I saw this recurring theme on HN that electrophoretic panels were expensive due to patents and evil misdeeds by that most evil corporation called E-Corp.
I thought, hey, I work in this bloody display industry myself where everything is about volume, volume and more volume, and I hangout with their guys at conferences and events, and I've never heard such a thing as them using patents to attack other industry players. Are they really attacking people and hurting customers that want to use their technology as alleged?
So I asked a simple question each time I saw that claim that E Ink uses patents to attack startups or similar claims. What's the evidence?
And guess what. Now it turns back to people like you who ask what is my evidence that there's no evil misdeeds. And to which I just feign shock, oh no, it must be true then, since a lack of evidence for them being innocent of the alllegations must mean they are guilty.
So we're left back at square 1. I hope people with a smarter mind than mine can arrive at whatever the correct conclusions are.
Could you please tell a bit more about the volume-side of story? Somehow I feel that E-ink is at this weird point on the cost/volume curve because it is a fundamentally flawed display technology: monochrome or a couple of dull colors at best, very slow refresh rate (with ghosting/leftover on partial refresh).
LCD/OLED displays were also very expensive initially, but because they're so much appealing universally, loads of money got poured into the industry to make them better and cheaper (mostly due to volume demand).
There's no such amount of money/interest in making E-ink better and cheaper :(
Please search my comment history for what I posted about electrophoresis and physics. I don't think they'll be able to get past the physical limitation. To summarize, you either move ink fast but end up losing bistability, or move ink slow, as it is currently. Most people don't realize electrophoresis has remained at about 700ms for an update over the last decade. Tricks like A2 sure with the Dasung, but nothing substantial.
As for the comment about "money/interest", see my comments about why a venture capitalist would have little interest in spending billions trying to create new display tech and fighting hard expensive physics problems when they could get higher rate of return by investing in another software service or ML/AI company. That said, Jeff Bezos spent hundred million or more on trying to get Liquavista working, Qualcomm spent lord knows how much on Mirasol. Great demos, but just couldn't get the process scaled or reliable enough to commercialize. Physics is hard. Physics is expensive.
I mean, as long as they have patents they don’t need to “attack” others. A patent is enough on its own to prevent others from innovating. That’s the function of a patent after all!
Well, to be fair, large displays tend to be fragile and unwieldy as well. Depends a lot on manufacturer, but in essence short production runs also don’t help lower the price.
