As a student that looks like exactly what I'm looking for, but I'm never going to shell out $400 for one when I can get an early-gen Kindle for free. Really hoping we will see prices decrease for higher-end e-ink displays.
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Hi, a bit late now, but where can I get early-gen Kindles for free? I very much love the ones with hardware buttons (the cursor square, not necessarily the first gen with the keyboard) and without this annoying touchscreen, and I often find them offered for more expensive than they were new!
> Really hoping we will see prices decrease for higher-end e-ink displays.
Unlikely to happen: similar to silicon, eink's yield (that is, amount of parts produced with no errors) goes down quickly (quadratic if not cubic, I forgot) with increasing size.
A system based on lots of eink chiplets with small enough margins that you can tile them could scale up, but the margins are also a difficult area.
I don't think the eink part of it has issues with yields since it's essentially just conductive ink and a suspension of particles, but the fancy transparent transistors they sometimes use certainly do. The real issue with eink is the economies of scale will probably never kick in. Most people would rather have a color screen, or a screen that exceeds 10fps, or something that doesn't have artifacts like an etch a sketch, etc. There's only 1 oem for the entire eink panel market (over 6") last I checked.