8 out of every 10 Kindle users may want a colored e-ink screen.
Yes, it has been nearly 15 years since the birth of kindle, but kindle has always "known white and black", never known "green fat red thin".
Color electronic ink screen is not a fantasy technology, E Ink Yuantai Technology, which produces ink screens for Kindle, has launched printed color electronic paper in 2019, allowing users to rush out of the black and white shackles of the ink screen and browse color content.
Now, color e-readers are already everywhere in the market, but compared with traditional black and white ink screens, color ink screens do not seem to be as popular as imagined.
In addition to the high price of color e-readers, it is also related to hardware defects such as insufficient color and low resolution, and the color ink screen seems to have not been able to wait for its outbreak year after many years.
But don't be discouraged, E Ink has recently brought a wave of updates to color ink screen technology, and the "color Kindle" you have in mind may really become this time.
More "colorful" than "color"
Friends who are not familiar with the ink screen may be curious, why is the color display screen such as LCD and OLED so mature, but the color electronic ink screen is still so difficult to do?
To answer this question, we must start with the imaging principle of the electronic ink screen.
Unlike LCD screens, which are composed of RGB pixels, the Kindle uses electronic ink screens that are actually composed of tiny ink microsacles.
Inside each microcapsule there are pigment particles of different colors, which change the arrangement of the particles by applying different voltages up and down to reveal a specific content.
Among them, the most common black and white ink screen is composed of black and white pigment particles, and each time the ink screen is refreshed, it is actually to rearrange the black and white pigment of the micro-sac to form a new pattern. Therefore, the ink screen also has the characteristics of non-illumination and non-self-consumption.
To make the ink screen show color, there are currently two mainstream methods: one is to add a layer of color filter in the display screen, when the external light enters the ink screen and then reflects out, it can show a specific color.
The second is to simply and directly add more colors of pigment particles to the microcapsules, which can directly display a variety of colors.
The two methods have their own advantages and disadvantages in color richness, refresh speed, and resolution, the color richness of the former (4096 colors) is far less than the latter (super 40000 colors), but the refresh speed is much faster, and the vast majority of color e-readers on the market currently use color filter layer schemes, that is, E ink Kaleido series technology.
▲ Image from: Inputmag
However, although the color filter brings color to the black and white ink screen, it is not perfect. Compare the color e-reader with your iPad, and you'll notice that the color ink screen is not only more "colorful", but also inferior in clarity.
This is related to the physical structure of the color filter.
Due to the limited filter effect, the Kalerdo screen can display much less color than the self-illuminating liquid crystal; the presence of the filter layer also makes the resolution of the screen will be discounted to a certain extent, the ordinary black and white ink screen PPI can reach 300, Kaleido's PPI is only up to 150.
In the past two years of technology updates, E ink by adjusting the distance between the filter layer and the ink layer, so that the Kaleido screen color becomes more accurate, the saturation is also higher, but to completely reverse the color disadvantage of the color ink screen, you have to rely on another technology - E ink Gallery.
E ink Gallery in the ink sac added cyan, magenta, yellow, white 4 kinds of electronic ink pigment particles, through the pigment combination can achieve a full color gamut color display effect, from the actual look and feel, it is closer to the color display we are familiar with.
But because E ink Gallery's pigment is much more complex than traditional black and white, the screen refreshes much more slowly.
The first generation of E ink Gallery only took 2 seconds to refresh the black and white pages, and it took 10 seconds to refresh the color pages, which made the E ink Gallery basically not for e-readers, but only for large billboards outdoors.
At this point, you may be wondering, if E ink Gallery can increase the refresh speed, is it possible to "kill"?
This time, E ink did. E ink recently officially released the third generation of E ink Gallery technology, and E ink Gallery 3 has made significant progress in refresh speed.
E ink said that the black and white refresh speed of E ink Gallery 3 has been shortened to 350 milliseconds (1 second = 1000 milliseconds), and the color refresh speed can be shortened to 500 milliseconds according to different color modes, which is close to the level of ordinary black and white ink screens.
At the same time, the color refresh rate of E ink Gallery 3 can be controlled within 750-1000 milliseconds in standard color mode, while the refresh speed is 1500 milliseconds under the highest quality best color display, which is still significantly higher than the 10-second color refresh time of a generation.
While the E ink Gallery 3 isn't as fast as a 60Hz or even 120Hz tablet, it's a milestone leap past the threshold of usability and adoption in e-readers.
In addition to a significant reduction in refresh speed, the resolution of E ink Gallery 3 has also increased from the first generation of 150 PPI to 300 PPI, making up for the lack of detail of the color ink screen in the past. The increase in resolution also means that the color ink screen finally has the opportunity to be applied to devices with larger screens, which has been a big regret in the past.
From the perspective of parameters alone, E ink Gallery 3 should be the "dream love screen" in the hearts of electric paper book lovers, and the only thing that can prevent it from competing with LIQUID CRYSTAL technologies such as OLED is probably the cost of components.
Along with E ink Gallery 3, E ink is currently researching two cutting-edge e-paper book technologies, namely color folding ink screen and color scroll ink screen.
Using flexible folding technology, e-readers can be more portable, and when the iconic action of "flipping books" is also reproduced by electric paper books, electric paper books will be one step closer to replacing physical books.
But the question is, even if the electric paper book can use color ink and folding screen, are you still willing to pick it up?
Do you want a color ink screen or an "eye-protecting version" of the iPad?
It's an indisputable fact that ink screen e-readers aren't as hot as they were 10 years ago.
This is not to say that the e-reader market is facing a shrinking crisis, on the contrary, compared with the past, the e-reader market is much livelier.
Although the Kindle is still a big company, the addition of opals, palm reading, Huawei, Xiaomi and other manufacturers has made the variety of e-reader devices unprecedentedly rich, from 6 inches to 13.3 inches close to the size of the notebook screen, you can find the ink screen that suits you better.
It's just that Kindle's story of "putting the bookstore in your pocket" is no longer as appealing as it used to be. At the end of 2021, Idle Fish released the top ten "useless" product rankings, and the e-reader Xi Ti "Tanhua" became a regular customer of the second-hand trading platform.
The reason why the e-reader is annealed is because everyone no longer likes to read books?
Perhaps not, according to the "2021 China Digital Reading Report" released by the China Audiovisual and Digital Publishing Association, the per capita electronic reading volume on the mainland is 11.58, an increase from the per capita 9.1 in 2020.
Another set of data may better explain why e-readers have reduced fever.
According to the results of the 19th National Reading Survey released by the China Press and Publication Research Institute, 45.6% of the people in 2021 are inclined to read in "a paper book", an increase of 2.2% year-on-year; "reading on mobile phones" accounts for 30.5%; "reading on e-readers" accounts for 8.4%, down 0.2% year-on-year.
In contrast, people's enthusiasm for listening to books is even higher, 7.4% of the people tend to "listen to books", an increase of 0.7% year-on-year, accounting for almost catching up with e-readers, people may simply no longer love to use e-readers.
The weakness of e-readers such as the Kindle has less to do with hardware and is more relevant to the reading environment.
The books represented by "Kindles" are no longer the only entrance for us to consume content and obtain knowledge, nor are they the symbols of "picking up a book anytime and anywhere", and the ease of access to content has reached an unprecedented peak, at this time, if "Kindles" can not bring innovation in service, it is difficult to attract people to pick it up again.
Just as smartphones need the next "iPhone," e-readers desperately need the next Kindle — not Amazon's new reader, but a product that can revolutionize services once again.
The success of the Kindle does not lie in the innovative introduction of ink screen products, long before Amazon launched the original Kindle, Sony had already launched an e-reader called Librie.
At the hardware level, the original Kindle wasn't as polished as the Sony Librie, but as Jeff Lee was, it was. As Bezos said when he launched the Kindle, "It's not a device, it's a service."
Kindle beats Librie by relying on a complete hardware and software experience, through seamless integration with online bookstores, Kindle can not only let users read books anytime, anywhere, but also buy books at any time, getting an almost unlimited handheld library.
Citigroup Internet analyst Mark Mahaney has said that the real change that Kindle brings to users is that people can finally buy books anytime, anywhere, which is also the secret to making Kindle conquer the world like the iPod, Walkman and even the iPhone.
Service is more important than the equipment itself, and this is the most valuable success experience that Kindle has left behind.
▲ Do manufacturers really not consider cooperating with the "Five-Year College Entrance Examination Three-Year Simulation" to produce an electronic brush question book?
So if the "Kindles" want to use color ink screens to regain people's love for e-paper books, then product managers have to think about what kind of "color service" people need?
Perhaps when the right answer to this question is found, the next Kindle that can change reading again will not be far away.