens. Black-and-white content material can refresh in simply 0.35 seconds, and the screens additionally help pen enter for e-readers that allow you to mark up PDFs and different paperwork.
One good thing about Gallery’s “Superior Colour ePaper” (ACeP) expertise in comparison with colour display screen expertise like E Ink’s Kaleido is that it does not use a colour filter array to show colour, eliminating the odd colour forged you possibly can see on Kaleido-based shows. As an alternative, every show pixel can use a mixture of cyan, magenta, yellow, and white e-ink to show totally different colours.
Whereas colour e-readers at present exist, black-and-white e-readers are nonetheless overwhelmingly extra widespread, particularly inside the most well-liked e-reader ecosystems (Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, and Rakuten’s Kobo). The few colour e-readers that exist, just like the PocketBook Color, are usually considerably costlier than even the priciest black-and-white readers.
Aside from their sharpness and quicker refresh charges, E Ink’s demo movies additionally confirmed off foldable and curved variations of Gallery 3 shows. E Ink sells an $800 13.3-inch ACeP test kit for manufacturers, however we’ll want to attend for e-reader producers to announce new merchandise earlier than we all know if (or when) we’ll see Gallery 3 in shopper gadgets.
Ars Technica might earn compensation for gross sales from hyperlinks on this submit via affiliate programs.
