The fact that this type of device is virtually inaccessible, short of DIY, is for me a prime example of market failure ever since I learned about transflectives.
Btw I'd opt to replace the "E-INK" in the title with "transflective" assuming HN folks know to tell the two apart.
Mary Lou Jepsen (who created the One Laptop Per Child laptop also developed transflective displays for the laptop, which could switch between backlit color mode and sunlight-readable monochrome mode.
Later her company Pixel Qi even developed a screen with solar panels inside it, to charge the device while it is used outside. Pixel Qi is now defunct.
Today Jepsen is working on Clearwater, a non invasive brain imaging technology (an infrared headband which reconstructs a 3D image from scattered photons), which can be used for brain computer interfaces.
One Laptop Per Child laptop also developed transflective displays for the laptop, which could switch between backlit color mode and sunlight-readable monochrome mode.
In practice, mono mode was just barely readable in bright sunlight, and the colour mode was a grainy mess for anything with fine detail due to the lack of true RGB pixels[1]. I knew someone who had one of those --- it was more of a cute toy than anything actually useful, and that was at the time when tiny "netbooks" were still common.
I had an XO-1 and your description is really selling the display short, it was much more than just barely readable in bright light. Yes resolution was fairly low on the display, but it was first generation technology and the entire laptop cost only $200. OLPC made many questionable decisions, but the screen was good tech. I remember wanting transflective screens in other devices for a long time before finally giving up hope.
Agreed, the screen was one of the best things about the XO-1. Transreflective displays do live on here and there, I have an Amazfit Bip [1] which uses one.
I also have a couple XO-1s and agree, the transflective screens are excellent. My Kindle Paperwhite has a more readable E-ink display, but isn't _that_ much better.
>Later her company Pixel Qi even developed a screen with solar panels inside it, to charge the device while it is used outside.
That's such a pointless gimmick though. Solar panels works best when they track the sun or are at least angled properly. Between the very few times you'd be using your device outside in direct sunlight, and actually having those panels angled towards the sun, you're not going to be charging anything at any reasonable rate. Those panels are completely useless and just add complexity and cost to the design. If you really care, you can buy portable solar chargers real cheap but they are universally mediocre at best.
Why do stupid gimmicks like this? Why not have an efficient device and just charge it from the grid? Or, given that this was made for the developing world, charge it from a generator or a proper solar array or wind turbines ... or the grid (even developing nations will have a grid that functions at least most of the time)
> Why do stupid gimmicks like this? Why not have an efficient device and just charge it from the grid?
I used to have a laptop with dual batteries, so one could swap one battery out with another to have an uninterrupted power supply without having access to the grid. Very few people need an uninterrupted power supply while away from the grid, but some people do. That is why such a design existed. Something like an integrated solar panel may fill a similar niche.
It is also worth noting that a technology should not be dismissed simply because the first iterations appear impractical. If we took that attitude, many of the things we enjoy today simply would not exist. Just think of personal computers from the late 1970's and early 1980's. Few people used them since they were not very practical. On the other hand, that seed of a market both financed the development of the machines we use today and directed the development of the technology towards something we would want to use today. (Put another way: if people did not use that impractical technology in their homes, it likely that computers would remain the tools of large institutions.)
This would have been around 2010, when powering anything with USB was relatively uncommon. Some USB peripherals required a separate power supply or dual USB connections in order to provide enough power. Devices that charged via USB typically provided a special USB power adapter in order to facilitate faster charging.
Even today, dual battery compartments have marginal utility. Since it is built-in, it offers extended battery life without carrying around extra modules. Spare batteries are mildly more convenient to carry around (no extra cables). Mostly though, it enforces user replaceable batteries.
Cost is probably what killed that project, but it's not entirely stupid, although it would certainly be better with a foldable panel at the back of the screen that can be positioned optimally.
A 30x20cm laptop could get at best 12-10W of sun power with a solar panel on its surface.
You could build a useful laptop with the same spec as a smartphone with a standard 4000mA battery and need about a charge a day in normal use.
Since the exposure of your laptop to the sun would be suboptimal, you may only get 4W for say 5h a day, which seems fairly reasonable and is enough to recharge the battery every day.
Even on bad days, you would probably be able to use your laptop half of the time, which could still be a few hours and enough to make a difference to someone with otherwise no access to technology.
I imagine that in places where electricity is scarce, adults might have different priorities than charging kid's laptop. Maybe the idea is that you leave laptop open in sun if the battery dies and it charges without needing access / permission to use power grid / generators?
>I imagine that in places where electricity is scarce
I think that's what most people in the west imagine and that's why this is a gimmick that resonates with well-meaning westerners. Besides the fact that developing world is a diverse place in all aspects (so the the stereotype you're imaging is wrong for the vast majority of the developing world), communication is such an ingrained human need, that communication devices like smart phones are everywhere.
But none of that matters. These panels just do not work well - or at least as well as you can expect given the surface area and whether or not there's enough sunlight. That's why nobody bothers with building them into devices. Besides you can buy little external solar chargers for real cheap. And the external ones are better than the ones built into the devices because you can angle them, and they aren't a failure point you need to worry about (that is, if they die, your device doesn't need to be replaced), and aren't limited to device size. Also, I don't know why you would want your electronics exposed to direct sunlight... Heat is not good for electronics.
Again, I support low-power, energy efficient devices. There is a very real use case for them, and not just for the developing world. But these gimmicks, like building in solar panels into the device, are dumb.
I am married to a teacher and can assure you that even in 'the West' there are kids without personal smartphone and without a single computer/tablet at home.
No idea whether heat aspect is worked around in OLPC somehow by carefully selecting materials used or whatever, my point is that making these laptops self-sufficient would indeed be useful (if at all possible).
Definitely agree. There is a profit incentive to make laptops powerful but there is very little competition at the low end, unfortunately. I solar powered a microcontroller in indoor light just to prove that powering a computer is possible (96mhz is far more capable than even some early 486 PCs that ran Windows) , and not just a calculator. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ztj_MDNRcI
of course, powering a screen would require much more light, but it's not impossible if there was a full system re-development - from low power monochrome displays to light peripherals. Our group hopes to get a terminal to display on an e-ink, which seems doable: https://forum.ei2030.org/t/paperterm-project-definition-and-...
Give them a laptop and put the solar panel on the side? Even in the exact case you're mentioning, they're better as separate devices. (It wasn't done this way because the solar panel would be used for other purposes, but treating the user as hostile is the clearest sign that something has gone terribly wrong in your design process.)
10+ years ago I had a laptop case with solar panels and an outlet. It worked well; could both extend the battery life and charge when not in use. Not mediocre, and I imagine things have improved? There may be better solutions for low grid envs, but this one is viable.
It’s interesting that electronic calculators are basically the only type of devices ever to have successfully powered by integral solar panels.
There are some electronic price tag products, wireless keyboards, decorative keychain tags, etc. that could work on solar only, but even those are rare.
e: Forgot digital wristwatches. They seem to work fine.
I really like the Logitech K700 solar keyboards, with two caveats:
- In a couple of mine, the included battery seems to have lost the ability to keep a charge well before you would expect (i.e. a year). This is a bit of an annoyance in that it is a rechargable button cell, not your run of the mill AA/AAA sized NIMH/Lithium bit.
- The build quality on these as far as sturdiness/etc isn't great. And if it ever gets 'flexed' too much, you wind up with broken traces internally, leading to issues where the juice doesn't flow one way or another unless you flex it back in the right way.
I love them in the office, but at home they just don't handle the use of clumsy roommates.
And it's pretty simple to figure out why it's so for electronic calculators. I had one of these, a modern-ish one though, except that the solar panel was defective and never actually worked. I only noticed after 3 years of use. That's how much the builtin _half-discharged_ coin battery would last... and how useless the solar panel actually is... I would even guess they only put in the solar panel for the look.
You could probably power such a calculator from ambient radiowaves, using a galena crystal...
Yeah, what I mean (and has been better put elsewhere) is that the consumption of your average calculator is so low as to be practically negligible (<1mW?), otherwise capable of running for years on a depleted battery. Which is why they may work from such a small solar panel, but at the same time it says nothing about the solar panel itself.
I was going to mention watches! I love my Casio Tough Solar and wore it daily for five years. It never reported a charge level less than 'High'. If it didn't say on the box that it was solar, the only thing I would have noticed is that the battery never seemed to run down.
The solar charging is probably the biggest feature I'm missing in my smartwatch, but at least it has a (low-power, daylight-readable, always-on) transflective screen.
Good to know, thanks! The price is a bit more than I can justify at the moment though, you weren't kidding about the high-end part. That's worth more than my car!
>It’s interesting that electronic calculators are basically the only type of devices ever to have successfully powered by integral solar panels.
Because they are ultra-low powered devices. If tiny solar cells can power that kind of device, then it can also be powered through kinetic energy (i.e. user's movement) as well ... Or you could spend $5 and put a standard watch-type battery in there which will last you years. So even there solar panels are a bit gimmicky. But ok, do whatever you like.
On a larger scale, there are a lot of flashing LED road signs or radar speed warning signs that aren't connected to the grid. Instead, they are powered by a small solar panel with a battery for at night. Even simple stop signs on wooden 4x4 posts have these.
At least in my area, the speed warning signs tend to get moved to a different location a couple of times a year, and not having to run any wiring probably makes that significantly easier.
The latest version device in question (the OLPC) is ~5W under normal usage and less than 1W when idle.
Im not sure about an integrated solar panel - im not sure i would want to keep my laptop exposed to the sun - but i was able to keep a 2015 macbook charged with a small solar panel while travelling (approx 4 hours a day of heavy usage).
Obv depends on time of year, location, weather, etc.
>10+ years ago I had a laptop case with solar panels and an outlet.
Do you think they would work better if they were built into the laptop screen? Because that's what OP was raving about.
You can get batteries and external solar chargers (they are cheap and come in any size you want) if that's what you want to do. Building them into the device is STUPID. For one thing, you would need to put your device in direct sunlight to charge them ... and heat is not good for electronics. Also, the solar array size will be limited to whatever size your device is, that is: "too small".
No. I think it's a perfectly fine technology ... but it isn't a panacea and it doesn't make sense for everything that people are trying to cram it into. Case in point, attaching solar panels to a smart phone or a laptop screen. I've conceded (somewhat) that if you really want to, it makes far more sense to get external panels and just plug them in.
Many places in my country have no access or reliable access to the grid and kids have to walk many miles to go to school, in this pandemic with the remote schooling this made millions of kids to miss classes or even leave school.
I can think something like this would be very useful for these kids as chargers and solar panels wouldn't last long in the hand of childrens.
This are very harsh words. Do you have evidence to back the claim that the designer did not do proper research?
Perhaps they had reasons to believe that a self-contained device would survive being handled by children, while an external panel would get lost or broken.
Fewer moving parts? How much power does a low powered laptop need while in transflective mode? How much power does a solar panel produce that’s not facing the Sun?
One could cover the front and back of the screen panel on solar panels this way, if it could create a device that’s mostly independent from a grid or extra gadgets to plug in it could be nice. But yeah, maybe an external little solar array would be more flexible.
>How much power does a solar panel produce that’s not facing the Sun?
Nothing.
>But yeah, maybe an external little solar array would be more flexible.
And those little solar mats are mediocre at best. They just don't work very well. They take forever to charge and require strong direct sunlight. But hey, if you want to use them, go ahead. They are still better than having them built into the device.
So it appears modern smartphones have a power consumption of about a Watt (see cousin post). Assuming a transflective display, that laptop could use a similar amount of power. Assuming a 20cm x 30cm charge area and 1000Watt/m2, you need to only capture 1.7% of the energy of the directly incident sunlight [1]. Or assuming your panel has 10% effiency, you need to get 17% of direct sun light light onto the surface. Thats a fair allowance for clouds and weird angles and whatnot.
At a metal-festival in Northern Germany I was at in 2019, there was a guy with a 1-2m² solar mat. It was enough to charge his phone and play music. Doesn’t seem too horrible.
If you have non-utilized surface area / volume in the screen part of your laptop, why not put solar panels in there? Yes, their reception might not be optimal due to angling constraints, but if they're light enough, they might still be useful to have. So you don't know for a fact that it's a gimmick.
Brain computer interfaces will be life changing for about 1% of users, but unbelievably invasive for the rest after Facebook etc gets on board (possibly via oculus?)
> e-ink displays and 3d printing have both convinced me that patents do more harm than good these days.
I work in the display industry. Not for E Ink. But I have no idea what you're talking about. I see this claim about patents on e-ink repeated again and again. I don't know much about 3d printing so I can't confirm. But each time I've seen this patent claim about e-ink, I ask the poster/commenter what specific patent or patents or data they're talking about and thus far every single time they either go silent or get defensive or in rare occasions acknowledge they didn't know about it and just "felt" it was the case. So could you help me out and explain what data convinced you? You can see my comment history to see all my attempts to try to get at what is the actual truth.
FYI, in my experience in the display industry, the main driver of price at scale is the asymptotic cost of components and materials like TFT backplanes, glue, passive layers, coatings, Indium Tin Oxide. Low volumes are what all of E Inks displays except the ones made for Amazon. That matches up with what I see in the prices.
This gets into a chicken and egg argument. You are arguing that the level of demand is leading to the current price point, while complainers about E Ink argue that anti competitive practices lead to higher prices which results in a lower demand.
In a competitive market, both are actually true. The fact that there aren't really any major competitors to E Ink in that market indicates however that there probably is some sort of moat (whether it is IP, or otherwise)and that prices are likely higher than they would be in a more competitive market. There are a lot of signs that there is latent demand in the market and lowered prices would lead to an increase in total market volume.
> The fact that there aren't really any major competitors to E Ink in that market indicates however that there probably is some sort of moat (whether it is IP, or otherwise)and that prices are likely higher than they would be in a more competitive market.
I don't know what exactly you mean in the context of the display industry. What do you mean there aren't any major competitors to E Ink? There's tonnes of display products from lots of different vendors. Are you talking about the electrophoretic display industry specifically? If so, then even there there's competitors like ClearInk but its a niche space with low volumes. FYI, the volumes that E Ink reaches even for what is considered "high volume" by them would be considered unacceptably low volume by LCD manufacturers. Ask yourself a simple question. Are you as a VC going to invest a billion into scaling up an electrophoretic display tech startup that may take 10-30 years or would you rather pump that same money into another internet services? Even Amazon pumped billions into Liquavista and then pulled the plug on it after not being able to scale within the time frame Jeff had given them.
> that prices are likely higher than they would be in a more competitive market.
But how are you substantiating that? Do you have awareness of the costs of materials for electrophoretic panels? Are you aware of yield rates? I actually work in the display industry and I have no actual data on that and I would never be able to estimate even order of magnitude cost without knowing those key numbers. So how are you doing making that price estimation? Your claim is equivalent of looking at a sports car market and saying Ferraris would be cheaper if there were more competitors. I hope my explanation is clear enough to convince you of the fundamental flaws in the arguments being made claiming there is "some sort of moat".
Money Quote: "The Pixel QI license was picked up by John Gilmore, activist, philanthropist, and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has released the patents under the Defensive Patent License."
WHAT patents. ALL these technologies are about 40 years old. There are even mentions in this thread of the Game Boy / Color since they use very similar stuff.
There are few if any patents involved here -- the problem is that there is just no demand. The moment you show someone the flashy backlighted screen he will go for it 100% of the time and ditch everything else (think: there's a reason people "upgrade" their GameBoyAdvance's to a backlight).
Perhaps if you made a storefront directly illuminated by heavy sunlight...
The gameboy (and GBC) screens are very different. They're normal LCD screens with a reflective and scattering layer behind them instead of a backlight. E-ink's technology doesn't apply to them.
Sorry for the confusion, I (as well as the rest of the people who mention it) mean (reflective) LCD overall (since the article is also incorrectly using "e-Ink" ).
Ah, ok. That probably would have been clear to me if I had given your statements the benefit of the strongest argument you could be making. My bad, that's totally on me.
That is _a_ patent, which is expired, but not the only patent, or the lynchpin of IP keeping people from independently making e-ink style screens.
I generally have rule about being courteous to our fellow HNers and not doing something that could be cited as evidence of willful infringement (and triple damages), but I'll forgo it in this one case with the disclaimer I'll have around it in order to help dispel the rumors going around here that somehow patents aren't at issue. There are also other patents.
= = = = = = A C T I V E P A T E N T = = = = = =
Do not look at this patent if you work in the space of computer display technology.
Why? The patent space around e ink is dominated by e ink corp over the last two decades. They're working on better driving methods, color displays, and new material compositions. Anybody entering this field is looking at licensing (expensive if current e ink prices are anything to go by) or navigating all of these recent patents to produce something competitive (good refresh rates, high contrast or color).
>Anybody entering this field is looking at licensing (expensive if current e ink prices are anything to go by)
No, that's a result of low economy of scale. LCDs have a massive market, whereas e.g. big e-ink screens have such a small market they're hand-fitted. You're presupposing your conclusion.
I'm not disputing patents exist. I'm disputing whether they have a noticeable detrimental effect on the e-ink market.
I mean, ARM has a licensing fee (of 1c per CPU), but nobody sane would blame that fee for x86 beating ARM in the desktop world.
>The patent space around e ink is dominated by e ink corp over the last two decades.
I'm not sure what your point here is. Yes, they're putting a ton of money into e-ink R&D. They're patenting everything they come up with, because that's how you monetize your R&D so it's not immediately copied by your competitors without seeing a cent of benefit.
There are companies who have developed alternatives, such as Mirasol. That never took off, despite not needing any e-ink patents. This suggests that e-ink is sufficiently better than all alternatives that it's worth the patent cost - either because those alternatives were impractical, or because the patent fees for e-ink just weren't particularly cumbersome in the first place and the real problem lies elsewhere.
Which brings us back to the central issue:
Do you have any evidence that patents are actually causing problems in the real world, besides "patents exist, problems exist, one must be causing the other"?
3D printers -- both resin and filament-- are everywhere and cheap today.
And there are many great affordable devices with e-Ink--I have several Amazon ebook readers that I use every day.
I'm not sure I was harmed by any patent.
Many of the things we talk about on Hacker News are covered by patents. Why do you want to shred a piece of the U.S. Constitution (assuming you're talking about U.S. patents) over eInk?
I believe that was GP's point - 3D printers are cheap and ubiquitous because a patent on them expired in 2009. Before that they were expensive and had little tooling or support: useless outside large corporations, despite all the technology involved existing for years and years. I don't know the patent situation of e-ink but patent law was incredibly counterproductive in the case of 3D printing.
3D printers aside (I don't know enough to comment), literally everyone I've seen who claims e-ink is held back by patents is either 1) speculating or 2) repeating hearsay and can't provide a source.
Regardless of the issues with patents in general, in the specific context of e-ink it's an unsubstantiated myth until someone provides some hard evidence.
E-ink patent speculation is especially problematic because everyone on HN agrees that patents are a problem, so it sounds truthy and people want to repeat it as an example of the evils of patents.
Everytime "e-ink" comes up here in any context, we see people doing a hit-and-run post about patents, with nothing to back it up. I'm wondering what the real agenda is here. Is there some competitor trying to do some sort of astroturfing?
Is it every time? It is something that I've only noticed about e-ink posts in the last two months or so. Prior to that I've always wondered why they were so expensive. The posts that I've seen regarding e-ink and patents seem to be very persuasive.
But things turned out pretty well in the end? That is the whole point of patents: they expire. You say the tech existing for years and years, but few years is very short time, even 20 years is not that long time. Just need a bit of patience.
> patent law was incredibly counterproductive in the case of 3D printing.
I don't work in the 3d printing industry so I don't have enough knowledge to know that with any level of confidence. It sounds plausible but not sure if it is true. That's why, I am curious whether you do, ie: do you work in the 3d printing industry? How confident are you that the recent proliferation was due to an expiration of a counterproductive patent (which one?) rather than just technologies, volume, demand, industrial production finally coming together and becoming mass market? Has there been any actual detailed analysis or study proving this? The reason I ask is not because I am opposed to the claim, rather I often see unsubstantiated claims like this go unchallenged for a long time. In the case of E Ink, I even saw someone blog that statement and they cited an HN comment about E Ink patents that I had challenged and the poster never responded, and then someone cited that very blog post in another HN comments so it became a circle of references where all the dots on the circle are unsubstantiated.
The lynch pin FDM patent was 5,121,329 which expired in 2009; there were similar later patents in the space around SLA printing that expired in the five years following that. There's been plenty of analysis both from industry and academia that it was indeed holding back the proliferation of 3D printing technology.
Being in a adjacent field of other robotic control that utilized 3d printing for our own prototyping before and after the proliferation I can also confirm the patent licensing being a major impediment to proliferation of the technology. We had high enough margins that we could spend $100k on a 3d printer before 2009. But the field has been revolutionized since then from the democratization and even our own processes changed heavily once we could have a bank of printers rather than just one. Sort of like the change of a a company sharing a mainframe with a guy dedicated to keeping it going versus ubiquitous microcomputers.
I'm not in the industry, just a hobbyist, but this is well established. There are dozens of companies making printers, filament, models, tutorials, software, and innovations that legally couldn't exist while this patent was active. Universities, makerspaces, and small to medium sized businesses (and hobbyists) didn't have access to the tech because of it.
I read the article and came away unsatisfied. I was hoping to see a clear analysis like "here's an inventor who was blocked from producing his product by a patent infringement lawsuit" and here's a series of patent infringement lawsuits that blocked inventors from innovating. Instead I felt the main points were broken due to contradictory statements in the article.
They started with:
"Commercialising these kits was actually an infringement on Stratasys’ patent but Stratasys did not stop this from happening."
Which contradicts:
"Everything changed by the end of 2009, the expiration date of the famous Stratasys’ patent after 20 years."
I see that Reprap was commercialized in 2006 prior to the patent expiring which clearly contradicts above as well.
There's limited factual data in this article. Claims like "Everything changed" seem like strong claims that ought to be substantiated rather than defended using "feels right" kind of explanations.
I don't think the level of proof you're looking for exists. There weren't any lawsuits because nobody started companies because they knew they'd be sued out of existence. I can tell you that Stratasys was aware of and leaning on the (open-source, non-commercialized) RepRap project at the time:
They eventually settled that suit because the patents involved were a bit weak, but I doubt they would've settled if the earlier ones were still in force.
I don't know where you saw that RepRap was commercialized in 2006 but as far as I know that's not true. Here's a history of the project by its creators which puts the first RepRap-based company in 2009: https://all3dp.com/history-of-the-reprap-project/
You could probably buy pieces on forums before that but Stratasys wouldn't target individual forum posters with runs in the single digits.
The SLA (liquid) section is the most relevant; it mentions how FormLabs lost a lawsuit for building one early. Other companies didn't attempt to beat the patent, but Prusa, Creality, and Makerbot (ironically now owned by Stratasys) all began selling SLA printers shortly after the patent expired. I don't have statements from the executives that they waited because of patent issues, but barring that the situation seems clear.
Exactly. I have two low-cost (Prusa) 3d printers going in my office lab right now. It wasn't until recently that technology, software, and infrastructure for filament and SLA supplies lined up to allow the current "explosion".
In the early days, Stratasys and others really did "invent" significant things in the classic sense of the word. We're not talking about "one click purchase" patents here. Allowing them exclusive use of their invention for a couple of decades didn't seem to hurt anyone.
Cheap SLA printers couldn't have happened until recently because of the screens, but there's nothing in FDM printers that wasn't available in the 90s. Sure it didn't "hurt anyone," people don't need 3D printers, but it stopped a whole subfield of engineering from existing for twenty years. Personally I call that detrimental.
At least it's not as bad as the other IP protections. If the lawyers who brought us copyright law had gotten into patents, we'd be eagerly anticipating the launch of the consumer television.
You'd think so, and some printers like the Prusa Mini use newer 32-bit controllers, but a lot of the most popular models (other Prusas, most Creality models, etc.) use the ATmega 2560, which is an 8 bit controller that came out in 2006 and isn't much different from what was available in the late 90s. They didn't exist in 1989, but they weren't far off.
Oh, we for sure had 8 bit microcontroller chips in 1989. A quick look back through old editions of Radio Electronics looks like you could buy an 8039[0] in 1989 for $1.95 qty 1. PICs were pretty nice back then too.
[0] - An 8039 is a version of the 8048 that was in the original PC keyboard, but rigged up with an external EEPROM for program code instead of the normal mask ROM. They were probably secretly 8048s that were programmed with some other customer's code in the mask ROM, but then fused off for whatever reason.
Even if you didn't have a free-standing cheap microcontroller, couldn't you do a "Winmodem" style scenario where the printer is a bag of dumb mechanical bits tethered to a PC doing all the heavy lifting in software?
You will like 1987 Atari SLM605/SLM804 Laser printers. They had no electronics inside other than the power supply. Instead a dongle was shipped with 19pin Atari ST DMA port (ASCI, very similar to SCSI) on one end, and 37 pin connector for the printer on the other. It contained two microcontrollers, Intel 8253 timer chip, Toshiba TC9142P dedicated Direct Drive Turntable motor controller :), bunch of buffers and some chips I cant identify.
Unlike all the other printers up to late nineties there was no high level computing smarts neither in the printer nor in the dongle. It was a Software Defined printer fully controlled by Atari ST (computer UI froze during printing to maintain tight timings), just like post year 2000 HP LaserJet 1000 and later Windows "host based" non PCL printers. As a result of this Atari ingenuity you ended up with a combo of Atari ST computer, 640×400@71.25 Hz monitor, DTP software (for example Calamus) and a Laser printer costing less than just the Apple or IBM laser printer alone, and as a bonus it printed 2-3 times faster.
So yes, 3D FDM printer at reasonable price was totally possible in late eighties leveraging cheap 16bit computers for control logic.
I have a Toshiba R500 - it's a machine ahead of its time - transreflective display, SSD, very light, long battery life, nice keyboard. Unfortunately the CPU and memory are limited, otherwise I would be using it today.
Would you be willing to part with it and ship it to the EU? :)
I've been hunting on ebay for these every now and again, but I'm not quite desperate enough to piece one together from the parts I can find.
Well and there are large, high resolution full color transflective displays out there! It's really frustrating that these aren't available. My mental health would improve substantially if it were easier to work outside.
Availability is also one of the principal problems with e-Ink, and is directly related to the patent issue. It is next to impossible to source e-Ink displays (even at outrageous prices), or to work with E Ink corporation in any capacity unless you are huge and are in a market they are interested in. Making another generic ebook and can credibly claim that you might sell half a million? Maybe they'll talk to you. Work for Lenovo and want to put an e-Ink layer in a trackpad? "We're not pursuing that market segment at this time." It's not an open market, and they haven't been interested in moving beyond ebook readers for the last decade.
Smaller designers who want access to the technology can't get it from a western company, because none are stupid enough to attempt to design a competitor while E Ink the company is still around to sue them.
Fairly recently we've started to see Chinese electrophoretic displays crop up, and I can actually get a devkit or buy them by the low thousand, because E Ink isn't going to be able to sue them in China. But you still don't see them designed into very many products sold in the west, because it would be easy for E Ink to stop the end product from being sold.
What is preventing someone from creating a display with the same concept as e-ink? This is not a new technology and the idea has been around since 70s.
The title is very misleading, these are not even comparable.
Btw, why aren't transflective displays more poplar? They doesn't seem as technologically challenging as e-ink and there clearly is some market for rugged phones/laptops/tablets. It seems they would be a perfect fit for some construction site type of uses.
I really loved my Dell Axim long, long ago. Specifically because of the transflective display. The Ipaqs were only reflective, great in sunlight but needed a front light panel over the screen for use indoors, not always evenly lit. The transflective seemed to be the best of both worlds, reflective in sunlight and backlit for a more even light.
That's actually the fairest point of critique about my rambling that I've heard in a while, and I have been rambling about this since 2012. :D
That being said, the Toshiba Portege showed that a big manufacturer can produce these at scale if they want to, and they haven't continued with it. If someone here is willing to share stories from the trenches if that particular battle ground, I'm all ears. :)
The creator posted on reddit [0] that they are exploring making these commercially available (in small quantities). Maybe you could reach out and get one?
It would require a major iOS re-write though. Designing for e-ink is a really different paradigm, both statically and in relation to UX interactions. I just returned an onyx boox note because although the hardware was quite nice, the UI was just garbage. I'm sure Apple could do it, but it does't seem very on-brand for them. I'm waiting of a delivery of an RM2, but I'm still not that hopeful that they have solved the problem of reading an A4 academic PDF. Yet another reason to kill off the commercial academic publishing industry — we can get proper epubs of papers!
Please be aware that "market failure" is also a technical term in economics, relating to positive and negative externalities. Your use appears to be the (by now probably dominant) colloquial use.
I personally would not use this term, just as I would not use e.g. "to beg the question". I wonder if this phenomenon has a name, along the lines of "euphemistic treadmill".
> I personally would not use this term, just as I would not use e.g. "to beg the question". I wonder if this phenomenon has a name, along the lines of "euphemistic treadmill".
I intentionally use "beg the question" with the new meaning to do my part in cycling out the old meaning as quickly as possible. The "old" meaning is a waste of precious linguistic bandwidth, spent on a concept that is very rarely invoked (and could be just as easily invoked with something like "presupposes the facts", which is more intuitive).
If language is dynamic, then braindead vestigials should be bulldozed out with prejudice, especially when they tie up prime real estate.
If a term is overloaded, and if the purpose of language is to communicate, then I think the better approach is to drop the term as a lost cause and switch to alternatives for both uses, rather than fight and endless battle. For the two meanings I use "raises the question" and "circular reasoning" or "the conclusion was already part of your original assumption".
I use it to mean that despite demonstrated technological viability by multiple vendors, and despite the devices providing a solution to the issue of actual portability beyond closed rooms, the market has failed to make these devices accessible.
IIRC one of the problems is that the benefit doesn't become obvious in "good" lighting conditions like a walmart building. In that way I'm putting much of the blame in this on the buying side of the market for making shallow, lazy buying decisions. But the producers are equally to blame here. Nobody made a serious first move, so no competition evolved, despite the availability of transflectives being technically governed by market forces.
I don't know enough to judge the root cause. My ideological priors would make me look to blame the government granted monopoly patents on the display tech.
> A market failure occurs whenever the individuals in a group end up worse off than if they had not acted in perfectly rational self-interest. Such a group either incurs too many costs or receives too few benefits.
> Even though the concept seems simple, it can be misleading and easy to misidentify.
> Contrary to what the name implies, market failure does not describe inherent imperfections in the market economy
> Additionally, not every bad outcome from market activity counts as a market failure.
As I say, I think he's using it in a very much more colloquial manner: "I don't like the outcome of the market process", which is fine.
Very true and for different terms we all are on battlefields waging a war that we mostly are not even aware we're in. As part of the mob, we just steadily walk over the minority who coined the term and plow them ever deeper into the muddy ground. Such is life... and death.
I still find it worthwhile to point out when somebody uses a jargon term from an academic discipline, so they maybe can leave the battlefield and its senseless slaughter and instead and chose some other formulation.
Let's create some market demand here (and hope it goes anywhere).
I want a transflective display.
If any tech company reads this and wants to change the world: getting this in the hands of people means that many more people have the capability of sitting outside. This means more vitamin D intake. More vitamin D means improved mood (a lack of vitamin D could lead to depression [1]).
Low res image to not show too much of my data, but this is the screen at minimum brightness with the sun shining on it. Text is a little blurred, but legible.
My previous laptops definitely didn't have this, but then again I switched to this one here in 2020 after almost seven years.
You can see this in other LCDs as well. It's not deliberate AFAIK, the direct sunlight bounces off the back layers and causes the active RGB filters to be visible at certain angles.
Thinking of market demand - this guy hasn't even sold the three he built for $666, which seems really decent for a full system already ready to go. I'm tempted myself but wouldn't get much use out of it because I am deeply embedded into Apple and I'm Ok with that, I use my reMarkable tablets to scratch my e-Ink itches.
You can already by a 13 inch mobile e-ink monitor.
There's the Onyx Boox Max series starting with the Max2 (the current model is the Max Lumi) with HDMI in
and the Dasung Paperlike monitor.
They are pricey, however.
If you have some kind of overlay screen you can have both worlds. But I was still under the impression that E-ink was the only option. Today I learnt about transflective screens. I hope they catch on. I would buy it.
It can be used as a PC display, which I'd kill for (figuratively) as long as it's affordable. If it's $200 or more, that's not what I consider affordable.
Since such a screen would be most usable outdoors, I wonder about the setup. I guess if it'd be light and thin enough it could be put on top of the screen in that case? Or would you have a separate stand for it?
I have one and use it outside regularly (e.g. [0]), it's pretty amazing!
There's some open-source tooling[1] for it which can control screen features like brightness/refreshes/rendering modes/... and I've set it up[2] to work with my unprivileged user so that I can bind these features to keys in my Emacs.
With these screens you want to use light themes, and use tooling to improve contrast on websites (a friend wrote a Firefox extension[3] which is amazing for this).
The problem is lack of standardization. My desktop is decked out the way I like. That's different from how you'd like.
I'd obviously buy a high-quality high-res reflective display for my laptop. I wouldn't swap out the rest of my laptop for a random laptop with a high-quality high-res reflective display.
But you can't just swap laptop components, except for sometimes SSD, RAM, and wifi card.
If there were an industry-standard 13" and 15" laptop form factor with swapable components like a desktop, there would be a market for eInk displays and other oddballs. You could stick them in your HP, and Ivanka could stick it in her Lenovo. I'd buy a:
* Keyboard with eraser dongle
* Overbuild, rugged case (think ToughBook). I don't mind the weight.
* Motherboard with two M.2 slots (for RAID), ECC memory, and lots of ports
* High-res outdoor readable display
* High-quality microphone and camera (I don't care about speakers)
And stick it all together.
I'd never buy a Toughbook as-is, since the display doesn't have enough resolution. I don't like a lot of the workstation/gaming style laptops either, mostly since they use a ton of power, which leads to fan noise, heat, and other annoyances.
At the end of the day, without being able to customize, the thinner laptop with shitty keyboard seems to be what I want.
Anyone else here old enough to remember the Mac Portable? It had a monochrome reflective (no backlight) display fast enough to display video (a rarity at the time) and worked great in sunlight. Apparently it wasn't so great in low light. There was a backlit version sometime later, per wikipedia.
Yes, my parents had one and it was our only computer from 1991-1995. Sadly teenaged me thought it would be good to pull the then-obsoleted machine to bits. It was a good learning experience but I'd rather still have it intact. :(
Transflective screens are a vastly underappreciated technology these days. Back in the 00's basically every PDA came with one as standard. I don't know why we just decided we didn't need them in the smartphone era.
This video is an example of why. It looks crap and has no color. I have no problems seeing my phone in the sun and it looks stunning. The HN crowd hypes up tech that real users don't want and exaggerates problems that real users don't have or don't care about.
My OnePlus phone in direct sunlight not only pushes the physical OLED brightness to the max, but seems to also apply some filter to the image that makes dark colors brighter, e.g. a dark gray keyboard almost turns into lighter gray. Does help with visibility.
I'm personally fine without color on a device I can use outdoors. Text don't need to be colored to be readable. I tried to work on a laptop outdoors - even in shadow in sunny weather I had to set brightness close to maximum which drains battery too fast.
No, the Pebble used a Sharp Memory LCD, a different transflective technology. It can only do greyscale while pixelQi uses prisms to separate the colors. That's why you get color with backlight and greyscale out in the sun.
Always with this excuse, but I really doubt it. There's just a million manufacturers of this or technology similar to this. Many of them have failed and people usually would only notice and care _after_ they failed.
The most plausible explanation is that it's expensive because there's no economy economy of scale, and that there's no economy of scale because people don't want to pay extra for a worse quality screen even if it has a slightly better battery life.
The slower FPS and slight blurring is making me nostalgic for the old "luggable" portable computers from the 90s, and early LCD display laptops, though it's no where near as bad as they used to be.
On top of that, while there are e-ink screens that can refresh at 30Hz, they aren't bi-stable. In other words, you have to give up the main benefit of e-ink in order to get half the refresh rate of a normal LCD.
The fundamental problem behind e-ink refresh rates is that there's an inherent physical limit to how quickly you can shake your ink particles up and down without damaging things.
I have often thought that a device purpose-built for music with one of these transflexive screens would be absolutely fantastic. Even the 10" screens are big enough; Two screens for a folio would make a fantastic device for any musician to travel with.
There are quite a few people who have done this (myself included). The process is pretty straightforward since they have nearly identical chassis. r/Thinkpad has a lot of details on how to do it. The toughest part is covering the right connections on the ribbon cable for the 220 keyboard since the pinouts are slightly different. It is a fun little project and the keyboards can be found pretty cheaply on eBay.
Yes, however the process is very easy today and can be done entirely software-side, thanks to 1vyrain [1]. So you don't need to flash the BIOS using an external programmer, just run what amounts to an exploited/modified update. I recently did this on my T430, and could not be happier about the keyboard.
This is what I thought too ... I am giggling over this ... :
Them: "Woah, you just tip the screen computer down and it can project an immersive 3D holographic experience? That you can interact with directly? That's just so amazing!"
Us: "Woah, it's a X230? Even cooler if it had an X220 keyboard!"
My demands for an e-ink display aren’t even that high. I just want some kind of e-ink that can be used with vim and terminals that will be easier on the eyes, I can use a separate monitor for graphical applications. What are my options in 2021?
It would be stupid to keep my wife and kids home during summer just because I need to work. So they sometimes travel without me.
I have actually been working remotely for many years. It is sometimes possible to move stuff around so that I have mostly reading for a week or two and then I could do it anywhere I want.
I have experimented with traveling while working remotely with some mixed results.
I had a notion ink tablet 8 years ago or so. Being able to use the tablet outside in the sunlight was definitely cool, however the display quality (uniformity, dead-pixels ...) was quite poor. I wish there were more tablets or even laptops of this type later.
And the Lenovo IPS screens on the X220(t) were notoriously bad anyway. The ghosting being so extreme I used to think my xterm had transparent backgrounds enabled (imagine my horror when I realized I didn't).
One thing to note, this is _not_ an e-ink display. The quotes around e-ink should be replaced with "diaplay that looks like e-ink" There are no colored capsules in this screen which float around to create a picture. These are usually just regular LCDs with no or little backlight and a reflective backing.
Transflective displays do seem to result in decent battery life, the Pebble Time watch is a good example. Though we do now have long lasting OLED watches – looks like running Android on a beefy CPU vs a tiny RTOS on a microcontroller is the bigger difference… buuuut still the Pebble gets away with a smaller battery than these OLED ones I think?
Btw I'd opt to replace the "E-INK" in the title with "transflective" assuming HN folks know to tell the two apart.