A) classic displays (LCD/OLED/Mini-LED/Micro-LEDs) reaching a point where the quality and power consumption are so low as to be indistinguishable from paper
B) Color e-ink displays get good enough for interactive use, movie watching, etc.
Maybe someone who's an expert in display tech can chime in? My money's on A) since so much is invested in it.
I work in the display industry. My take is neither will happen. Lets start with B.
> B) Color e-ink displays get good enough for interactive use, movie watching, etc.
There is no commercially sold genuine color e-ink today. Kaleido is a grayscale e-ink with a color filter laminated on top. Kaleido Plus is just the same with a light guide.
E Ink did show off a genuine color display back in 2018 called Advanced Color and marketed as "Gallery". But it would take 30s to display an image and it was 32 colors or 16 colors. Not 16-bit color. I mean only 16 colors. E Ink tried to get the industry to buy in and start making products using this technology but nobody really signed on. They revamped their production to then start producing 7 color panels in much smaller sizes like 5" for signage. I heard that hasn't hit the numbers they needed to even cover their RnD costs. I doubt it will be a commercial success.
When you say "good enough for movie watching", I'll say that'll never ever happen with electrophoresis. You can't violate physics. Either a pigment particle moves slowly and stably or it moves fast and is unstable. You'll never be able to get both. That's why newer technologies by various startups like ClearInk sacrifice the bi-stability in order to get fast video speeds. But look at the market response, the market isn't exactly embracing that either. Venture capitalists aren't exactly eager to fund the billions needed to create new display tech when they could invest in some new internet services startup or AI/ML startup instead.
As for A), these are all emissive technologies. They will by their physics always be distinguishable from paper. As to whether you'll care or not, that is something I can't predict.
LCD doesn't have to be emissive. Black-and-white LCDs are most often not. It's unlikely but not impossible for there to be some breakthrough in colors LCDs
I actually thought of that! I had a friend in high school who had one. You had to set the contrast separately for each color and could never quite get it looking right
Unfortunately, I have no knowledge of it. I would go as far as saying the article is quite confusing because the author (Mike Kozlowski) says things like "ACEP achieves a full color gamut, including all eight primary colors, using only colored pigments" and then jumps to "They can display a total of 32,000 colors". Statement A contradicts statement B unless I have missed something obvious.
I think A is fundamentally impossible. A backlit display is always going to look different to a reflective surface.
My money's on C: a new display tech which works similarly to color E-ink, but isn't actually E-ink. Qualcomm's Mirasol technology looked amazing for this, but sadly it never made it into any mainstream products and they've basically shut it down at this point.
In principle it's possible to measure the ambient light and set the emitted light to simulate reflected light from paper so that an OLED looks indistinguishable from paper. Next gen QLED displays might have the brightness to pull this off even in bright sunlight.
If you really want to simulate reflected light you also have to be able to control the angle of the light that you emit, and you want to absorb incoming light almost completely otherwise there'll be a conflict (glare, in particular).
I suspect that it might be easier to improve reflective displays, but I have no expertise in this field so maybe I'm completely wrong about that.
> If you really want to simulate reflected light you also have to be able to control the angle of the light that you emit
Uniform emission is fine because paper has close to Lambertian reflectance. "The apparent brightness of a Lambertian surface to an observer is the same regardless of the observer's angle of view." [0]
> and you want to absorb incoming light almost completely otherwise there'll be a conflict (glare, in particular).
Or make sure that the display itself has close to Lambertian reflectance and take into account its color in the emission calculations.
> I think A is fundamentally impossible. A backlit display is always going to look different to a reflective surface.
Not all LCDs are backlit. Some are purely reflective or 'transflective' (eg. the screen used on the old Gameboy.) That's not to say they look like paper now but it's not 100% impossible.
Edit: Also the screen used on the Pebble Time watches looks reasonably close to a colour print-out with the backlight off. These are a "memory LCD" made by JDI (although they were somewhat confusingly marketed as "e-paper" despite being an LCD.)
>A) classic displays (LCD/OLED/Mini-LED/Micro-LEDs) reaching a point where the quality and power consumption as so low as to be indistinguishable from paper
I thought in relation to eye strain and ability to read in sunlight the quality would be theoretically impossible to ever be indistinguishable?
A) classic displays (LCD/OLED/Mini-LED/Micro-LEDs) reaching a point where the quality and power consumption are so low as to be indistinguishable from paper
B) Color e-ink displays get good enough for interactive use, movie watching, etc.
Maybe someone who's an expert in display tech can chime in? My money's on A) since so much is invested in it.