I know there are some advantages to e-ink displays, but I don't think that's enough to justify the high price tag on these readers/note-taking devices.
There's also hidden costs involved, such as buying new tips for the e-ink pencils.
Has the e-ink industry reached a dead-end where patents are impeding progress, or are there other reasons involved?
E-ink, the company, holds the patents of the pigment core tech that makes "paper-like" displays possible and strongarms the display manufacturers and the users of their displays to absolute silence. Any research project or startup that comes up with a better alternative technology gets bought out or buried by their lawyers ASAP.
E-ink don't make the display themselves, they make the e-ink film, filled with their patented pigment particles and sell it to display manufacturers who package the film in glass and a TFT layer and add a driver interface chip, all of which are proprietary AF and unless you're the size of Amazon, forget about getting any detailed datasheets about how to correctly drive their displays to get sharp images.
In my previous company we had to reverse engineer their waveforms in order to build usable products even though we were buying quite a lot of displays.
With so much control over the IP and the entire supply chain and due to the broken nature of the patent system, they're an absolute monopoly and have no incentive to lower prices or to bring any innovations to the market and are a textbook example of what happens to technology when there is zero competition.
So, when you see the high prices of e-paper gadgets, don't blame the manufacturers, as they're not price gouging, blame E-ink, as their displays make up the bulk of the BOM.
Tough, some of their tech is pretty dope. One day E-ink sent over a 32" 1440p prototype panel with 32 shades of B&W to show off. My God, was the picture gorgeous and sharp. I would have loved to have it as a PC monitor so I tried building an HDMI interface controller for it with an FPGA but failed due to a lack of time and documentation. Shame, although not a big loss as an estimated cost for that was near the five figure ballpark and the current consumption was astronomical, sometimes triggering the protection of the power supply on certain images.
There is certainly enough to justify the cost, if you are a prolific note-taker.
Conversely, I find it hard to justify the cost of an iPad, becuase I already have a phone and several laptops. I can't see a situation where a tablet would be more useful to me, so I've never bought one.
Turns out different people have different needs, and the e-ink note-taking market caters to that. Most people would find an iPad more useful, so they're lower cost.
These days, whenever a new gadget comes up, my first reaction has become "I wonder how they try to screw you into a SaaS later".
It has an 8inch screen - about the same size as the iPad mini. It runs Android 8 but, obviously, some apps work better than others. It came with several nibs for its pencil.
They have an 10 inch version for around £230. See https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/boyue-p10-is...
So, there are some cheapish, largeish, eInk devices out there.
I was told (and I have no way to back it up) that the yields on eInk are fairly low. They make a couple of square metres of screen, and then have to cut it to size. Because of defects in the process, they can have a lot of wastage. So the larger sizes are disproportionally more expensive.
First company to build something like this and bring the cost down to something a bit more reasonable will get my business.
There are lots of us out here.
Some even people do their deep work on a separate airgapped computer just to preserve their focus.
It's like how not having junk food in the house makes dieting a lot easier - you don't have to use willpower to do the right thing, because the wrong thing is hard to do.
Honestly I would rather have the iPad for note taking. Response times are important for rapid idea translation, and e-ink systems are very lacking here, whereas the iPad is not. Probably an unpopular opinion, but it’s my own experience.
Niche devices almost always cost more.
There is lots of advice on affordable e-readers, diy e-readers and buying advice
Sure e-ink has its flaws, but wouldn't it be better to have a smaller slice of a much larger cake?
OLED is patent encumbered too, there's also a patent holding company, despite that you can buy smallest modules for less than $2 on AliExpress.
I’d also like better integrations with alternate cloud storage providers, but this is true for Apple products too.
Combine with the fact you can literally ssh to your Remarkable and write your own apps, it’s a no-brainer.
https://www.iskn.co/repaper/shop/repaper
I got my wife ( a non-techie painter ) one for Christmas and just set it up last night on our iMac.
Adoption -> volume -> buying power -> lower component prices, better feature implementation
I think most of the alternatives suffer from adoption challenges, but I personally love Unix-model physical devices [ which do one job well and work well with others ]
So vote with your dollars, and feature requests